Ludicrous Libation Lawsuits
Imagine this. You’re Adil, chilling around lunchtime one day, when you get a hankering for some delicious, thirst quenching, nauseatingly neon green/yellow Mountain Dew. You crack open the can and bring the glorious beverage up to your mouth, allowing the golden rivulets to sluice down your throat. You immediately start vomiting. Panicking, you wonder wtf was in the drink you just crushed. Quickly, you pour the defiled beverage into a styrofoam cup and out plops a carcass — mus musculus, to be exact. That’s right. A mouse.
At least, that’s what Ronald Ball claimed happened to him while he was trying to enjoy his lunch in February of 2011. Appropriately, Ball was outraged and took his claims to court. This is where things start to get a bit fuzzy.
In what has been described as a “win the battle but lose the war” strategy by PepsiCo lawyers(the owners of Mountain Dew), the legal team argued that Ball’s claims could not possibly be true because the soda was bottled 15 months prior and the soda itself would’ve turned the mouse body into a “jelly-like substance” rather than the distinguishable mouse carcass that Ball claimed to find (yikes).
To prove their point, Pepsi’s lawyers brought in a veterinary pathologist, Lawrence McGill. His affidavit was truly something:
If a mouse is submerged in a fluid with the acidity of Mountain Dew, the following will occur due to the normal acidity of the fluid:
a. Between four days to at most seven days in the fluid, the mouse will have no calcium in its bones and bony structures.
b. Within four to seven days in the fluid, the mouse’s abdominal structure will rupture. Its cranial cavity (head) is also likely to rupture within that time period.
c. By 30 days of exposure to the fluid, all of the mouse’s structures will have disintegrated to the point the structures (excepting possibly a portion of the tail) will not be recognizable and, therefore, the animal itself will not be recognizable. Instead, after 30 days in the fluid, the mouse will have been transformed into a “jelly-like” substance.
Apparently the citric acid in the drink is enough to dissolve the animal. While no scientific study has been done to validate this claim, there have been a few papers looking at the rate at which enamel from teeth erodes after exposure to various sodas, and it’s not pretty. One team led by the prominent dentist J. Anthony von Fraunhofer (I already don’t like this guy) discovered that not only does Mountain Dew dissolve teeth, it does so faster than Coca Cola (surprising, since people always thought the phosphoric acid in Coke was worse)
Fortunately, there was one brave soul willing to test the thesis. (Warning the video below is NSFL)
Welp, our boys did it. They dissolved the hell out of the mouse with Mountain Dew (HMB while I go vomit). At least now we know Pepsi was vindicated.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, McGill further confirmed that Ball was full of it by providing rather specific details on the actual age of the mouse provided for evidence and even how long it had been exposed to air — both proving that there’s no way the mouse could’ve ended up in the bottle:
a. The animal claimed to have been found in the subject can of Mountain Dew was a young mouse at the time of its death, at most 2 to 4 weeks old, though I cannot completely rule out the possibility the animal was a very young rat of approximately the same age.
b. The mouse was dead when it entered the Mountain Dew fluid and had been exposed to air after it died.
c. This mouse had not been born when the can of Mountain Dew was produced (filled and sealed) on August 28, 2008.
d. Because of the condition of the mouse, its internal organs, and cartilaginous and bony structures, namely that none of them had been disintegrated or been decalcified, this mouse was not in the Mountain Dew fluid for more than 7 days and could not have been and was not introduced into the can of Mountain Dew when the can was produced (filled and sealed) on August 28, 2008, seventy-four days before it was allegedly found in the can. From a medical, pathological and scientific view, that simply would not have been possible.
get rekt.
Fun side note about Sicilian Mafias:
The Sicilian Mafia was a slick bunch. They were quite good at having people disappear off the face of the planet, and evidently they were a bit more advanced than the trusty old concrete boots. Known as “lupara bianca” (“white shotgun”) murders, these crimes had some sophisticated planning and disposal methods involved. One of the more common techniques? Dissolving the bodies in sulfuric acid.
For funsies, a group of forensic investigators wanted to see how long this strategy would take to see if was actually feasible to use. Armed with pig carcasses, sulfuric acid, and a can-do attitude, our swashbuckling scientific scouts tossed some bodies in some pools of sulfuric acid (a la Breaking Bad) and counted the minutes. With sulfuric acid alone, the carcasses took days to dissolve. The dissolution time was improved (? dunno if actually an “improvement” per se) to 12 hours for muscle and cartilage, and 2 days for bones, with the addition of some water to the putrid preparation. So, conclusion, did the Sicilian Mafia really dissolve bodies in Sulfuric acid? Yeah, probably. Was it the most efficient technique? Probably not.
Sources:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-mountain-dew-really-dissolve/
http://www.umich.edu/~chemstu/content_weeks/F_06_Week1/dental%20cavities_coursepack.pdf
