don't forget! this weeks useless poll [link] **i eats it!**

(NEWS FEATURES TO COME LATER - WATCH FOR UPDATE!)
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I thank all of you who voted last week for my ladybug picture! There are still 3 weeks to go and it has moved up in the polls, but I still need your help if I am to stay under the 150 mark for consideration! Please Please Please vote and vote and vote again! Its easy, fast, and you don't need to sign up for anything. Just click on this jacked up lookin [link]XF-w&u=QKBl5&ref=mf and you will go to the page on Brickfish where you can click the vote button. Thank you all super duperly! If I win I can get a scholarship which will help pay for my expensive but awesome photography classes!
Ok... enough with the self-pimpage... here's the feature this week!
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The worlds most commonly consumed psycho active substance. Chances are, you have taken some dosage of Caffeine today. Caffeine is a distant cousin of cocaine and does wonders - increase concentration, war off drowsiness, boost metabolism. Mountain dew contains 55 mg of this white powder, slightly less than a cup of coffee. Although outside the United States, it's usually sold without caffeine.


Born in the hills of Tennessee in the 1940s, Mountain Dew
was originally invented by two brothers, Barney and Ally
Hartman, for use as a mixer with whiskey. Mountain Dew is
actually slang for “moonshine,” and some of the early
bottles were even adorned with sketches of a character
called Willy the Hillbilly.


In keeping with the "moonshine" theme, the Mountain Dew bottlers even added the names of the bottlers, the sellers and their locations on the bottles.


Mountain Dew, the yellowish-green soda that was advertised as being "zero proof moonshine" also carried the saying, "It'll tickle yore innards!" on the back of the bottles.


America's sugar quota and high tariffs on imports causes companies to use the chemical known as high fructose corn syrup. Everyone's favorite enzymatized syrup - made from the corn mill. It's in everything, from Ketchup to Kool Aid and the average American consumes about 60 pounds of this sugar substitute annually. Mountain Dew contains 6.5 teaspoons of High fructose corn syrup. Don't count on this sugar impostor to get you high, many studies have debunked the notion of a "sugar high". Also, because natural sugar has a tendency to go bad, it also increases the shelf life, allowing you to store the dew until its ready to be done.


Without Brominated vegetable oil your delicious dew would look like the Gulf of Alaska in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez. It keeps fat soluble citrus flavorings from separating from the rest of the liquid by keeping it all the same density. Bromine is extracted from sea water and in its liquid or vaporous form, it's lethal. Prior to 1975, you could make sedatives out of it but once when droves of overmedicated people were wheeled into psychiatric facilities, diagnosed as loony but actually suffering from bromism -- so much serum bromide that they couldn't stand up or remember their names.




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sources:
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