One & Done: 10 Trends From 2011 That We Hope Won't Survive The New Year

4. Four Loko

At first, I thought this one was going to be tough to write: after all, I've written about Four Loko before, with roughly the same combination of fear, awe and dependency with which Joyce wrote about whiskey, or Burroughs about heroin. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that like Tina Turner, I was clinging to my love of something that was beating the living crap out of me and giving me back nothing in return. Four Loko, we're done. Of course, 2011 was going to mark the end of Four Loko no matter what we said. The legally mandated reformulation, which removed the insane amounts of caffeine (substituting for cocaine in what was basically a legal speedball), had rendered Four Loko into just another disgusting malt alcoholic beverage. At this point, you can probably get the same effect by cracking open two AA batteries and mixing whatever comes out into a Smirnoff Ice. And while children are no more or less safe than they were before they took away Four Loko, clove cigarettes and whatever other bullshit is scaring white people these days, at least we won't have to look at those awful eyesores of can design anymore. I guess that's a win-win? [via] -Alex