Where Have All The Six Packs Gone?

We noticed yesterday at the grocery store that soda no longer comes in six packs. Sure, you can get a six pack of 20 ounce bottles. Or a six pack of mini 6 ounce cans. Or, you can get a "convenience" twelve pack. But let's face it, there is nothing convenient about the twelve pack.

We've noticed the slow disappearance of six packs. It began with the standard bearers of the soda industry: coke and diet coke six packs were replaced with the twelve pack. For a while, orange soda, root beer, cherry soda were hold outs. But more recently, even those have been replaced with the uber-sized twelve pack.

No doubt some marketing genius came to the conclusion that only stocking shelves with twelve packs of soda would force consumers into buying twice as many sodas all at once. And what better way to drive sales of the never ending supply of new flavored colas. Vanilla Coke, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Vanilla Coke with Splenda, Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke-- how many new Coke formulas are there? Well, Coke is certain you'll just love them so much you want to have twelve of them crowding out your refridgerator.

Occasionally we might be inclined to sample from the bounty of flavored colas, or perhaps satisfy our craving for orange soda or Mountain Dew or 7Up. Yet, we can't really justify buying an entire twelve pack of any one of these sodas. Once upon a time, we loved our diet Dr. Pepper, which tasted more like the real Dr. Pepper. Yet, there is no reason we need twelve when maybe we want one Dr. Pepper a week.

In the suburban McMansion, leaving twelve packs lying around with one or two sodas taken from them really is not a big deal. After all, why else should anyone want 5,000 square feet of space unless it is to have a complete collection of a flavored Diet Cokes. But we don't live in a suburb. We live in a small urban apartment, just like the other 250,000 people who shop at the very same grocery store we do. We're assuming we aren't the only folks who refuse to fill our entire 4 square feet of pantry shelving with Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke.

So yesterday we did leave the grocery store with a six pack: Lemonata, an Italian soda. We skipped right passed the Diet Coke, the Sunkist, the root beer, the cream soda. Did we want an A&W? Sure. But what the hell were we going to do with the other eleven?

Yes, Bill, You Are a Shithead

Last night's episode of One Week to Save Your Marriage featured Jersey City couple Bill and Madeline.

For those of you who've never heard of One Week to Save Your Marriage, and we're guessing that's probably everyone who didn't pass by their production set, then you need to know its a reality show featuring Doctor Robi Ludwig, you guessed it, putting back together bad marriages. One Week is alot like Shalom in the Home, except without the kitch factor of Rabbi Shmuley or a streamlined camper trailer.

The only reason we know about this One Week is that for ten days or so, the production crew was setup outside a bar a block from our own residence. This really wouldn't have concerned us at all except that the crew apparently needed a half dozen parking spaces for their precious trailer. So yeah, we already had a bad taste in our mouth when Bill showed us just exactly why his marriage is falling apart.

As luck would have it, the Saturday afternoon that Dr. Robi was telling Bill and his pretty little wife that they soon would have to decide whether they should stay together or not, also happened to be the Saturday afternoon that some co-workers and I were sitting around drinking glasses of wine at the local bar Bill and his wife lived above. We had a brief conversation with some other fellow bar folks. And then the bar tender call last call on the bathrooms as the as yet unamed television show was going to spend an hour or so filming in the backroom.

Great, everyone thought, sipping their pints, just what drinkers don't want access to after three or four hours of drinking. This of course got everyone talking about what was so important they needed to close the bathrooms down. After someone revealed that the show was "One Week to Save Your Marriage," the other drinkers in the bar began to discuss the merits of working out a marriage via reality television show. And that's when Bill showed up to explain why his marriage was falling apart.

Bill suffers from the Napoleon complex and has severe issues with anger management. He briefly explained to the entire bar that he was "TRYING TO SAVE [HIS] MARRIAGE" and then kindly asked us to the shut the hell up. We couldn't possibly understand what he was going through. He was very sincere and taking the whole "saving his marriage" bit very seriously. Needless to say we didn't need a degree to know why his marriage was falling apart; Bill is a rage-a-holic.

Meanwhile, the show concluded with Bill and Madeline agreeing to stay together. That's great, but Bill, just in case things don't work out, either because your wife files for divorce or because you have a rage blackout and end up killing a man, let us know; we liked the apartment.

Wikipedia: Website Killer

A few years back I launched a small website titled "The Theater Guide." The site was moderately succesful for a first time web publisher, coded by hand and published without the aid of any blog software. It was good enough to be plagarized and to win a prize. That was almost seven years ago.

The Theater Guide was essentially a resource I had written including information about community theater. At the time, the internet was pretty bare when it came to informaton about theater; theater geeks were simply not web geeks. I was not a professional, but I'd like to think most of the information presented on the site was useful to the people who happened to come across it. That was then.

Now of course, everything I had published on the site can easily be researched on Wikipedia. Compare for instance, the Wikipedia entry on stage lighting to a similar page on my guide. Not only is the Wikipedia entry more extensive, but offers links to other areas. The best part is, Wikipedia is being edited by hundreds of thousands of people, providing collective knowledge rather than the limited knowledge of a single publisher. All of this is obvious.

But what this does mean is that sites like my former Theater Guide have a lot less relevance. Small publishers are less necessary today then before Wikipedia. This is in part why my old site has been moved to an archive and I no longer support it. Better information is produced for far less effort then I could devote to expanding the theater guide.

Indeed, Wikipedia has meant a rich assortment of information is freely available on the internet tubes, but it also means small time web publishers must work harder to provide any sort of innovative service.

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