Refreshingly corrosive!
Pepsi Co recently defended itself against accusations that a guy found a mouse in his Mountain Dew. Their argument: no, you didn't, because Mountain Dew will turn a mouse body into goo. Therefore, you cannot have found a mouse in your can.
When your lawyer decides that the right thing to do is admit that your soda melts dead mice, you know you're really in a bind.
According to Pepsi's documents, if the man had really found a mouse in his can, it would have long since been dissolved into "a jelly-like substance." The can had been bottled fifteen months earlier - long enough, experts agree, for all the citric acid in Mountain Dew to have wreaked havoc.
Oh, where to begin.
First of all, it's true that Mountain Dew is one of the most acidic (and delicious) sodas on the market. This is part of what is responsible for "Mountain Dew Mouth," which is a dental issue that is plaguing Appalachia.
I really wish that wasn't true, because it's just such a stereotype. But it is: children in Appalachia drink a lot of Mountain Dew. Partly because the caffeine presumably calms them (stimulants have the opposite effect on children), partly because of local pride (Mountain Dew was invented in Tennessee), partly because there is so little dental care or prevention happening in that part of the country, and partly just because DAMN.
And so in children you have a mirror version of Meth Mouth. Kids get dozens of cavities in their baby teeth, and serious tooth loss begins in the teenage years.
Do the Dew!
But I'm sure, upon hearing this story, that a certain sub-set of the population (myself included) thinks "What a great way to dispose of a body!" I wonder how many two liter bottles of Mountain Dew it would take to fill up a bathtub?
(If you just flashed to the bathtub in the basement of Jame Gumb's house, we should definitely be friends.)
Incidentally, the average bath takes about 80 liters of water. So you would want to buy 40 two liter bottles if you wanted to dissolve a body. At about two dollars a bottle, that's only $80 to cover up your crime. Not too shabby, when you consider the cost of hydrochloric acid!
(I don't actually know how much hydrochloric acid costs. I imagine it's expensive. I don't actually kill people and dispose of their bodies. I just watch a lot of The Sopranos. Honest. Really. Wait, come back!)