Fresh Faces

To celebrate more than thirty years of hip-hop music, Sprite has released its "Fresh Faces Series" cans available only this summer.

I got my hands on one of the six cans in the set.  They are 16 oz cans and feature a cool green brick wall in the background.  The gold band at the top is a nice touch, too.

The can I have is the one that lists the five artists being highlighted.  But the coolest cans are the other five, each showing one of the artists in the set.

You can read more about the promotion here. 

Call of Duty: BO4

Fall is getting close, which means another Call of Duty game is about to release.  This year's offering is the 4th installment of the Black Ops series, aka Black Ops IIII.

And as always, Monster energy drink is doing a promotion for the game with their Black Ops IIII branded cans.

Last weekend was the closed beta for those who have pre-ordered the game which featured a few multiplayer maps.  In a few weeks the next beta will be available, that one giving a sample of their battle royale mode.  And on October 12, the game will be released.

This can was given to me by a co-worker a couple of weeks ago.  I had no intention of getting the game, but as it draws nearer and the hype-train pulls out of the station, I'm starting to get an itchy trigger finger.

Recycling Day

I will begin this post by clarifying the cans mentioned in this story are NOT from my collection. 

As far back as 2015 I mentioned in a post that my kids decided to recycle cans they gathered for some extra money.  Word spread, friends and family started donating a can here, a can there, a bag here, a bag there...

And this was my garage a few days ago.  My parents had also started to keep cans to recycle and had a smaller pile of bags in the corner of their garage.  And with the possible purchase of another car soon, I needed my garage back.  So my dad loaded their bags on his trailer and came to my house where the kids loaded our bags on the trailer.  Then we took a family trip to the recycler.

We counted roughly 100 bags in total.  Almost all were aluminum cans, but there were about a dozen bags of tin cans people from church had brought to us.  The recycler said they took tin as well.

The main machine they used was this red beast.  The bags were emptied into the hopper on the right side (#1 in the pic).  A belt carried the cans up to the top and dropped them into rolling baskets (#2).  We filled more than a dozen of those baskets.  The rolling baskets were then gathered on a scale built into the floor (#3).  The white bags are the tin cans being weighed on the scale.  After the cans were weighed, the rolling baskets were rolled to a machine on the far right side of the pic (#4) and the can were dumped in and crushed.

It took quite a while.  It was a very hot and humid day.  The recycling place was filthy and the dirt road and parking lot were muddy from recent rain.  There were sweat bees and wasps buzzing us the whole time.  But the kids didn't mind any of that because at the end of the trip they had a check to split.

I forget the exact numbers, but we had over 200 pounds of aluminum @ $.45/pound and around 100 pounds of tin @ $.08/pound.  It was a pretty good day.  Each kid got over $55 and I got my garage back!

Epilogue: We are no longer in the can recycling business.

Alcohol @ Work?

Ok, that title might contain a little click-bait.

Recently I arrived at work and sitting on my desk was this can of Seagram's.

I've only known Seagram's to be an alcoholic drink, but upon closer inspection I noticed this was a can of ginger ale. Alcoholic cans often have very cool designs, and this looked like one of those.  But since it's ginger ale, it made its way into my collection.

And again this week I got to work to find this can of "beer" on my desk.

But it's ginger beer, not beer beer.  I Googled this particular brand and they only carry two flavors, this one and a diet ginger beer in a cool blue can.  I checked my collection and sure enough, I already have a Barritts can but that one is an older extruded steel can.

I love having variations of cans, and this is a good example of a can design not changing much in many, many years, but being just different enough to warrant keeping both cans.

This only leaves one question... when's Happy Hour?