Assorted Silliness

An Open Letter to General Mills

Dear General Mills,

I want to start by thanking you for providing my mornings with tasty breakfast cereal delights for almost 30 years. As I sat at my dining room table this morning, blearily enjoying a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, I began to rehash a theory I concocted back when I was but a wee lad. The theory concerns the familial relationship between several of your popular cereals, specifically Kix, Cocoa Puffs and Trix. As a young boy I figured that Kix were the base cereal: The healthy, slightly sweet but mostly mild tasting parental unit of the “round corn puff” family. From there the offspring went either to the rich chocolate side with Cocoa Puffs or to the tangy fruit side with Trix. It isn’t much of a theory, really, but it seemed very clever when I was six and I haven’t quite been able to push it from my mind in the years since.

But as I reflected over my silly little theory, I was struck with a sense of—not sadness really, but more of a mild melancholy (this is only cereal we’re talking about here). The melancholy was wrought from the evolution of the Trix brand.

Compared to its family members, Trix is a vastly different foodstuff than it was in my childhood. Cocoa Puffs and Kix have retained their same basic shape and taste through the years, earning a kind of classic elegance in their stalwart consistency. Sure, you have improved the texture and added extra chocolate flavor to the Cocoa Puffs and have slightly sweetened the Kix as well as give them a heftier crunch, but the same basic structure and flavor has remained steady.

Not so the Trix. My memory of Trix is of a tri-colored bowl filled with tasty, fruity orbs floating in a pool of icy milk that turned ever so slightly pink near the end of the breakfast. The biggest alteration to the formula was introducing the purple (grape) spheres to the formula, a welcome addition. By the time I began to enter high school, a few more changes—not so welcome—had materialized: Green (lime?) colored orbs and blue (flavor uncertain) were making their way into the cereal. I went through a period where “kiddie” cereal was not an acceptable breakfast choice and drifted away from Trix for a few years. When I returned after learning how not to take myself quite so seriously, I found a Trix cereal that I didn’t even recognize.

Gone were the simple round puffs with such perfect texture and mouth-feel. In were bizarre fruit approximations, which not only altered the visual appeal of a bowl of evenly-spaced cereal pieces, but changed the overall texture of the cereal and impacted the taste as well. Or perhaps it was the “new fruitier flavors” that had crept in during my brief hiatus from the cereal. More disturbing was not just the changed flavors but the additional flavors of mysterious origin. The sum was a cereal that held practically nothing in common with the food that had once ranked in my top five breakfast choices.

It was as if Trix had abandoned its family in search of a new experience but in the process had lost its entire identity. How could this cereal that bore no flavor similarities or physical likeness to what I had once so enjoyed still continue to be called “Trix”?

I don’t denounce your choices regarding the Trix brand. Hopefully it has brought you many additional sales and continued prosperity. But I hoped I could offer a modest suggestion, to appeal more to the old school cereal lovers like myself: Classic Trix.

Please imagine with me a cereal with the added heft and robust crunch of modern Cocoa Puffs but with the classic three (or four) colored fruit flavors of Trix from twenty years ago. Add a bit of nostalgic artwork to the box (hopefully you still have the printing plates around!) and advertise them as “Limited Edition” for extra marketing punch. However you were to handle it, introducing a product of this type would guarantee an order for a full case from one lone consumer. I can’t be positive, but I would wager that I would not be alone.

Thank you for your consideration,

Paul A. Hamilton

Experience Music Project: A Homework Assignment

The Experience Music Project building is something you literally have to see in person. Pictures, descriptions and prose do it absolutely zero justice. At best you can try to think of the most bizzare architectural design a drunken Dr. Suess would have crafted as an elaborate joke and then cover half of it with arbitrarily sized metal sheets. The artistry is amazing in its ridiculousness yet somehow compelling. It certainly invokes a strong desire to see the insides which, perhaps, is the whole point.

Inside the modern hipster vibe thrusts out of every Ikea-inspired accessory and display. A series of winding staircases wrap the main lobby in tentacle-like claustrophobia leading to various attractions or locales within the building. Signs with sans-serif fonts point the way to the upstairs bar (The Liquid Lounge) or the art gallery currently showing some sort of educational mashup between classic and modern artists, described in the adversarial parlance of hip hop remixes: Monet vs. de Kooning.

After paying a pricey entry fee, a staircase winds past the strangely shaped interior wall, covered with some sort of spray-on coating that looks vaguely like congealed oatmeal and harshly detracts from the intrigue of the same wall’s opposing surface. On the way up the stairs, a uniformed guide questions visitors about their cameras, confiscating them if they choose to reveal that they are indeed carrying. Pictures of any kind are not allowed in the EMP, although no explanation for why that might be so is offered. It is simply so.

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