In the previous post, I called "slenderer" the plural of "slender." This is incorrect. I'm not even sure if a word like "slender" can have a plural in any reasonable fashion, but I may be wrong again. I've said my Hail Marys and I hope all is forgiven.

In a previous post but not the previous post, I asked y'all for suggestions on what to trade Red Steel in for, because Red Steel apparently sucks. You had a lot of great suggestions, but upon going to Toys 'R' Us with visions of Elebits dancing in my head, I traded the bad game in for a shiny gift card and left not with Elebits, but with lots and lots of toys. Starting with this:

There's already a full gamut of toys based on the upcoming Ninja Turtles CG flick, including the four green heroes in what I'd call their best action figure translations to date. Really, the new figures are just about perfect. While I dabbled in the resurgent TMNT line based specifically on the resurgent TMNT cartoon, these are much, much nicer. I picked up Raphael to begin a collection that will inevitably end up as desk decor at work, and the picture above says it all. It's a great mold with or without the connection to the new flick, with around 47,000 points of articulation and a bandana that actually looks like a bandana and not at all like a knob of raw steak glued to the side of a Ninja Turtle's head.

I really love their chic simplicity. In many ways, seeing the new movie toys reminded me of when the original Turtles toy craze first launched -- with four totally basic, soft-headed Turtle figures that came with 27 brownish plastic weapons. Like those figures, the new set relies less on any specific gimmicky action feature and more on the idea that these are great toys to let imagination-through-hands run wild. It's a shame that I'm too old and fogyish to utilize Raphael as anything more than a decorative statue, but kids who end up with these figures are in for countless afternoons of adventure by their own dictation.

Not all of the new TMNT movie toys follow Raphael's holy pattern of simple awesomeness, but the best ones do. And they're only $6.99! That's not much more than I paid for the elusive Metalhead figure back in grade school.

There's a great commercial for new Strawberry Delight Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal, where a normal, white-frosted anthropomorphic Mini-Wheat mistakes a pink-frosted anthropomorphic Mini-Wheat and starts hitting on him. I am so damn proud of the person who pitched that to Kellogg's well enough to get an OK. I decided to reward the mystery pitcher's grand effort by buying a box, and now that I've tried it, I hereby proclaim Strawberry Delight Frosted Mini-Wheats as both Cereal of the Month and Cereal With The Longest Name Ever. Shit's good, son. Real good.

Take a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats, but replace the milk with Strawberry Quik. That's what this tastes like, and it works much better than that visual dictates. The frosting is far thicker ("thicker" being the plural of "thick") and more indulgent than the regular whitey version, and my taste buds had to light a cigarette after the experience.

And that's my story. Turtles and cereal. You know what I should write? Articles. It's been a while. That's on the to-do list, assuming I can get past the recent habit of writing articles halfway, hating them and ditching them. In the meantime, check this page for a bunch of older articles that I liked well enough.

Posted by Matt on 01/18/2007. E-mail me!