All posts by wickensworth

Interpreting cereal boxes literally

It appears as though I’ve missed a few weeks or a year or whatever, but I expect the ’20s to be my most prolific decade in quite some time, with four or even five entries. I begin with this expository essay, in which I will be arguing my long-standing thesis that, if interpreted literally, cereal boxes depict the attempted consumption of cereal by dangerous morons who have no comprehension of how to eat cereal.

I present Exhibit O:

This is a striking image, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise—a toothsome eruption of cereal dainties all but leaping off the cardboard in springtime joy, a scene designed to excite our appetites and imaginations alike. Press the play button, however, and the magic quickly dissipates, leaving us with some sad dipshit dumping milk all over his pajama pants. It would be quite one thing if he were just cheekily splashing a little extra milk onto his already-brimming bowl, but the furious torrent on display here seems less calibrated for moistening cereal than dispersing a riot. I recommend easing up on the milk carton if you happen to notice O’s blasting out of your bowl with enough kinetic energy to chip your ceiling paint.

As adults we understand the metaphor implied by Sonny—he’s “cuckoo for” (dependent upon) “Cocoa Puffs” (low-grade crack)—but this concept is happily conveyed without giving him those glassy, tweaked-out eyes and that joyless, insatiable hunger. This is a portrayal of Sonny who society has failed. Even if he were merely drinking “chocolatey milk” from what I’m going to pretend is not a crack pipe, why is milk ejecting from the bowl? That’s not how even the chocolatiest of fluid dynamics works. My best guess is that the Cocoa Puffs Design Team was told to depict Sonny sucking milk, but they misunderstood the direction and just started to suck really badly at their jobs.

Cereal bowls had a good run, but they were really just getting in the way of that gnarly milk-on-cereal action we all demand from our boxes. Just give me one massive slab of Golden Graham, plate it on a bed of milk, and blast it with a pressure washer. Once it gets nice and sodden I suppose we can rip off a chunk and roll it up into a bite-sized ball or whatever, but I’m not really concerned with eating my giant Golden Graham. I just want to see this piece of shit get waterboarded.

The customary legal footnote claims the Golden Graham was enlarged “to show detail,” which might have been a credible assertion had they not blown it up to the size of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This Graham was obviously enlarged for dramatic effect, not to “show detail,” and it feels a little violating to pretend you’ve created this monstrosity for the consumer’s benefit, as if we were all secretly pining to see molecular granularity in our breakfast cereal. I wouldn’t want to see this sort of detail in a fine jewel, much less a Golden Graham, and I certainly don’t need you to wave your gigantic piece of cereal in my face like some sort of breakfast pervert.

The actually appears to have been a pretty decently prepared bowl of cereal—not a significant feat, but in the world of cereal boxes it deserves some recognition. Everything was looking pretty good up until the Cap’n felt possessed to karate chop his bowl with that ludicrous serving spoon. I defy you to replicate the gross meaty grip on display here. It’s almost impossible to hold a spoon like this, let alone convey that spoon to your mouth without upsetting its contents, and that’s assuming you’re not on an active battleship. Meanwhile, why are you saluting me? Do I outrank a Cap’n somehow? At ease, you fucking idiot.

I realize it’s foolish for an adult to sit around critiquing cereal box cartoon characters, even probable war criminals like Cap’n Crunch, but imagery has a powerful influence, and I’ve had more than a few roommates whose cereal preparation mirrored the reckless gusto depicted on the box of Oreo O’s. I’m not saying your cereal packaging should feature an uptight prick like that Quaker Oats guy, with his patronizing little smirk and sanctimonious Founding Father energy, because fuck that guy. You’re not posing for the $50 bill, bro, it’s just a tin of oatmeal. I’d rather freebase Chocholatey milk with my boy Sonny than listen to another one of the oatmeal guy’s tedious sermons, but then again I feel like I’m detracting from my thesis at this point. One day I’m going to figure out why my essays always devolve into me ragging on the Quaker Oats guy.

“I don’t care” shirts

I frequently see people wearing shirts and jackets with some variation of the phrase “I really don’t care.” This is not only a tasteless attitude to aspire to, but it’s obvious these clothes are little more than wearable comb overs for one’s emotional insecurity.

To be clear, I can’t begrudge a person for their vast museum of insecurities and its accompanying collection of coping mechanisms, as long they’re non-harmful. What rankles me is the brazen misunderstanding of how caring works. As a stranger and therefore a purported member of these shirts’ intended audience, I’m personally insulted you feel I have so little grasp of human psychology that I could think this clothing is suggestive of anything other than a roiling neutron star of care. You care so much that I practically care on your behalf, and I definitely don’t give a shit.

Any child old enough to read can intuit that proactively ordering a sassy t-shirt designed to convey a cool indifference is the behavior of a person deeply invested with their perceived emotional state, a person desperate to shield themselves from appearing vulnerable. Meanwhile, other strangers don’t care about you in the first place and they don’t need a t-shirt tell you that. It turns out that when you’re busy not caring about something, you don’t typically feel compelled to race over to Etsy to memorialize your apathy and broadcast it to others. Not caring is one of the easiest pastimes imaginable: you simply do nothing and just sort of let nature run its course. When you find yourself taking any sort of action whatsoever, that’s a pretty good clue you’ve fucked something up.

As ineffective as this shirts may be, I’ve seen enough iterations of them to consider it a trend. Here’s a representative example:

i'm sorry it's just that i literally do not care at all

In this case, the customary denial of caring is fortified with an apology that I’m beginning to suspect doesn’t contain all that much contrition. To further reinforce the messaging, the text is written in a breezy lowercase, as if to imply that only caring losers adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. You’re already wearing a hoodie—I get that you’re not dressing up today. This would be like wearing a tuxedo with the words “I’m a fancy boy!” stitched across the lapel.Hi, I don't care. Thanks.Boom—just like that, we’re greeted, spoken rudely to, and then dismissed with a peremptory thanks. We can’t get in a word in edgewise, if this shirt has any say in the matter. This is the sort of shirt worn by somebody who doesn’t quite grasp how sarcasm works, but who’s pretty sure it has something to do with being polite in a disingenuous way. And while they’ve maybe come up a little short on the biting wit, you have to admit they really hit a homerun in terms of coming off like a dickbag. What’s the point of a t-shirt if not to have a built-in justification for why people dislike you other than your personality?

This past summer, Melania Trump infamously wore this jacket while visiting detained migrant children:


The phrase “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” is the sort of psychopathic shit you’d scrawl in blood on a crime scene when serial killing is getting too easy and you feel like baiting the police a little bit. You’ll note this jacket outclasses previous efforts with a smarmy interrogation, as if now suddenly our own measure of care is on trial here. What are you even asking me, idiot? Care about what? Am I supposed to also wear my answer on a Zara jacket repurposed from a Vietnam-era military tent?

As an experiment, read this jacket out loud and see if you can muster the will power to not punch yourself. It perfectly captures the nasally sing-song voice of a child who is both bullying, and being bullied by, another small child—a heady mix of the pathetic and the hateful. If this jacket were a person it would be Melania Trump.

It’s possible she selected this jacket to advance her carefully curated public image of a sulking prisoner of war, but this is a shitty thing to wear to brunch, let alone to a detention center for children who’ve been forcefully separated from their family. But to be fair to Melania the boutique was probably out of trash bags her size.

Slow Down Baby Is Playing

I’ve been walking past this sign for years and some days it’s all I can think about:


Too often I find myself zoning out during conversations to focus on this riddle, and suddenly the next thing I remember is my friend’s worry, her tearful eyes searching mine as she breathlessly whispers, “Where were you just now?” Then there are the nights in which sleep does not visit, in which I lie awake counting the atoms in my ceiling paint while undiscovered mathematical proofs flit by at the edges of my field of vision.

Let me disabuse you of the notion that there is a dependent living at this residence. I’ve never seen a baby here, either playing or sleeping or even just relaxing with a box of apple juice, and I’ve been passing this house long enough for any baby to now be in grade school, well on its way to a master’s degree in playing.

I am happy to allow, as you assuredly are, that the baby is simply a pretense for encouraging slower driving. Maybe it is unethical to lie about a baby, but when confronted with the disturbance of neighborhood traffic, one must resort to all manner of chicanery—phantom babies, mythical speed bumps, School Zones. In my childhood neighborhood there is still to this day a sign that requests slower driving in consideration for an alleged “deaf child,” who is either well into his thirties or who was ran over by a truck decades ago. The reality is that you can’t be arrested for lying about a baby as long as they don’t also make an appearance on your 1040, and I’m not certain there’s been any fallout to my anonymous tips to the FBI.

This “slow neighborhood traffic” theory is complicated by examining the orientation of the sign in relationship to the street:


It’s a one-way thoroughfare, and the sign is clearly facing away from thru traffic. One must confront the reality that the sign’s audience is not neighborhood traffic at all, but either pedestrians or those few vehicles entering this person’s own driveway—which are each in their own way troubling possibilities. I simply can’t abide by the idea that this request is being made to pedestrians. Is the baby disturbed by joggers? You live in New York, baby, fuck you. You slow down, baby. You stop crawling around so fast. Why are we suddenly being asked to cater to a baby?

Yet it is even more preposterous to imagine this sign is targeted at the residence’s own driveway, as if anybody could forget they were parking at the home of the famous Guinness world record holder for the longest play session of a human baby. Maybe I’m a guest to whom this baby and its incessant merrymaking will be a baffling surprise, but even then I can’t exactly imagine the baby would be running around outside getting ready to perform an aerial cartwheel in front of my car.

Like are we still talking about a baby? Any child old enough for autonomous play is also old enough to be offended by you calling them a baby. If I run over an actual baby in front of your garage, it’s maybe a little bit my fault for running over your baby, but it’s mostly your fault for placing their fucking bassinet on the driveway, and if anything I have a right to be mad at you because now I have to repaint my car.

The real dilemma posed by the sign is almost too subtle at first. It’s the verb, of course it is. Why playing? Why does the baby need to be playing? What does my speed have to do with your baby’s recreational preferences? Even if we’re allowing that “baby” means “any juvenile younger than 10,” because for some dipshit reason we forgot the word for “child,” it’s distracting to imply that their playing is somehow vital, as if they’re working on a concerto for an upcoming audition. What’s wrong with “Slow Down / Baby Home”? I still wouldn’t slow down, but at least now you wouldn’t have a five-word sign in which you fucked up two of them.

It is also possible that the sign is entirely metaphorical, encouraging one to slow down in life, to take a moment to consider the certain reality that somewhere in the world right now is a smiling cherub at play, and why are we all in such a hurry anyway? I’ve crunched the numbers, and believe it or not this is actually one of the most likely scenarios, or at least the only one that brings any wisdom to my life. But realistically it’s probably just some sort of insurance scam.

eKarjala is now eKarj for some reason

I concede that five years is an unsustainable update cadence if I’m going to attract any kind of audience.

Nevertheless, it feels like the right time to reanimate this blog, in this period of great solidarity and sweeping national optimism. It’s fatiguing paying hosting fees for an abandoned website, and I realized it was necessary to either delete eKarjala altogether or restore it to its usual ramshackle condition. Neither seemed ideal but here we are.

A better question than why I’m updating now is why I haven’t been these past five years, or with any regularity the past ten. Historically, this website has always begun to feel less like writing saucy little pleasure rants than fulfilling an obligation, and I am extremely gifted in spurning my obligations. Not professional obligations, current and future employers (nice try). I’m referring to the sort of foolish enterprises one derives joy from.

Meanwhile, after having successfully not updated for a few months, continuing to not update becomes a relatively effortless sort of inertia. After a year’s time, starting my day and then navigating to the end of it without capitulating becomes practically second nature, even despite the gnawing guilt incurred from failing to spend time and money mildly amusing internet strangers. In my defense—and just about everything I write is—probably like 99.5% percent of the people who’ve ever started a blog have subsequently abandoned it, and the other .5% are just waiting for the right amount of shit not to give.

Having demonstrated my disregard for this site’s readership, the next few months will surely be quiet as this site enjoys less traffic than a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and not even the Mad Max kind. But I am content to talk to myself and maybe a palsy handful of my most ardent readers, among those still living since my last update. I’ve never needed readers, and if anything they just get in the way with their mysterious clicking. So it’s possible that this site will remain a ghost town for the duration of its life, albeit one still mining coal or whatever this metaphor is.

It’s also possible that this site could be abruptly re-abandoned at any time, which is the same condition I give my cat. I do not wish for this to be the case, but I must be honest with myself and my failings as a blogger. To be honest, I’m not even certain people are writing or reading these sorts of non-specific little scampish blogs anymore, especially ones that aren’t fed through a social media conduit. It doesn’t matter. My intention is to post about one thing a week, assuming I can manage it in between my endless stream of social appointments. For now this will have to do.

Trading Cards From the ’80s/’90s: Troll Force


Troll Force
Star Pics, Inc., 1992


Continue reading Trading Cards From the ’80s/’90s: Troll Force

Trading Cards From the ’80s/’90s: Dinamation





Continue reading Trading Cards From the ’80s/’90s: Dinamation

Home of the Wave











Everything bagels




True friendship



Mailbag Monday #3



Mailbag Monday #2


I couldn’t help but notice on your board games article ( that entertainment was said to have been invented in the early ’90s. I was wondering if you might please pin-point the exact moment for us – was it the opening of “Terminator 2”?



-Brandon Mullis



Mailbag Monday #1


Email #1


–Bob Mcfar






Email #2


–eKarj fAnGuRl, DeeTee




Here’s this picture again

Review of my cat


Here is my one-year consumer review of Pippi.

Continue reading Review of my cat

Comments on the The Land Before Time article



#177 jere wrote:




#78 Why wrote:



#59 Jeff wrote:



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#135 Andrew wrote:




# 187 Beatrice wrote:



#80 Cheryl wrote:



#192 merla wrote:

i love the lan before time so is
the best movie i have ever saw.and all i
want is for you to keep makeing the
land before time and to start showing it
on tv.


#42 Anonymous wrote:



#206 baby_dinosaurs wrote:



Cookie Crisp

Every few years I select a box of Cookie Crisp from the grocery store, having dismissed my previous dissatisfactions with this cereal. If nothing else, I reason, I’ll be getting an entire box of snacking cookies. However, these irregular discs of dehydrated high-fructose corn syrup taste so abstract from the idea of a cookie that they make me miserable for the entire day. And by the way, General Mills should be relieved that their cereal tastes nothing like actual cookies, because the stupidest thing you could do to a real cookie is mash it up into a bowl and pour milk upon it. Why does everything need to be made out of cookies all of a sudden? Cookies are supposed to be a special treat.

It could be argued that many cereals snare you in with this sort of false association. Golden Grahams taste nothing like actual graham crackers; Cinnamon Toast Crunch nothing like actual toast; Cap’N Crunch nothing like actual Crunch berries. However Cookie Crisps are especially conniving because while they sort of resemble Famous Amos cookies, they have an unpleasant mealy taste and are abrasive to your palette. They should change the name to Dookie Crisp, because if you fed this cereal to the Cookie Monster he would literally get diarrhea.

“Splish Splash”

Today’s producers of Top 40 music are making some promising advances in developing the worst music imaginable, but it seems unlikely they’ll ever write a song more stupid than 1958’s “Splish Splash,” by Bobby Darin. The music itself is an inoffensive 1950s rock & roll arrangement and nothing to be concerned about, but the lyrics are grotesque:

Splish splash, I was taking a bath
Long about a Saturday night
A rub dub, just relaxing in the tub
Thinking everything was alright

Right away we are assaulted with this vile image of Bobby Darin bathing in his tub; and not only bathing, but splashing about like a child. It’s as if somebody had stolen the music to a bubble bath commercial from the early ’90s and then went back in time in some bizarre plot to make Bobby Darin a commercial success. And why should this be successful? The 1950s were not so long ago, but I cannot understand a culture that would allow this to be an acceptable subject for a song. I find it easier to comprehend segregation, and I’m barely even a racist. We should have segregated this song into a garbage can.

I wrapped the towel around me
And I opened the door, and then
Splish, splash! I jumped back in the bath

“How was I to know there was a party going on?” I don’t know, Bobby, don’t you fucking live there? Now we have this monstrous notion of Bobby Darin wrapped in a towel and strolling into his living room, where he unexpectedly encounters some sort of party. Bobby’s mysterious reaction to this is: “Oh well, I guess it’s back in the old tub for me.” What is wrong with this guy? He should have yelled: “Hey, not to be a nuisance or anything, but would you people mind clearing the fuck out before I call the police?” Don’t just jump back into your lukewarm bathwater you lunatic!

To make a retarded story short, the rest of the lyrics describe Bobby’s return to the party. He “puts his dancing shoes on” and forgets “about the bath,” and then begins caterwauling on about a-splishing and a-splashing and a-rolling and a-strolling and a lot of that type of horseshit. There is no real conclusion to the song, and absolutely nothing in the way of an explanation. Maybe it’s best not to decipher 1958 pop songs, but I would nevertheless like to condemn this song on the grounds that it is idiotic and insufferable. It is easily one of my ten all-time least favorite songs about bathing.

“Whenever God closes a door” aphorism

People like to claim, “Whenever God closes a door, somewhere else he opens up a window.” What kind of a dick move is this? I’m a grown adult and am certainly not about to crawl through a window. Come on, man, just unlock the door. Why the fuck did you even invite me over?

Imagine you’ve got a friend coming to visit your house, and as he’s walking up the driveway you open the door to greet him. But then when he gets to the porch you suddenly slam the door in his face. Moments later you pop your head out an open second-story window and yell, “Well come on up, dipshit! Time to find a ladder, hahaha!”

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for such antics, but please be advised that you’re not teaching anybody a life lesson about overcoming adversity in this scenario—you’re temporarily inconveniencing them for a laugh. They may as well change the aphorism to, “Whenever you try to open the passenger door to God’s Subaru, he locks it right before you lift the handle and starts laughing. Then he pops the trunk and says, “Get in, you little bitch!” Yeah, God, real mature.

Magic 8-balls

I’m very displeased when a Magic 8-Ball says “cannot predict now” or “ask again later” or some other similar horseshit. What could a plastic die floating in blue slime possibly be doing that it’s too busy to answer my question? Maybe these snide non-committal messages are meant to be some sort of a joke, but in practice the only logical response to them is to immediately just reshake the ball. Why are you wasting my time in this fashion? The equivalent to this would be if in every Tarot deck there was a card that said, “Sorry, we can’t really figure out your fortune this hand. Fuck you, reshuffle the deck.” Magic 8-Ball manufacturers should just create a fewer-sided fortune die and throw the neutral messages in the garbage, because that would really save me a lot of time late at night when I’m trying to determine whether a girl likes me. And there’s nothing “magical” about dicking people around.


I can tell backgammon is a classy game because it often comes in a little briefcase, which is more than I can say for games of chance like chess. Sometimes I imagine commuting to work carrying my backgammon briefcase—who’s going to stop me? I have important business to attend to. It’s called playing backgammon. Backgammon should come with those handcuffs you sometimes see douchebags at the airport attach to their briefcases. If somebody stole my backgammon briefcase, I have no idea how I’d ever recover that data.

If I ever needed to deliver a briefcase full of cash to somebody, you can probably guess which kind of case I’d secretly bring along. I’d slowly turn the briefcase toward the druglord or whomever, and his eyes would begin to light up in anticipation of the cash. Then I’d pop open the case, and boom—backgammon. I’d be lost in hysterics as they proceeded to shoot me in the face, but what the hell were they expecting? I don’t have that kind of cash. My laughter nerves would probably still be activated for two or three minutes after they shot me, like how mammals’ limbs sometimes twitch after death. I’d just be lying there dead, laughing my ass off.

Insert key

There are a lot of useless keys on a standard PC keyboard, but only the insert key has the power to fuck with your work. I would rather the insert key be replaced with a button that gives you a mild electrical shock. Prior to pointing devices, the insert key might have had some utility, but now it’s just a trick button. What it does is it transforms your keyboard into a living nightmare in which everything you type replaces the text in front of it, as if all that other text in your document was just hanging around for decoration. The only scenario this would be useful is if you wanted to get rid of the proceeding text of your document, but only in a quantity of characters that was exactly equal to your newly-inserted text. What kind of asshole would make such an edit? “Man, I really need to delete the thirteen characters to the immediate right of my text cursor, and I also need to insert a word that’s exactly eleven characters long, leaving two extra characters for spaces. Time for my trusty insert key!” How about you insert a bullet into your head? Meanwhile, the insert key is located right next to backspace, which is for people who edit text in an educated fashion. So I’m constantly hitting the insert key on accident, and there’s no way to tell that you’ve toggled on overtype mode until you notice that your new text is eating the shit out of your old text. Maybe there’s a way to disable this—maybe there is. Maybe there’s also a way to pry the button off with a carving knife. But I would like to know if any sort of person needs their insert key, because perhaps I speak out of ignorance. Do coders use overtype mode? Has anybody in the last twenty years hit this key on purpose? Or should I organize a protest?