Cap'n Crunch Goes Blue, Yo:
It had to happen sometime, though I'm having trouble explaining exactly why.  If you're a kid wrapped in a dirty old guy's body, you've probably seen the new Cap'n Crunch commercial, where everyone's favorite seafaring breakfast pusher teams up with those weird looking kids from Rocket Power to splash lots of water around and crash boats.  Somehow, that led to the Cap'n's (is that correct?) Crunch Berries cereal to become available, for a limited time, with corn and oat bits that change color in milk!

We've been waiting for color changing cereal for a long time, all of us.  Our prayers have finally been answered.

Anyway, I think this is how it goes: the usual Crunch Berries have been replaced with Rocket Power shapes — that kid with the dreds, rollerblades, yadda yadda — and some/all of these new additions have been thoroughly injected with food coloring that, when moistened in milk, lets loose with all kinds of radioactive blue breakfast action.  Yeah, that's how it goes.  I don't particularly care for the Cap'n shilling all these new shapes as actual Crunch Berries, one of the traits of this campaign that mucks up decades of Cap'n Crunch cereal commercial continuity.  I guess it's a small price to pay to get a bowl of milk that looks like something guys who like Worf would compare Romulan Ale to.

Frankly, the cereal business in of itself has become really, really fun to watch over the past few years.  I've done plenty of articles detailing some special promotion from eons ago, but these days, every cereal has a gimmick.  Next time you're at the supermarket, stroll down the cereal aisle and try to make sense of what you're seeing.  Color changing Cap'n Crunch doesn't begin to illustrate just how insane breakfast has become.  I'd probably consider myself a spoiled child who had pretty liberal parents, but we never had more than one kind of cereal in the house at a time.  When I visit my siblings and sift through their cupboards for stuff to steal, I can't help noticing that they're buying like, a dozen different cereals for their kids on each shopping trip.  It's easily explained: kids who see these wild promotions need to take part in all of them, so if the Cap'n dyes his morning crap, that's just another in a long line of things children cannot possibly live without.  Who wants to walk into the schoolyard and be the only jimmyjack who didn't shit blue the night before?

Anyway, I can't say the gimmick actually works too well.  I mean, it works, but the milk is the only thing in that bowl that's truly blue and not just mud-colored from dried dye.  I'm actually a bit surprised that Quaker pulled this stunt — some of you remember "Smurfberry Crunch," right?  Stuff got pulled off the market for — and I swear this is true — turning kids' excrement unpalatable shades of blue.  It was all completely harmless of course, but still a turnoff.  I did notice that Cap'n Crunch's experiment not only turns cereal and milk blue, but also bowls, spoons and lips.  It's no Alien Fruit Monster, but few things are.  Speaking of which, I'll give you an update on ol' AFM next time I feel like talking about cereal.  So maybe tonight.

Wow, this one took way too long to finish.  A few years back I did a tribute to vending machine toys, but recent trips to where the beastly machines are located told me that there was enough shite left to examine, so here tis: The 2004 Vending Machine Prize Spectacular!  Everything from Dr. Mad's Blobs to the mysterious eggs of "The Chicken Machine," it's a two-page mess of quarter trinkets and button quails.  Also, this is a work-from-home week due to the Republican National Convention ruining city transit.  That more or less means it's a vacation week, so expect more updates soon.  Not super soon, but soon.

When faced with a clearance sale — a major clearance sale — I often encounter trouble.  Instead of just buying a single liquidated item, I tend to buy as many as possible regardless of need or even desire to own them.  The sickness first surfaced eons ago (eons meaning several years of course) at Toys 'R' Us, where I found Wheeled Warriors accessory packs marked down to a literal eight cents each.  (these were the blisterpacks containing extra tires, alien brains and guns for Saw Boss and pals)  When  I realized that a measly buck could a dozen toys, some little bell went off in my head and has consistently forced me to repeat the process whenever the opportunity presented itself.  With that…

Some of you might have noticed TRU's major clearance sales going on — not sure if this plays into the alleged "no more toys" rule, but whatever the case, shit's cheap.  They've got this deal where anything with an already marked-down green price tag is 50% off, so you're really clashing oars with all the housewives doing their early Christmas shopping.  If you can survive that, treasures await — check out that bag of Pokemon Mewtwo plushies.  Quarter a pop.  I have no conceivable use for 84 Mewtwo dolls, but stand confident that, someday, I will undoubtedly safe a life using 84 Mewtwo dolls.

And, found at a nearby closeout store, here's a bag of 29-cent promotional Congo figures.  Gray gorillas!  The chilling fact that promotional figures for Congo actually exist notwithstanding, it's always interesting to waltz up to a tired checkout girl and dump a basket full of plastic monkeys on the table.  I think there's twenty of 'em or so.  Twenty gray gorillas, 84 Mewtwos, another chunk of the closet that can no longer be used for clothes.

Slow week on the site, I know.  Don't worry, bidness will be a'pickin' up next week — three new articles between this weekend and the next, and absolutely none of them having to do with Italian thumb wrestling or Crayola crayons.  Next article's looking pretty saha-wank so far.

Oh, an early request: I'm gearing up for the coming X-E Halloween season.  Had shitloads of fun doing last year's Halloween Countdown and I can't wait to get on the ball with that again this year — especially because the length of the daily entries won't preclude me from actually letting them be "daily."  Loads of fun stuff planned, stay tuned.  My request: if anyone out there has any Halloween materials they think I might be able to use on the site, please e-mail me.  (feel free to use this link to do so)  I don't have very many specifics on what I'm looking for, but here's a few: Halloween television specials, Halloween commercials (these can be in file format or on VHS), Halloween-inspired print ads, so on and so on.  If it looks like something that would be on X-E during the Halloween season and you're willing to part with it, lemme know.  Oh, please don't post what you've got in the comments section — kinda ruins the surprise for everyone else if I use it. :crazy:

To close things out, another survey topic: name your five favorite television shows ever, in any order.  Did we already do this one?  Oh well.

Two of our friends hooked up, got engaged and are now living in sin till the wedding nearby, and during the process of ma-ma-merging, some of their shit had to go.  So, thanks to Justin for passing this one along — a beat-up old Nintendo chest from the rarely mentioned "crate craze" of the 80s, where we plowed on with silent obsession for milkcrates, storage chests and just boxes in general.  There was a huge line of similar chests available for virtually every childhood franchsie you can think of.  I'm pretty sure they're officially licensed…

I'm not going to tell you what caused the damage shown above; I've heard the story and it's disgusting.  Our new Nintendo chest will never double as a plate.  Each side features a different NES scene, alternating between Mario, Zelda and BOTH AT ONCE.  Looks like a lot of the art was inspired by the old instruction manuals, meaning we get to see that old hag who told Link about glowy triangles and underground ghouls all over again.  Here's the pics, click to enlarge.

Caught Alien Vs. Predator the other night, and wow…seriously, that's the worst flick I've seen in theaters for a loooong while.  I've waited a few days before commenting in hopes that the feeling would subside a bit, but nope — that was one terrible movie.  Keep in mind, I'm far from married from either of the franchises at play here.  I like them both, but I'm never going to seek out posters or anything.  I probably had much lower expectations than most, but the film still somehow failed to come close to the barrel of shit I'd anticipated.  First off, the level of exposition in AvP is absurd.  It wouldn't be honest for me to say that neither Pred nor Alien did anything for the first half of the movie, but absolutely truthful to say that they did almost nothing.  For kill-fodder human characters with such half-assedly defined personalities and motives, they sure spent a lot of time letting us get to know them.

When we finally get to the central battleground — an ancient pyramid maze buried under ice in a cold penguiny place, the film gets so literally dark that you can't follow anything that's happening.  I'm serious — there's minute-long action stretches where all you see are vague flashes of light and obscured objects moving about.  The CG fight scenes down in that pyramid have some cool moments, but they're outweighed by the negatives: in what should be one of the most money money money scenes of the movie — and you should be able to guess which — there's long portions where the CG is so dark and haphazard that you're totally taken out of the movie.  At one point, the battling monsters seemed to form an almost perfectly spherical, marbleized bowling ball.

You've probably heard about this PG-13 thing, and how the movie was trimmed by the studio to fit that rating.  Frankly, for a PG-13 flick, it's still pretty gory and violent.  I still heard cursewords, I still saw people impaled, blood splattered and creatures bursting through chests…I'm sure the movie suffered from that greedy late trim, but it just seems impossible that this alone is what caused AvP's problems.

There was a weird "twist" near the movie's climax — it's probably been the biggest focus of every complaint thrown at the film.  I won't spoil it, but only mention it to say that I really didn't mind it.  Sure, it was fucking stupid, but at least it was somewhat interesting when compared to the dreck beforehand.  More so that anything else, the twist was hilarious.  Seems like the filmmakers cut their losses a long time ago on trying to create a film all the diehards would enjoy — it was the kind of plot development that seemed to almost by design make longtime fans of these franchises hate the story.  I wish I could say more, but let's leave it at this: after seeing all of the unintentional comedy provided by that infamous twist, I'm certain that there was a much bigger market for an outright AvP spoof film than the serious effort thrown at us.  It's potentially the funniest movie you'll see this year.

Anyway, in celebration of things that should not exist, here's an article on Italian Thumb Wrestling.

After work on Tuesday,  I went to a screening on behalf of Box Office Magazine to see Shaun of the Dead, an amazingly kickass zombie movie that I couldn’t possibly recommend more.  Some of you hopped on my head when I said I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake, but I don’t mind telling you that the Shauny version is 100x better and one of the best films I’ve seen in a long while.  A Brit comedy that stays true to the genre written by a guy who loves Romero’s zombie trilogy to death, Shaun of the Dead is hilarious, engaging and gratuitous enough with the gore without ever having to depend on it.  Trust me on this one, it’s a winner.

Anyway, as this is obviously a workweek and I was faced with getting home real late after the screening only have to sleep for an hour before repeating the commute, we decided to splurge and stay in a hotel – a very overpriced one called the Sofitel, where the lobby is decorated with a hundred kinds of plant stems and everyone who works there either speaks French or tries desperately to fake the accent.  And the room service burgers come with French fries, and cost a French 19 bucks each.  Still, blowing way too much cash for what amounted to a three-hour stay was worth it.  The next morning, instead of the bus ride from Hell into work, I just walked a block over and that was it.  If only my job paid enough to stay in four-star French hotels nightly, then we’d be onto something.

Inside our room was a mini-bar, probably my favorite thing in the entire world.  It’s not one of the ultra swank automatic ones, but this one’s more eerily reminiscent of that little ditty Kevin stole M&M-encrusted cookies from in Home Alone 2.  Everything you see costs seven times the normal retail price.  Somehow soda isn’t as refreshing when you can’t afford anything else because of it.