Cap'n Crunch Clean and Sober

From here forth, the Cap'n will simply be known as Crunch.

After 44 years, Quaker Oats and Ari Steinowitz, the man who has played the Cap'n since the popular breakfast cereal's debut in 1963, have decided an image change was long overdue, saying that cereal-eating children can now expect a calmer, more laid-back Cap'n.

This comes following a string of bizarre actions culminating in his arrest in January after showing up to a Connecticut casino drunk without his toupee and missing his captains trousers and hat while attempting to wrestle a stuffed coyote.

Steinowitz pleaded no contest to charges of public intoxication, indecency, disorderly conduct and assault of a law enforcement official. He was sentenced to 64 days in jail, fined an undisclosed sum and ordered into mandatory substance abuse treatment.

It was this treatment that Steinowitz and Quaker Oats
say was the biggest catalyst for change.

Officials at the cereal giant have since acknowledged privately a growing concern for years about the Cap'n's suspected amphetamine addiction which led to an increasingly hyper-aggressive and overly-energetic insistence on people eating his cereal.

They point out the visual change over the years on the cereal boxes, going from a stoic if not weathered seaman in the 60s and 70s to the recent eye-bulging buffoon, saluting and grinning while practically forcing large spoonfuls of his cereal on anyone from coworkers to passing motorists to infants and
toddlers.

Quaker Oats officials said the return to a more dignified persona would be gradual. While temporarily keeping the name Cap'n Crunch, Steinowitz will now appear on cereal boxes wearing a 'do rag in place of a bulky captains hat. He'll also sport more of a neutral, almost sedated expression to better reflect the attitudes of today's youth.

Political Climate Crisis

Estimated reading time: 53 seconds

Then there were just two colors, two flavors, two ideologies and they thought it clever to call it a political spectrum.

They shouted past one another ideas that fit neatly between commercial breaks, serving as forced interruptions. Ideas were kept brief and small to fit this framework, not too complex, not too nuanced. To maintain an opinion short and simple was to repeat culturally acceptable ideology, to repackage conventional wisdom, to revisit what had been established before. And you agreed and nodded as what you already knew was confirmed by someone whose importance, you assumed, put them in front of a camera.

Voices that did not fit this template, voices willing to truly defy and provoke remained silent in favor of those waiting to comply. Those willing to discuss and listen, challenge and discern were kept quietly aside.

Instead, the shouting.

The two men claimed to disagree with one another but secretly had a common goal.
To argue over red and blue, black and white, good and evil, business as usual while their country burned in a hazy darkness.

A Pig To Haunt Your Sleep

Estimated reading time: 1 minute 21 seconds

At first sight, the photo could make the churchiest of church-goers curse in freakish wonder.

A dead pig weighing 1,050-something pounds and measuring 9 feet 4 inches.

Pigs just aren’t supposed to be that big, that monstrous.

About four times larger than the average feral hog, the pig would weigh more than a good-sized cow and dwarf the size of your average bull moose.

Once you rid the massive pig’s image from haunting your sleep, the most logical joke to make from the whole thing is “That’s a lot of bacon.”

Funny because it’s true. That is a lot of bacon. Roughly 22,727 slices of bacon.

But in all seriousness, the father of the 11-year-old who shot the pig confirmed that the bulk of the pig will be used to make sausage – 500 to 700 pounds of sausage, which converts into about 9,390 breakfast links (someone needs to put this guy and his family on heart attack watch ASAP.)

However, I think I’d have a hard time eating sausage that came from this rhinoceros of a pig.

I’d be afraid that the pig’s stuff would somehow get inside me and permeate my glands and nodes. I’d wake up the next morning with shiny gray skin, hands, feet and ears in freakish proportions, my fingers beginning to fuse and harden as my voice gets crazy deep and I sprout dark, thick hair everywhere.

The more sausage I eat, the more I look like a freakishly large pig.

Oh wait . . .

Tennis, Spiders and Terror

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 4 seconds

Passing a tennis court as you walk back from the pharmacy you notice a man laying on his side just inside the baseline on the far end of the court.

Dozens of balls line the fence and sit at the foot of the net. A large empty practice basket straddles the service line.

You try to talk yourself out of investigating, offering the idea that the man had halted his practice to grab some quick shuteye on the court’s 112-degree surface. The blood spattered on the front of his white T-shirt jolts you from your comfort.

Walking briskly across the court, you approach the man, who is apparently breathing but unconscious. You inspect closer the small orange and red splatters on his shirt, noting in your head that it looks like he had been squirted by a spray bottle full of blood.

Looking for the source of the blood you go to lift his shirt. As you reach toward him, what you see sends a shock up your spinal column as you jump away in primitive flight.

Crawling all over the man’s shirt are thousands of tiny red baby spiders, some of which had been smashed to create the illusion of blood.

After a few moments, you deduce the man had been hit by some sort of bomb of spiders, the red being the spiders that splattered on impact. What had rendered him unconscious was beyond your comprehension, a potential truth so horrendous and terrifying you try to suppress it but fail.

Ten years earlier you would have called 911. But not now. Not with a man who had been hit by a bullet full of baby spiders which may or may not have stripped him of consciousness. If you see something, say something, you recall hearing.

You dial the Department of Homeland Security. Awaiting instruction, you back slowly off the court, returning reluctantly to a changed world.

Sarcasm Lost On Google

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 59 seconds

With its complex algorithms that would make advanced extra terrestrial life wither dumbly, it's no secret that the super wizard computer geeks at Google have done some amazing things.

Not only can one type in the nonsense phrase "goat saddle" and actually see picture after picture of, you guessed, goats wearing saddles, but he can also find web sites that sell goat saddles and – I swear it – tips on how to make saddling a goat as pleasant as possible for you and the goat.

But what makes Google so successful as a business is how it recognizes key words within your search results and automatically generates relevant and potentially useful links to paid advertisers. So when searching for goat saddles, on the right of the screen are links to web sites where you can buy goats and saddles.

Google has applied this same technology to its e-mail program Gmail. But instead of recognizing key words in an internet search, it picks up on what it thinks is the content of your e-mail – keywords and phrases – and offers potentially relevant advertising links to the right of the message.

At first this seems a little creepy and a lot obtrusive. I imagine someone or something actually reading and comprehending the content of my e-mail and supplying the corresponding advertising.

But if you read the disclaimers and FAQs supplied by Google, you can be rest assured that it has nothing to do with monitoring or spying and everything to do with the complex algorithms and Google super wizards mentioned above.

While Google may pat itself on the back for being able to use artificial intelligence to decipher human correspondence, all in the name of advertising, I have discovered something Google is not too good at: Detecting sarcasm.

This played out simply the other day, in an e-mail exchange I had with a friend of mine who I'll call "Ted." (I'll also omit the names of anyone else to keep all identities anonymous).

It's important to know that it has been Ted's shtick to downplay his current position in life, his job, the city he lives in. He's not entirely happy with it but when he talks about it, he lays the sarcasm and hyperbole on thick. It's become sort of a joke, kind of like Ted's life (that was actually an example of how Ted might actually joke . . . see?).

The e-mail exchange went something like this:

Ted: You still want to have lunch tomorrow? If so, we should also include "Brian." I'm available around 1.

My biggest accomplishment this evening was [insert name of lame movie here]. My life is in F'ing shambles.

Me: That sorry excuse for a human being "Brian" and I were just discussing activities for tomorrow. We were thinking of playing some basketball and then going to lunch. Thoughts?

Ted: "Brian's" life is one of the only things that makes mine seem relevant. I'll be home from work around 1 so maybe hoops at 1:30 and lunch to follow?

Now I'm going to watch [insert name of lame movie here] and then go to sleep. F---.

So if you're a computer and/or robot reading this e-mail and looking for key words, some consistent subjects and relevant phrases, here's what you might deduce:

You've got two people talking about getting lunch and playing basketball. And then something else keeps coming up, like references to lives being in "shambles" and someone who is a "sorry excuse for a human being."

So I look to the right of the e-mail exchange and notice the specifically tailored advertising generated for this conversation.

Expectedly, there were links concerning the NBA and NBA playoffs. Good job Google, 1-for-1. Next up was one advertisement targeting overweight children and another offering tips for the overweight. I'll give Google a consolation prize for that but it was getting colder on relevant advertising, as the most prominent and abundant number of links it offered were quite different.

There was one for teenagers with troubled pregnancies, one advertising a "practical, proven program for parents of troubled teenagers," and another claiming that "surrogate mothers are needed."

Wow. I never knew our lives were this dire.

So maybe Google still has some work to do, to find a way to detect the dry wit of its users. Or perhaps Google is really a step ahead of me and Ted is actually dealing with a troubled teen pregnancy and just hasn't told me.

Today's Smell: Walgreens

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 28 seconds

I walked into a Walgreens the other day looking for a muffin pan (A muffin pan at Walgreens you ask? Well, it’s only logical when you plan to have muffins on an easy Saturday morning and A) you discover that for some reason your only muffin pan is not in the drawer below the stove as usual but in some closet in your wife's classroom at school and B) there's a Walgreens less than 1/6-mile from your doorstep).
Immediately when I walked into Walgreens I was permeated with that smell. You know that smell. That Walgreens smell. I can't describe it in any other way than . . . Walgreens.
No matter if the Walgreens is in Denver, Kansas City, El Paso, Omaha or Manchester, CT, or if the Walgreens is 16 years old or 16 weeks old, all Walgreens smell exactly the same (true could be said of other discount chains, Target especially).

How can this be?

Certainly over the last 20 years, Walgreens has changed the bulk of its products, or perhaps began carrying more convenience foods and makeup and less camera supplies and toys. And yet the scent is exactly the same.

I want to know specifically what I am smelling.

Maybe the smell is the product of commercially unsuccessful, bargain DVDs placed near a cash register. Maybe the smell is a cocktail of hair clips and self grooming tools placed in proximity to cigarettes and Nicoderm patches. Maybe it’s the combined scent achieved when a photo processing center butts up against a dairy case.

Some I have spoken to about this think it’s a scent Walgreens sprays in all its stores. My only hesitation with this theory is that if Walgreens was to provide a scent for its stores, it would pick something like “sea breeze” or “flowers” over “Walgreens.”

Whatever makes up the smell, to me it’s one of the most remarkable, consistent and unique scents I have ever smelled while purchasing allergy pills and Pringles.