Mountain Dew Good at Quenching Thirst, Liquifying Rodents

I once saw an episode of The Steve Wilkos Show in which a guy was accused of (among other things) stealing a tv from his lady friend.  He maintained his innocence in a rather bold fashion.  “I didn’t steal anything,” he said.  “Actually, I was in a different city committing another crime.”  Boom, checkmate.  Because you’re thinking, “Wait, what?  Another crime?  Why would he bring that up if it wasn’t true?”  Law professionals know this as “evidence against interest”, but I like to think of it as “taking the shady lane”.  Sometimes, the only thing that can save you is more shadiness.

This was the strategy apparently deployed by PepsiCo’s legal team in responding to a lawsuit brought by a man who claimed he found a dead mouse in his can of Mountain Dew.  They could have simply pointed out that the four-week-old mouse wasn’t even alive when the can in question was sealed two-and-a-half months prior, but that wasn’t good enough!  They wanted to present a defense so stunning and gruesome that nobody could doubt its veracity.  And so, like a hapless paternity denier on a daytime talk show, they took the shady lane, setting out to prove that exposure to Mountain Dew would have reduced the mouse to a disgusting goo.

PepsiCo trotted out an expert witness whose affidavit painstakingly demonstrates how Mountain Dew – PepsiCo’s popular beverage sold for human consumption – would transform a mouse carcass into an unrecognizable, “jelly-like” substance in a mere thirty days.  The expert, Dr. Lawrence McGill, describes how the citrus-flavored soft drink would leach the calcium from the mouse’s bones, cause its abdomen and head to rupture, and eventually disintegrate everything except “possibly a portion of the tail”.  So if the mouse had been in the can like Mr. Wise Guy Plaintiff claims, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed because it would have been nothing more than a nonspecific blob intermingled with his soda.  Case closed, PepsiCo wins!  Now go out and buy some Mountain Dew, everybody!

On the plus side, PepsiCo noted Mountain Dew’s now public helpfulness in washing down mice should make it the beverage of choice among cats and circus geeks the world over.

[Photo via Nick Moise]

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