Monthly Archives: March 2009

General Mills is now issuing a number of its cereals in "retro" packaging, using designs from bygone days. They're not available everywhere (I hear some Target stores have 'em) but they might be if they boost sales. In some locales, both are on shelves and I'd be interested to hear which ones buyers prefer. Above we see the old Trix box that is now available and next to it, I've put one of the recent box designs. I don't think the new one — with the rabbit looking like he's on a massive sugar rush — is that much worse. It might even look pretty good if it didn't have the clutter of those extra selling points.

One can also purchase Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios, Wheaties, Golden Grahams, Kix and Cocoa Puffs in vintage packaging. Some of those aren't that old but it's still an interesting experiment. I hope there's no one dumb enough to think that if you buy cereal in an old-looking box, the contents might be stale…but there probably is.

This morning, I linked to a Stan Laurel interview conducted by, as I put it, "someone named Arthur B. Friedman." Bruce Reznick and Michael Kelley both e-mailed to let me know who Arthur B. Friedman was. He was, as you can read here, a professor at U.C.L.A. and the curator of its Television Archives. I apologize for giving the man the shortest of shrift. I spent a good deal of time poking around those archives when I attended that school in the early seventies. I may well have even spoken with him then.

Over on Huffington Post, an interesting combination of folks mourn the loss of actor-activist Ron Silver. There are tributes from Alec Baldwin, Frank Luntz, Ben Stiller and Paul Begala. If you hit Liberal and Conservative sites, you'll find more of the same on both. That sure speaks well of the man.

Everyone's up in arms that the folks who ran/run AIG, the failing insurance giant, are to receive huge, contractual bonuses totalling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Barack Obama says he will use every legal avenue possible to get out of paying those bonuses and other prominent politicians are proclaiming similar thoughts. I, of course, have the solution.

No one on this planet is better at figuring out how to avoid paying money that is contractually guaranteed than insurance company execs. Let's hire the folks who run AIG to come up with a way to get out of paying the bonuses to the folks who run AIG. Or if for some reason they don't want to do that, let's hire the staff at some other big insurance company to find a loophole.

I had a friend who parked his car on the street one night and came back in the morning to find it had been totalled by someone who had crashed into it and then fled the scene. My friend's insurance company refused to pay off the claim because, they insisted, the wreckage was more than eighteen inches from the curb, suggesting my friend had not parked his vehicle in a legal manner. My friend argued that he had, and that the collision had moved his parked car away from the curb. The insurance company said, in effect, "Prove it." I think he finally got some money out of them but not the full amount specified in his policy.

The guy at his insurance company who handled that case? He could come up with a way to not pay those bonuses to the AIG guys. Let's get him.

You get the feeling Dick Cheney is daring us to prosecute him for war crimes?

Monday on The Colbert Report, my friend Neil Gaiman is the guest. It'll be a lot like Jim Cramer on The Daily Show but with a British accent and more financial know-how.

Okay, I know what you've all been waiting for: Mark's report on the Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation. I had a disappointing bowl of the stuff last Monday but vowed to try, try again. On Thursday, I lunched there with my pals Vince Waldron and Dan Castellaneta and the soup was much better. Then last evening, Carolyn and I went there for dinner and it was terrific. So I'm writing Monday's soup off as an aberration…and will be back many times before March is over.

20 Tools and Technologies That Have Changed the Way We Cook. It's not a bad list but they left out the telephone you use to have Chinese Food delivered.

During a political campaign against any member of Congress, candidates and their supporters are fond of describing the opponent as either "The Most Liberal Member of Congress" or "The Most Conservative." Neither is usually true but, hey, when you run for office, you're allowed to make up just about any crap to describe the person you're running against. If you're interested in a non-partisan ranking (non-partisan in that the folks doing the scoring have no particular ax in need of grinding), here you go. Check out the voting records of the previous Congress and the previous make-up of the Senate. Needless to say, despite claims to the contrary, Barack Obama did not have the most Liberal voting record. He was thirteenth.