2000 SF Weekly Satire Has Come to Fruition

july 25, 2008  10:23 am
California recently joined 10 other states in compelling Anheuser Busch to stop selling caffeine-spiked beer products like Tilt and Bud Extra. "The watchdogs might have saved steps by looking up a 2000 SF Weekly satire column, which facetiously predicted the introduction of an 'energy beer' that would be viewed as a public menace, and run into trouble with the law," columnist Matt Smith notes. The satire was part of a regular dot-com-boom-era feature called "South to the Future," in which the writers Becky Bond and Jose Marquez "concocted made-up news stories about improbable, absurd, yet somehow believable technological advances." Energy beer was one of those advances, and as Smith points out, "eight years later, the Bond and Marquez column reads like current news."