Revenge of the Sith is slated to debut in Portland in t-minus 49 hours, 47 minutes and 33 seconds. Like a damn fool, I'm convinced that there's no possible way that George Lucas can botch this one, at least not entirely. He's working with a great premise and a screenplay doctored by Tom Stoppard. Even the advanced reviews are positi....

...Ok, fine, Sith will probably be another swing and a miss- making the new trilogy a complete strikeout. Mark my words: just like last time and the time before, everyone's going to love this thing for roughly three days. Then the backlash will begin and Sith will be torn apart by fans and the general public, forever dooming the prequels to the $5 bins at Blockbuster. The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones also received mostly positive reviews, only to succumb to ridicule once everyone got over the hype and came to their senses.

Despite all this, I'll be there alongside roughly a thousand others when Sith opens Wednesday night at Lloyd Cinemas. I wasn't able to take the evening off which means I'll have to rush across town to the Eastside in time for the midnight screening. Instead of spending the afternoon and evening alongside fans and their assorted regalia, I'll inevitably wind up with a seat in the front row on the very edge of the theater. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Midnight screenings are few and far between in this town and they always attract a weird, over-hyped crowd. The experience is more like a sporting event than your average night at the movies.

While I'll be missing out on the opportunity to wait in line for hours for a decent seat, at least I can console myself with 7-11's latest taste sensation/promotional marketing scheme.

For $1.99 I can wash away my nerdy sorrows with a few dozen Darth Dew Slurpees. I made a run to my local 7-11 a few nights ago and gave one a try. It came with 44 ounces of grape flavored Mountain Dew, a holographic cup and a cheesy cover topped with a plastic bust of the Dark Lord himself.

Despite the cool packaging, the Darth Dew inside tasted like a frozen Pixie Stick- the sort of thing that probably gives lab rats diabetes after just a few sips. I managed to drink only half of the 44 oz. I was going to dump the rest down the kitchen sink but decided to conduct an experiment first.

I mixed in two shots of Bacardi and gave it another try. Darth Dew's grape flavor didn't mix well with the rum, resulting in a concoction that tasted like a mashed-up popsicle made out of Robitussin. All in all, it was an evil-tasting drink worthy of one of cinema's greatest badasses. If you give it a try yourself, heed this warning: you'll need a gut made of steel to get through the whole thing.

There are other Sith food tie-ins out there but so far this is the only one I've managed to track down. Darth Vader Pop Tarts, Darth Vader Cereal and Dark Side M&M's are also out there somewhere. Here's hoping they're closer to the late-great C3P0 cereal from the '80s than to the sickeningly sweet dredges of the Darth Dew Slurpee.