COKES IN GLASS BOTTLES WITH PEANUTS INSIDE THEM

Sung to "These Are A Few of my Favorite Things". Well, they're better than a dog bite and bee sting.

After Little League games, we would sit in the stands and watch the next game and drink the terrific mixture. We probably didn't even wash our hands after our game. But they never made contact with the peanuts which went directly into the coke bottle. All that was left was a good shake of the bottle to start the flow of the fizz. We didn't know much about carbonation, but when we shook the bottle we had a mini-volcanic reaction. The only way to stop it was to let the liquid hit the roof of our mouth. Why the peanuts didn't fly and choke us was a matter of physics we didn't understand; they just didn't. So we did it.

It seems like Coke had much more carbonation then. Remember when if you drank it too fast it would sting your nose? Remember when it would make you burp? I haven't had a Coke, re-phrase, a Diet Coke do that to me for years. And syrupy fountain cokes; well, they can be just terrible. And canned Coke? It's terrible, and tastes to me like the aluminum it's cased in.

Since wine supposedly gets better with age, I wonder if Cokes do. Now, I know about fermentation. And I know about flatness. But if somewhere, someone had an old Coke bottle made when Cokes were really Cokes, and if it was kept in an ideal temperature setting, if it would be the same.

Hey, I have a celebratory championship Coke bottle from the Cardinals World Championship. I could pop that open and test my theory. I could add peanuts. I could even go watch my grandsons play baseball. But, then again, the bottle is from 1982. Coke had stopped being Coke by then.