Monday, March 30, 2009

Bubbles

As I wandered through Waitrose this morning, I noted products such as soda water syphons and those plastic Sodastream machines whose function is to put carbonated bubbles into water and juices. They're very popular. The idea is that when you eventually drink the stuff, you experience a refreshing fizz. All well and good - provided you're into fizzy drinks.

However, there must be thousands of people who aren't - people who crave a beverage unsullied by even a single bubble. Yet, fizzy drinks outnumber still drinks on the supermarket shelves by a factor of at least 10:1. Indeed, many drinks - Coca Cola, Sprite, Perrier, and so on - can only be bought with bubbles already added. Which is a bummer if you like the flavour but are determinedly anti-bubble.

Why, then, don't manufacturers supply machines that work like Sodastreams in reverse and extract bubbles from fizzy drinks to render them still?

I suppose one of the problems lies in the fact that fizzy drink manufacturers don't actually say how many bubbles each beverage contains, or indeed if the bubble count is even consistent from can to can. So you might guesstimate a can of Coca Cola as having, say, 10,256 bubbles and hit the "Extract" button. But on drinking the end result, you could find that it in fact had 10,550 bubbles. Therefore the remaining 294 bubbles would hit you hard. Worse still, you could guess at 20,000 bubbles, when actually the drink only had 5,000. I imagine that trying to extract bubbles that weren't there would have some effect at the molecular level and cause the drink to go critical, devastating wide areas of the countryside.

In my opinion, therefore, fizzy drink manufacturers ought to be required by law to state exactly how many bubbles their products contain. Then extraction machines would become viable. And of course, the bubbles you extracted could be combined together to form one massive, fuck-off bubble which could be re-inserted into a fizzy drink to make it really refreshing. So refreshing, indeed, that people might start overdosing on the stuff.

But at least Coke then really would be "the real thing". Or, at least, a reasonable simulacrum of same.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sheldrake touched on this in "Chirality in industry".He rejected my idea of the book cover having a topless woman covered in blood hold a pistol.We could ask a passing LLM (Cantab) who was now,it appears a Sgt in the Artillery.Or Janus.He knows everything but didnt spot the (very)witty allusion to Dante in my opening blog recently.