I heard something today that it never occured to me that I might ever here:

"It's like the Pepsi equivalent of Surge."

For those of you that don't recall, Surge was a green citrus-flavored sugar-and-caffeine powerhouse released by Coca-Cola in 2000-02 or so. It replaced Mello Yello and was after a couple short years replaced by Mello Yello.

The comment was made by a woman at Taco Bell when her son asked what something at the Pepsi machine was.

It looked like he was either looking at Sierra Mist or Mountain Dew

If Sierra Mist, they were of course wrong. Sierra Mist is Pepsi's answer to Sprite. A very poor answer at that. In that sense, I suppose, it is a bit like Surge.

If Mountain Dew... well that's techincally correct. Mountain Dew is the closest thing Pepsi has to something that tastes like Surge used to. But calling it Pepsi's equivalent of Surge is like calling Denver "the Boise of Colorado." The two have a pretty good deal in common (dirty capital cities with a substantial portion of the state's population and a more liberal tilt than much of the rest of the state), but you don't equate the relevent item with the comparatively irrelevent one. Boise could be called the Denver of Idaho, for instance, but calling Denver the Boise of Colorado seems wrong. Even if it's right, it's just wrong.