Hey look! New stuff! I only remembered I had this blog a few days ago, when I read a series of questions and answers that I'd written. I'm now going to post some of them. I think they're damn hilarious.

Here are two of them:

“How did 7-UP get its name?”

Researchers in 1920 St. Louis were attempting to create a mixture of Uranium and Phosphorous (among other things) that would be used primarily to patch holes in drywall, which was in its early life at the time. After six failed attempts, the researchers’ latest of shipment was accidentally swapped with lemon-lime flavoring. Sick from prolonged exposure to radiation, they didn’t notice the difference, despite its extreme obviousness.

They imbibed the new mixture, being the style at the time (and a reason they’d taken leave of their senses to illness), and proclaimed it much tastier than previous iterations.

Not having the connections to sell it on a mass basis, they sold the recipe, then called U-P-7 to a local businessman. The name was later changed to the more memorable one.

“What’s the difference between regular and fancy ketchup?”

Since ketchup became widely produced and distributed in the 1870’s, it has been a favorite among all types of people. However, well-to-do upper-crusters in 1940’s New York felt that ketchup, while delicious, was beneath them. It struck them as something the common folk would like (which they did) and that fact offended the upper class’s delicate sensibilities.

This presented a problem, since giving up ketchup wasn’t an alternative they were willing to consider, but eating the food of the Plebeians just wasn’t done. Millions of dollars were thrown at this problem, hoping an answer would present itself, which it, after enough money was wasted on it, eventually did.

A local start-up business cashed in on this windfall by promising the best and most expensive ketchup the bourgeois had ever seen. Their tomatoes would be grown only in the finest dirt money could buy, then be harvested not by mere people (who were filthy and unkempt), but by sentient machines that were powered by sacks of diamonds. They would then be flown by helicopter, one crate at a time, to a factory constructed on top of an active volcano and processed with machinery made entirely out of gold and platinum. Gold flakes would be added to, and then removed from, the ketchup, as would precious gemstones. The finished ketchup would be bottled in jars made on a special automated plant on the Moon, and then shipped to wealthy estates via jet.

None of this actually changed the taste of the ketchup, but it did make it ludicrously and prohibitively expensive, so only the top 3% of people could afford it, and thusly, the problem was solved.

This “fancy” ketchup was sold for a few decades before someone realized that they could call their own, run-of-the-mill ketchup “fancy” as well. The fancy ketchup you’re likely to eat in a fast food place now probably wasn’t harvested by diamond-powered robots. That ketchup is now called “swank” ketchup. You probably haven’t heard of it because you don’t own an industry-leading corporation.