Earlier this week, General Mills issued a press release promoting Simone Biles appearing on Wheaties boxes. In March, they announced new Sonic the Hedgehog fruit snacks, and in January, they alerted fans that Ice-T loved Honey Nut Cheerios. Cleary, they love telling us about their marketing synergy.

Yet somehow they failed to notify the public that this was coming:

The packaging tells us "Strong Berry" cereal is really Cap'n Crunch. I suppose this tastes the same as Crunch Berries, just with all of the pieces shaped like little diamonds. In other words, you're going to need a Mouth of Steel to survive eating this.

Amusingly, in keeping with the comic book theme, there is also a variant of this cereal with Supergirl on the cover box, all the better to sell the same cereal to little boys and little girls. Sorta makes you wonder why there isn't a female Cap'N Crunch, doesn't it.

We're currently living in a dystopia of infinite inflation, but you can get this at Target for a measly $3.49. Superman is all about helping the little people!

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The Olympics are here again, which of course means that I'm watching fewer movies and more sports — just in time for the end of football season!

9/2018. Black Samson (1974)
The protagonist of this blaxploitation film has a pet lion that... doesn't ever do anything. Is it only here because the biblical Samson killed a lion? ("What is stronger than a lion? Black Samson!") More interestingly, although the film very much indulges in themes of black solidarity, the "white man" isn't really the bad guy here; that honor goes to one crazy, wannabe mafia boss who even the white men don't like. (Is Johnny Nappa a Philistine? Which of the girls dancing in Samson's topless bar is Delilah?) Hardly great cinema, but not entirely worthless, either.

10/2019. The Story of Three Loves (1953)
This anthology film lives up to its title, telling three different stories about lost loves is the good kind of weird. The middle chapter would appear to have inspired the movie Big (with Ricky Nelson in what would be Hanks' role), and the third chapter showcases Kirk Douglas' typical commitment to his roles, in this case as an obsessed trapeze artist.

11/2020. How to Build a Girl (2019)
Beanie Feldstein pretends to be young and English in the early 90s British music scene. As I've admitted before, I'm a sucker for coming-of-age films. This one hits all the usual beats, and of course I enjoyed it.

She orders a Coke in a bar, then never touches it. It just sits on that table. What is this, an SEC football press conference?

12/2021. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Holy crap, the bus fight on this thing is amazing. They really should have found a way to make that the finale. I'd heard a lot of complaints about that CGI-driven finale, and I think they are all well deserved. The real problem isn't the CGI but the fact that the CGI characters introduced late in the third act have no character development before their action sequence. You've gotta give the audience a reason to care about your ridiculous animated dragons, Marvel, otherwise we're just checking our watches as we wait for the inevitable end-credit cameos.

13/2022. Putney Swope (1969)
The narrative is ostensibly about a no-nonsense outsider taking over a Madison Avenue advertising firm, but that's mostly just an excuse to satire consumerism, capitalism, socialism, racism, sexism, and, frankly, every -ism in all the best, most absurdist ways. Near the end of the film, there's a very self-indulgent several minutes of topless fight attendants which wouldn't be out of place in Kentucky Fried Movie but here comes across as appropriately damning of American society. As the man at the breakfast table eating Ethereal Cereal would say, "No shit!"

More to come.

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There's a new commercial in which an animated child holds up a piece of cereal and says, "I wonder where Froot Loopsâ„¢ come from." Then the camera pulls back to reveal Toucan Sam perching on the top of a box.

I don't think this commercial is selling what Kellogg's® thinks it's selling. I've spent too many hours birdwatching not to know what you'll find under a bird's perch.

Follow Your Nose to Froot Loops World (2021), youtube.com

Think I'm reading too much into this? Then why have the animators included a giant prolapsed asshole at the top of the screen?

No breakfast for me today. Or maybe ever again.

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Cinnamon Frosted Flakes are a real thing now. I haven't had them yet, and after watching this commercial, I can tell you I never will. We'll be right back after this message.

Did you hear that guy at the end of the commercial say that Cinnamon Frosted Flakes "tastes like victory"? Does Kellogg's know where that line comes from? Have they never seen Robert Duvall as the satiric Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now?

Once upon a time, art and literature employed allusions to previous works audiences would be familiar with in order to reinforce concepts. In modern America, corporations still use allusions, but they no longer expect the audience to understand them rationally. They only want to trigger an emotional connection. "Oh, yeah. I remember Apocalypse Now. I liked it. I bet I'd like Cinnamon Frosted Flakes."

Kellogg's doesn't care if the actual reference is to napalm, a weapon used to burn people to death. Nor does Dodge care if their products are pitched by Star Wars' oppressive evil Empire. Six Flags gladly names roller coasters after DC Comics serial killers.

So good luck with your new product, Kellogg's, but I still pay attention to who is trying to sell me something. Kilgore can keep his cinnamon. I'll stick with my Sugar Frosted Flakes, the cereal that Superman says is the best.

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The first rule of writing is show, don't tell. So although I occasionally talk about coding here on my site, today I'll show you some. (And thus his last 2 remaining readers are motivated to delete wriphe.com from their bookmarks.)

I've been working long hours lately, and the following sample was written at 4 AM after 12 hours of continuous coding while trying to beat a deadline. This snippet takes a character string, looks at the last number of the string to determine if it is odd, and then loads the number into a list.

1. List<> _dutyroster = new List<>();
2. string _stormtrooper = "TK421";
3. string _lastNo = _stormtrooper.Substring ( _stormtrooper.Length-1 );
4. int _id = int.Parse ( _lastNo );
5. if( _id % 2 != 0 ) {
6.  int _unlucky = ( _id == 1 ) ? 1 : 3;
7.  _dutyroster.Add ( _unlucky );
8. }

It seemed to work well enough.

At the grocery store the following day, somewhere between the cereal and the soda, I remembered this function. In the bright light of day, it seemed wasteful to bother with the ternary operator if I was just going to select the same number as the odd number I had just evaluated. So I replaced it.

5. if( _id % 2 != 0 ) {
6.  int _unlucky = _id;
7.  _dutyroster.Add ( _unlucky );
8. }

That broke everything.

Turns out, sometimes when you can't remember why you were writing code at 4 in the morning, you might ought to trust that you knew what you were doing.

What I knew in the dark but didn't remember later that day was that my "_stormtrooper" reference number could end in any digit. The ternary operator, seen below,

• ( _stupidIs == _stupidDoes ) ? true : false;

existed to provide a necessary, restrictive default in the case that what I was looking for wasn't present.

The takeaway from today's lesson is that I write better code at 4 AM than 4 PM. So next time you think it's weird that I sleep all day and work all night, remember TK421. No matter what time the clock says, sometimes you're just better off if you don't leave your post.

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Superman is such an icon, you don't even have to put his name on the box to sell products. Just his logo will do.

The product, as you can see by the price label on the shelf, is officially called Betty Crocker Fruit Shapes DC Comics. Superman's name isn't even on the box! But why should it be? Today's kids are sophisticated and knowledgeable about what they put in their pie-holes. They wouldn't eat just anything out of a box with a hero's likeness on it.

"Spider Berry" cereal "with Lizard villain marshmallows" flavored with natural spider and lizard flavors? I withdraw my statement, your honor.

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Hanna-Barbera's The Flintstones went off the air in 1966. Its last spin-off series, Cartoon Network's Cave Kids, aired it's last new episode thirty years later in 1996. The most recent original Flintstones content aired in 2001, so it's been a decade since The Flintstones has been culturally relevant as anything other than nostalgic reruns. That being the case, why do they still make Flintstones-themed Fruity Pebbles?

Introduced in 1971, Postâ„¢ Fruity Pebbles weren't introduced to the public until after The Flintstones were canceled thanks to free-falling ratings. Their entire, long-running success has endured without the support of the very product from which they were licensed! That's pretty amusing given that Fruity Pebbles is credited as the first breakfast cereal brand built from the ground up around a licensed property. Since then countless licensed cereals have come and gone, including E.T. Cereal, Mr. T, and Urkel-Os, which had hte the benefit of support from their licensed properties.

My point -- assuming that I have one -- is that I suspect that at this point the merits of the cereal, such as they are, must speak for themselves. Surely no one is buying Fruity Pebbles because of the Flintstones ties anymore, so there must be something in those Fruity Pebbles to enable 40 uninterrupted years of sales longevity. Nothing that The Flintstones actually actively endorsed on their show could have sold this well, right?

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After reading on the Mental Floss blog that Snap, Crackle, and Pop had a brother named Pow, I lost my afternoon trying to track down evidence. It was relatively easy to discover that the three elves (a baker, a band leader, and a slacker) were created in 1933 as a response to radio advertisement. It was somewhat harder to find evidence for the existence of Pow, who aparently appeared in animated advertisements. But here it is, as provided by John K Stuff. And all that proves is that cereal commercials have always been just fucked up.

[Note: that link above to shamuskrispies.mov is a Quicktime movie link. In my PC browsers, I can't see it, but downloading and watching it on a desktop (i.e. offline) application solved the problem for me.]

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*Or it may not. The "May" makes it legal. We checked.^**

**Anyway, it's chocolate; you know you want it. Go ahead, take a bite. You can stop anytime you want.^***

***Trust us, we're General Mills. Sure, we promised last year to reduce the sugar we put in foods marketed at children, but what else are we going to do with all that sugar if we don't put it in foods marketed at adults? Adults like sugar, too, right?^****

****Whatever. In any event, there's still a spoonful of real heart in every bowl, and that we don't have to qualify with an asterisk!

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I've had this commercial stuck in my head all day.

Call me crazy, but I've decided that Barney is really rapping about raping Fred's daughter, Pebbles. Fred must think so, too, for he sure freaks out over the minor theft of some delicious "cereal."

One would think that an archaic cartoon character rapping about child molestation is probably not the best way to sell sugar to children, but Post Cereals doesn't care. Post blatantly uses drug themes to market Golden Crisp, a cereal with so much sugar it gives Sugar Bear hallucinations, and Honeycomb, a cereal that acts as a nutritious sedative for dangerous feral creatures. It's no wonder that after a childhood of ingesting roofies, reds, and tabs, Post wants me to buy boxes of 100% Bran to cleanse my system.

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