About Energy Drinks

Two disclaimers, right up front

First, let's get this out of the way: Drinking caffeinated drinks excessively or habitually is not good for your health. It puts unnecessary stress on your heart. It is addictive. Having acknowledged that, let's move on.

Second, because you will start wondering: This may end up sounding like a sales pitch. Remember, I don't do that. I do make some recommendations. You're free to follow them or not. Think of this more like Consumer Reports than advertising copy.

Get on with it, already

I made a conscious decision, over ten years ago, to start every day with an energy drink. My reasoning back then was sound. I won't give you my justifications here. They're irrelevant. But, being a good engineer, I did a comprehensive study of energy drinks before I started. What follows is based on the results of my study, and twelve years of experience.

In modern society, we don't get enough sleep, we deal with too much stress during the day, and we end up being constantly fatigued. We try to combat the fatigue by taking artificial stimulants. The most common stimulant in the USA is coffee. It is legal, it is socially acceptable, and it can range anywhere from a plain cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, to an artisanal brew from a coffee house -- Starbucks being the modern archetype.

I don't like the taste of coffee. I don't drink it. But the energy boost cannot be denied. Caffeine is the ingredient in coffee that gives you the boost.

Caffeine can be easily manufactured and added to so many other consumables. Caffeinated sodas are a prime example. There's just enough caffeine in a 12-ounce can to give you a decent buzz. Drinking more soda gives you more buzz. But sometimes that's not enough.

Energy drinks are formulated solely to give you that buzz: an unambiguous, artificial energy boost. The two main energy-boosting ingredients are sugar and caffeine. Everything else is just snake oil.

The amounts of sugar and caffeine vary from product to product. Let's talk about caffeine first.

Caffeine

If you read the labels carefully, you will find that a can of energy drink delivers anywhere from 120 mg to 350 mg of caffeine. This compares to 96-195 mg for an 8-ounce cup of coffee, or 34 mg for a 12-ounce Coca-Cola.

The FDA recommends that you not consume more than 400 mg of caffeine in a day. That's if you're a grown adult, and not pregnant or planning to become pregnant. 

Slamming a can of energy drink can have disastrous consequences -- no, that's too strong a word. Adverse consequences. Dumping that much caffeine in your system at once can cause a pounding headache, vision problems, a racing heart, and trembling or jerky limbs. It can also temporarily affect your emotions or personality, and not in a good way. So if you're going to drink an energy drink, you need to learn to nurse the drink.

Caffeine has a half-life of about 5 hours. That means, if you consume 300 mg of caffeine, 150 mg of it will still be in your body 5 hours later, 75 mg will still be there after 10 hours, and 38 mg will still be there after 15 hours. Remember, Coke has 34 mg of caffeine, so 15 hours after you slam a 300-mg energy drink, you will still have as much caffeine in you as if you had just drunk a Coke.

But if you stretch out that 300-mg drink, and take an hour or longer to finish it, then your caffeine levels at any moment will be lower and more reasonable.

Take small sips. Okay, maybe one guzzle if it's really refreshing, but mostly small sips. See how long you can stretch out the drink.

Sugar

Although we love our sugar, it has a whole list of undeniable health hazards, chief among which are weight gain and risk of diabetes. I would put tooth decay up there as well.

Coffee doesn't have any sugar in it, unless you add it yourself. But if you don't add sugar, coffee tastes like mud -- burnt mud. 

Back to our can of Coke, the benchmark we will use for all analyses: a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola has 39 grams of sugar. Most energy drinks contain that much sugar, or more, with some going as high as 56 g.

How much is a gram of sugar? Well, a level teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams, and a heaped teaspoon is 7.5 grams. 50 g of sugar is 12 teaspoons. Four tablespoons. An entire quarter cup of sugar in your glass. That's crunchy!

Most energy drinks go cheap and use high-fructose corn sweetener in place of the cane sugar that we love so much.

Many energy-drink makers, recognizing that consumers are looking out for their health (HAHAHAHA) and trying to avoid sugar, replace sugar with sugar substitutes. Sometimes they are successful at making the drink taste good, but more often they make the energy drink taste like a chemical formula.

Choosing an Energy Drink, Then

I wanted an energy drink with the following characteristics:

• Tastes good
• Sweetened with real sugar, but not too much
• Not too high in calories
• Caffeine content 150 mg or less

I ended up settling on Bing energy drinks. Bing is made with real fruit juices, and not just a tiny amount. Each flavor of Bing has at least 5% real fruit juice. No other energy drink has any fruit juice. For comparison, Italian orange soda contains at least 12% orange juice, by law. That's the only carbonated drink I can think of with more fruit juice than Bing.

It only has 5 to 6 grams of sugar! Compare that to all of the other drinks we've discussed! Most of the sugar content in Bing is from the juices, although some flavors add 1 to 2 grams of real cane sugar. The caffeine content is on the low end of the scale, at 120 mg per 12-ounce can.

Bing contains other additives purported to boost energy, like taurine and ginseng. You can ignore these. The sugar and the caffeine are what really matter.

Bing energy drinks are also fortified with additional vitamins. I smile at this: healthy energy drinks! I'm not complaining, though. They have more vitamins than other energy drinks. Coffee and Coca-Cola have zero vitamins.

I was fortunate to live in Colorado while doing my research. Bing Beverage Company is a Colorado company, without the massive national/international reach of Rockstar, Monster, or Red Bull. It doesn't even show up in the lists of top-selling energy drinks on the Web. I might not have discovered Bing if I were living somewhere else.

Flavors of Bing

The Bing beverage company keeps the size of its product line intentionally small. They don't need the dozens of variations that Red Bull and Monster have.

Bing's product line in 2025

Here's a quick overview of the flavors, in order of discovery.

The original Bing

Bing cherry is the original flavor. This is the one that was invented in Denver, Colorado in 2006, formulated from a locally-produced black Bing cherry cider. It's still the best, and it's the flavor that hooked me on the brand -- but see Black, below.

Bing Black

This is the second flavor they came up with. Bing Black is a blend of blackberry and cherry juice. For my tastes, this one is tied with the original. Sometimes I prefer Black over cherry, because it's not as sweet as the original and is slightly tart.

Bing Raz

This is a delicious raspberry-cherry blend. It's not as available as the cherry or the Black, but if you can find it, it's good.

Bing Crisp

When I first drank this, I was disappointed. I think my taste buds were expecting a caffeinated version of Martinelli's Sparkling Cider. But it's an apple-cherry blend. The cherry takes the edge off the apple, and my taste buds weren't expecting that.

However, upon further review, it's delicious. If you want something calm and understated, Crisp is the way to go.

Bing Blu

This one was a delightful surprise. There's no cherry in it at all. It's a blend of blueberry and boysenberry, two fruits you don't usually find in the soft-drink aisle. Your taste buds are not accustomed to these flavors in a drink, and so your first taste of it may be a little off-putting. Be persistent. Stick with it until you have finished that first can. I promise, you will come back for more.

Bing Citrus

This is their most recent addition. Last summer, I suggested to the Bing Beverage Company that they consider a cherry limeade, perhaps as a limited-edition summertime drink. I mean, who doesn't drive through Sonic just to get a cherry limeade, right? Or better yet, a cherry limeade slush?

So Bing created a cherry limeade, but they added a bit of grapefruit, just to make it unique. It was a big success. On a hot summer day, the tangy Bing Citrus just hits the spot. Mix it with ginger beer and a sprig of mint, and you have a nice approximation of a Moscow Mule.

Where to Buy It

If you're in Colorado, you're in luck. Bing is a made-in-Colorado product, and so it's available nearly everywhere. You can find it at King Soopers, at Safeway, and sometimes at Whole Foods. Ironically, KS doesn't stock Citrus, and Safeway doesn't stock Raz, so you have to go to both stores to get all of the flavors.

At KS, you'd best go early in the morning. By afternoon, the shelves are empty. People in Colorado love their Bing. Safeway, for some reason, is better at keeping their stock up, although they do sell out of the more popular flavors.

Outside of Colorado, you will need to rely on the store locator at https://bingbeverage.com/retailer-locator/. The locator isn't always up to date, and the further you get from Colorado, the more likely the stores are to run out of Bing and not replenish it right away. Outside of Colorado, look for a small selection of Bing on the bottom shelf in the energy-drinks section.

In Colorado, Bing has pride of place, at eye level on the shelf. In some stores, because of its 5% fruit juice content, you can find it in the produce section. And if you're really lucky, you can find chilled cans in the produce coolers, next to the pomegranate juice and apricot nectar.

Alternatives to Bing

If you can't find Bing, then I suggest that you read the labels on the 12-ounce energy drinks. You're looking for something with less than 40 calories, with real sugar, and with 120 to 150 mg of caffeine. Here's a good online resource for both calories and caffeine content: Caffeine Informer.

One acceptable substitute is Alani Nu energy drinks. They come in a wide variety of very creative flavors. Some are weird, but they taste good. Their caffeine content is almost double Bing's, at 200 mg.

If you're in Canada, look for Guru energy drinks. Sweetened with real cane sugar, 140 mg caffeine, only 25 calories. They're made in Canada, and every flavor I've tasted (so far) is yummy.

Zevia is an energy drink sweetened with stevia, not sugar. That means it has zero calories. It doesn't contain any juice, but it is only 120 mg caffeine content. Some people think it tastes good.

If I have to choose a mainstream energy drink, my preference is Monster Energy Lo-Carb, the blue one. It has only 30 calories and 140 mg of caffeine in a 16-ounce can. In my opinion, all Monster drinks taste like chemical formulas, but this one is okay.

In a pinch, you can drink Celsius. Celsius has become the third largest-selling energy drink in the USA, after Red Bull and Monster. A 12-ounce can contains 200 mg, same as Alani Nu and almost twice what Bing has. But every Celsius I've had tastes like a chemical formula -- every single one. And, to be honest, the ingredient list on the can reads like a chemical formula as well.

Potholes! A new video game idea.

We're visiting our daughter and her family in Kansas City this week. We have been visiting, on and off, since last August. While we've been driving around this week, it has been obvious that the roads around here had a hard winter: potholes, potholes everywhere.

Potholes, potholes, everywhere!

Map of potholes in Kansas city

While attempting to dodge the potholes, I got an idea for a great new video game. I'm going to call it "Potholes!". With the exclamation point.

Here's the basic idea

The premise is simple. It's a first-person point-of-view driving game. You are in the driver's seat, looking through the windshield as the road scrolls towards you. This should be easy to do in a 2D game engine, like Defold or Godot.

As you drive along, potholes appear in the road. Each time you hit a pothole, you register some degree of damage. The larger the pothole, the greater the damage. When your damage reaches a critical point, your car falls apart, right there in the middle of the road. (Use a cut scene for this.)

Scoring

Your car has an odometer. Your score is how far you can get before your car falls apart.

Details of operation

The point is to dodge the potholes. You can drive around them, or you can straddle them. Damage occurs when your tires hit the potholes.

You get an animated "bump-bump" when you hit a pothole. The larger the pothole, the larger the bump.

You can dodge into the oncoming lane, but if you collide with oncoming traffic, you crash, obviously. (Use a different cut scene for this.)

There is a rare, giant, car-eating pothole. When you drive into it, your car disappears, as you can imagine. This one gets a Warner Brothers Cartoons style cut scene, where you see the car drive out into thin air and then drop straight down, leaving a puff of dust at ground level.

Enhancements

Day and night. At night, you have wimpy headlights that may or may not catch all the potholes. 

The headlights occasionally flicker, often at just the wrong time. If this is too annoying and spoils the game, I will drop it.

Fog! Potholes are invisible, until you're almost on top of them. Maybe I should add heavy fog, where the potholes are completely invisible.

Degrees of difficulty

• Easy: slow speed, few potholes (This will be the original game)
• Medium: higher speed, more potholes
• Hard: highest speed, lots of potholes, but density will vary at random

Steal this idea! It is NOT copyrighted.

Feel free to steal my idea and make it your own. Feel free to sell your game and get rich from it! Maybe just acknowledge me in the credits.

Cory Booker shines again

Cory Booker just finished giving a 25 hour, 5 minute, speech on the floor of the U. S. Senate, speaking in opposition to Donald Trump's policies and executive actions. The black man broke the previous record of 24 hours, 18 minutes, set by white segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1957, speaking in opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

 In 2019, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) threw his hat into the 2020 presidential ring. He was impressive at the time, although he didn't get very far in the competition. He sat out the 2024 election, in deference to Joe Biden and then to Kamala Harris when Biden dropped out of the race.

It's a much different world today. Biden won in 2020, Harris lost in 2024, and we're all watching as Trump and his minions run roughshod over American institutions, in a clumsy yet brutal attempt to remake the USA into the Germany of the late 1930s.

The Democrats were so thoroughly defeated in 2024 that they still haven't recovered. They do not have a champion, a leader, someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama to show them the way out of their wilderness. The Republicans in Congress, in the courts, and in most of the states, will not oppose Trump, and the Democrats are in every way too weak to oppose them.

I was mildly optimistic about Booker in 2019. He was certainly a better alternative than Hillary Clinton. But maybe now is his time to stand up, take on the mantle of leadership, unite the Democrats, and do something effective to oppose Trump. It's been five months since the election, three and a half months since the inauguration, and we have around three years to go until the next presidential election -- that is, if we get to have one.

Democrats need to unite behind somebody. Booker just showed that he may be the man for the job this time.

The Tariff Wars: Canada Strikes Back

 I know that, to many Americans, there is no weather north of the US-Canada border. USAnian weather maps often show clouds, storms, winds, and temperature readings right up to the border -- and no further.

Likewise, to many Americans, there is no civilization and nothing newsworthy north of the US-Canada border. All the news happens in the USA, and the only civilization that matters is in the USA.

Well, if Americans aren't watching Canada today, then they are missing something important.

Canada has long been the USA's closest and most faithful ally. You may not know it, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Canada was the FIRST Western country to declare war on Japan. Canada declared war on the evening of December 7, the same day as the attack. The USA declared war on Japan the next day, on December 8.

Since 9-11, Canadian troops have fought alongside American troops in every theatre of the Global War on Terror. They never came late to the fight, and they never came afraid or unarmed.

All of this is to say:

If you weren't watching the news carefully today, you missed something important. In the dark predawn hours of Tuesday morning, Donald Trump slapped his 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. After the sun came up, Canada slapped back. Hard.

If you want to see what was said, and what is being done, head over to CBC.ca, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website, and have a look. (That link will go stale in a few days. The world keeps turning, you know.)

In a nutshell, Canada's Prime Minister said that a trade war now exists between the US and Canada. He slapped a 25% retaliatory tariff on $155 billion of American goods. He removed American goods from store shelves. And he warned that the provincial premiers (like state governors) were going to take additional action themselves.

PM Justin Trudeau pointed out that Canada's quarrel wasn't with the American people, and in true Canadian fashion, he apologized for the pain it was going to cause them. He made it clear that Canada's beef was with "you, Donald."

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, announced that American wines, beers, etc. had been removed from the provincial liquor stores, representing a gigantic loss of revenue for American producers. He announced that governments in the province would no longer be doing business with American contractors or commercial entities. He announced that the province had torn up its contract with Starlink. He warned that Ontario would be switching off the flow of electricity from the province to Minnesota, Michigan, and New York state if Trump didn't cancel the tariffs.

The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, announced that the province was ready to close the taps on oil and gas flowing south. The premier said, in effect, "This doesn't worry us too much. We can always find someone else to buy it from us."

That's just the start of it. Canada has taken the gloves off. They basically said, "You want a fight, you got it. Both sides are gonna get bloody, but we're not gonna lose."

#TrueNorth

 It's December 12. It's been about five weeks since Donald Trump won the presidential election, and it will be another six-ish weeks before he takes the oath of office.

In the past five weeks, we have found out that a lot of what he said on the campaign trail was a lie. He was saying whatever he had to say, to pull votes from the Harris campaign and to collect votes for his own campaign.

Some of his lies

Immigration

One of the things I'm most incredulous about is the fact that he courted and received so many votes from immigrants, and children of immigrants. (Disclosure: I'm an immigrant. Came across the border with my parents when I was 7 years old. Had a green card for 15 years, then became a U.S. citizen. You wanna make something of it?) They thought that somehow they would be protected from Stephen Miller's Nazi-like excesses. But after the election, Trump and his team started talking about all of the immigrants they would be rounding up and deporting -- which included a lot of those who voted for him.

It might not be fair to call this a "lie." In my mind, Trump has always made it clear where he stood on immigration and immigrants. He only likes to keep them around to take advantage of them. Other than that, he'd like to get rid of them. And by immigrant, I think he means anyone who isn't of pure 100% European descent.

Steel

On October 19, three local unions of steelworkers in Pennsylvania endorsed Trump's candidacy, because he had promised that he would save the American steel industry and protect steelworkers' jobs. Then, on December 2, he said that he would block the US Steel merger with Japan's Nippon Steel. If the merger is blocked, US Steel has said that it will have to shut down many facilities and lay off thousands of workers. The steelworkers are not happy with Mr. Trump, after they gave him their vote and he double-crossed them.

Minorities, Diversity, Civil Rights

Conservative Black community leaders across the country endorsed Trump and influenced their followers to vote for him. After the election, when Trump was nominating members of his cabinet, he completely sidelined all of them, even though many Black leaders were more qualified for the cabinet positions than a lot of the cronies and TV personalities who did get nominated.

Food prices (Groceries!)

Trump also promised that he would bring down grocery prices for the average American. In August, he said:

"From the day I take the oath of office, we'll rapidly drive prices down, and make America affordable again. Prices will come down. You just watch. They'll come down, and they'll come down fast."

 It's not really clear how he would do this, especially with all the threats of tariffs he has been throwing around. In fact, in a Meet the Press interview, conducted on November 25 and aired on December 8, he said, "I won on groceries." However, later in the same interview, when asked whether he would consider it a failure of his presidency if grocery prices didn't come down, he said: 

"I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will."

Mm-hmm.

More to come

We've only scratched the surface on the lies and deceptions that Trump used to get elected. We have another four years to see what else he's going to pull out of his bu-- I mean, hat.

"Vote Now, Think Later"

Social media, blogs, and news stories have been full of examples of voters saying things like "I voted for Trump, but I didn't know he was going to do this. If I had known, I wouldn't have voted for him."

Clearly, he managed to sway a tiny bit over half the country into voting for him. That's how elections work, duh. But what's interesting is that the other half of the country knew exactly what was going on. They weren't fooled. 

And those who are now saying, "I voted for him, but I didn't think ..." ? THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT! YOU DIDN'T THINK!

For these people, the election slogan rattling around in their brains wasn't "Make America Great Again," it was "Vote Now, Think Later." 

What to do about it?

The majority of Americans who voted for Trump have given him carte blanche to make a wreck out of the country for the next four years. Unfortunately, thanks to you idiots, there's nothing we can do about it until 2028. Hopefully, by then you will have learned to THINK BEFORE YOU VOTE.

Another impeachment won't happen, and even if it did, it wouldn't see him removed from office. With this cabinet, an Amendment 25 removal is off the table. That leaves stroke, heart attack, or other similar scenarios. But We The People will not be part of any of these power moves. We simply have to wait it out.

Syria: That took way too long

 On March 17, 2012, I wrote an article predicting the rapid downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the tyrant king of Syria.

Boy, was I wrong.

With help from Russia and Iran, two other autocratic states and international troublemakers, Assad brutally suppressed that rebellion. Unfortunately, he didn't stamp it out completely. Rebel groups remained active in regions of Syria, and the country has had to endure 12 years of back-and-forth violence between the government forces, backed by direct Russian and Iranian involvement, and the rebel forces, backed by direct American, Turkish, and other involvement.

And, of course, Israel was always there to stir the pot whenever it felt that its national security was threatened.

In addition, the Syrian government and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist organization openly supported each other, with Hezbollah assisting the government forces at times.

ISIS also had a stake in the game, with a strong presence in Syria, but ISIS was playing for ISIS, not for Syria or for the rebels.

That all changed rapidly in the last week of November, this year.

On November 27th, rebel forces  led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former Al Qaeda affiliate, attacked the cities of Idlib and Aleppo in the north. After taking those two cities, they swept southward and took Homs, and finally Damascus on December 8th. (I think I got that day right.)

I MAY HAVE THE DETAILS OF THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH WRONG. I'LL HAVE TO CONFIRM THEM. THINGS HAVE BEEN HAPPENING FAST. Plus, I'm still grieving the loss of my son, and my mind is having trouble caring about what's happening in the rest of the world.

In the middle of the night, like at 2 a.m. on December 8th, just before the city fell, Assad loaded his family and much of his personal wealth (I'm talking about pallets loaded with cash and gold) onto a Russian transport plane and fled to Moscow.

The US assisted the rebels by suppressing an ISIS response. How did they do that? By bombing the crap out of ISIS camps, weapons caches, and other targets within Syria's borders. The US Air Force bombed literally thousands of ISIS sites in Syria.

Israel and Turkey took advantage of the Syrian government's helplessness to bolster their own national security. The Israeli navy destroyed the Syrian navy, tied up at docks in the port city of Latakia. The Israeli and Turkish air forces together destroyed 500 Syrian military targets over a two-day period, ensuring that Syria could no longer attack them or support attacks by other militant groups.

So here's the bottom line.

It didn't have to be this way. If Assad had responded differently to the May 2012 uprisings, he would still be in power, the country would be (relatively) at peace, and his people would enjoy the blessings of freedom, liberty, and prosperity.

But noooooooooo.

So he finally got what was coming to him. It's unfortunate that it took 12 years for it to happen.

Calling children by their full names

 We spent Thanksgiving this year with the family of one of our daughters. After dinner one night, one of her sons had a question for me.

He had noticed that all of the adults who know her address her by her first name, Kellie, except for me. I call her Kellie Jo, using both her first name and her middle name. He wanted to know why.

Hmm.

I think I gave him an adequate answer that night, but I have pondered on it ever since. I have often - not always, but often - called my children by their first and middle names. And I, myself, started to wonder why.

I got it figured out.

This week, my brother ran into a family friend from long ago - so long ago that they probably used to ride tricycles together. The boy's name was Greg. I have distinct memories of his mother yelling at him when he was in trouble, using his first and middle names: "Gregory Grant!" I heard it more than once. Sorry, Greg, I really didn't think you were that bad as a kid.

That reminded me of my own mother.  My mother was a great lady, but let's face it, she had anger-management issues. And when she yelled at us using our full names, we knew that she was really mad at us, or we were in deep trouble, or both. (And she didn't just use first and middle name, it was the whole enchilada.)

This next part of the story all happened in my subconscious. I admit that I have never given it any conscious thought. In fact, I didn't realize all of this until this week, when I put two and two (that is, "Kellie Jo" and "Gregory Grant!") together.

Subconsciously, I decided that I didn't want my own children to associate their names with an angry father, or with trouble. And besides, I was proud of the names we had given them.

So from the very start, I would address them using both their first and middle names. Not always, but often enough that it wasn't unusual.

Jason Daniel. Kellie Jo. Lori Dawn. Sandra Michelle. Christopher Michael (or "Chris Mike" for short).

 Whether it was a simple call to come to dinner, or a loving way to get their attention, or in the midst of playing a game or having fun, I would use both names. Over time (I hoped, subconsciously), they learned to associate their full names with love. And fun. And respect, and pride.

This many years later, when they hear their full name, I hope that it reminds them how much their father loves them.