Mox Populi

Moxie is one of my favorite words.

And just one visit to popsoda.com could make it my favorite beverage too.

For a mere consideration (and some overpriced shipping and handling), popsoda will put anywhere from a couple of bottles to a couple of cases of this distinctively different original elixir in my rec room's vintage soda dispenser tomorrow.

Or yours. Since I don't actually have a rec room, or a vintage soda dispenser.

I do have a basement. And therein, I have the restored backglass from a vintage Williams Tornado pinball game. Also some lamp bases. And a busted brass adding machine.

But this isn't about me. It's about Moxie, and my current lack of it.

Moxie's pedigree as a patent formula invented by Dr. Augustin Thompson in the 1880s hardly prepared it for its illustrious future as the first mass-marketed soft drink in America, according to its online fansite, maintained by the suggestively titled New England Moxie Congress. To say nothing of its current status as the Official Drink of the State of Maine.

Billed as a "Nerve Food," it basically was the Red Bull of its day, heavily promoted at amusement parks, gaming establishments, county fairs, beaches, and other areas where youth and vigor were the coin of the realm in the 20s and 30s. Eventually, though, even Moxie lovers were brainwashed into drinking the Coca Cola Kool-Aid and the rest is almost lost to history.

True Moxie mavens retired to the civitas of New England whence their distinctively different mass-produced elixir came, there to cry into their sodas and love other lost causes such as locally determined democracy, thrift and frugality, 100% wool sweaters, ox pulls, and The Red Sox (whose 2004 win in the World Series has made them somehow more tragic, to me anyhow).

Anyhoo.

[link to popsoda.com via Shawn. Sheer moxie via yours truly]