• While researching what turned out to be merely the baton twirler in a parade of forwards I would receive today (my friends’ hard-nosed employers can take solace in the fact that their workers are at least not wasting company time writing e-mails, only gently bobbing them along like crowd surfers at a Pearl Jam concert) I noticed that Snopes.com has recently picked up the “Why is 7Up called that?” question that I was idly snooping into a year ago. They add some of the funnier explanations I’ve heard while also repeating something that didn’t really register with me when I read all this stuff last time, namely that C.L. Grigg was part of the proud antediluvian tradition of drugging the water supply:

However, the uncola wasn’t known as 7Up for the first few years of its existence. It was originally christened “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.” In his formulation, Grigg had included lithia, a naturally-occurring substance found in minute quantities in bubbling waters fed by underground springs. (Lithia is better known as lithium, a drug used to even out mood swings.) Grigg had the notion that the chemical’s presumed healthful aspects would be a selling point with the soda-buying public, hence the “Lithiated” in the name. As for “Bib-Label,” it was Howdy Corporation’s intent to use paper labels of the sort that could be dropped over the necks of otherwise unlabeled bottles.

It could be worse; Coke did have cocaine in it at the turn of the century. Soda wasn’t soda unless you were being dosed on the downlow in that barbaric, unenlightened age. Now, please excuse me; I need to go have my third Mountain Dew or else lapse into a coma.

• In other sugar-related news, putting some in a gas tank doesn’t do as much damage as you think (better luck next time, my enemies.)
• Also, alligators get very big.