Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Chuck Klosterman's book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is quite an enjoyable read. I recommend it highly. Here's some excerpts that I particularly enjoyed:

"The twenty-three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide whether I can really love them:

1. Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks - he can pull a rabbit out of a hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades in the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn anymore; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?"

and on sugary cereals:

"An inordinate number of cereal commercials are based on the premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it. We are presented with the scenario time and time again. The most obvious is the Trix Rabbit, a tragic figure whose doomed existence is not unlike that of Sisyphus. Since its inception, the rabbit --often marginalized as 'silly'-- has never been allowed to enjoy even one bowl of his favorite foodstuff, and the explanation for this embargo smacks of both age discrimination and racism (we are to accept that Trix is reserved exclusively 'for kids').

An even sadder illustration of cereal segregation is Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, arguably the most tortured member of the advertising community. Sonny is plagued with self-loathing; though outspokenly otaku for Cocoa Puffs, he doesn't feel he deserves to consume them. Sonny will do anything to escape from his jones, including (but not limited to) locking himself in a primitive sky cycle and shooting himself into outer space. To make matters worse, he is bombarded by temptation: Random children endlessly taunt him with heaping bowls of C-Puffs, almost like street junkies waving heroin needles in the face of William S. Burroughs. The kids have cereal, and Sonny does not... And as long as they possess what [Sonny] does not, [he] shall remain a second-class phoenix, doomed by his own maniacal ambition for breakfast."