I lack the time and patience to acquire and mix all the necessary components for making breakfast. I mean honestly, who in this day and age can actually be bothered to pour (soy) milk and cereal into a bowl and pour orange juice into a glass, find a spoon, plop it all on a table and consume it?
Not that I don't feel like a God when I am afforded the luxury.
For the past week I've had a strange craving for Count Chocula. This may or may not have been triggered by my private Scooby Doo marathon. At any rate, I eventually found myself at the store and had the presence of mind to do something about it. I wandered over to the cereal aisle and looked and looked and looked.
At first I suspected the worst, that some do-good group of parents successfully lobbied to have monsters removed from their children's sugary lives. But after what must have been ten or fifteen minutes, I found what I came for.
As it turns out, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Booberry, Cookie Crisp, and virtually every other General Mills product from my youth had been severely redesigned: different colors, logos, characters. To understand my confusion, take a look at the picture at right.1 And apparently the cereal also picked up 4 vitamins and minerals somewhere along the way. Huh.
It made me feel old. It also made me want to beat up some small children for having outmoded my world view.
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If a photograph of something lost to time is itself lost to time, has anything really been lost? ↩