Talking Sweet About Nothing

Grape Nuts is the best cereal ever. What I like about Grape Nuts is that there are no gimmicks. There's no cartoon bunny dancing around on the box cover, there's no commercial with a lame jingle that gets stuck in your head for years (Honeycomb, I'm looking in your direction). You get a box full of cereal and that's it. No prizes, no celebrity endorsements. It's just a pound of wheat and barley with a picture on the front.

Yesterday I bought a massive box of Grape Nuts, twice as big as the box I normally purchase. This box must have weighed close to five pounds. Any other box of cereal this size would weigh half as much, which makes them half as good. You've got to respect a cereal with the same density as gravel.

When I was going to school in Lubbock and would drive home to Dallas I drove through a small west Texas town called Post. This town was founded by the inventor of Grape Nuts, Charles William Post. The story is that he dreamed of creating a utopian city, and this is one of the earliest examples of a planned community. Unfortunately, it would eventually lead to the final breakdown in his health. A much more comprehensive telling can be found here.

Lately, I've been eating my Grape Nuts with yogurt instead of soy milk. Talk about a little slice of heaven. I highly reccommend raspberry yogurt for any Grape Nuts enthusiasts out there. Novices, however, be advised. Without proper conditioning, teeth can be chipped. This is not a cereal for lightweights.

The Radio.Blog has been updated. I actually made this playlist months ago, but I never got around to converting the files, etc. That part of the process is a pain in the ass. Ask Al if you don't believe me.

Some quick remarks:

Tracks 1 & 2 are proof that Puff Daddy (yes, I still call him that) is an excellent producer. Just keep him away from the mic.

Track 4 is probably the first rap song I ever heard. When I was growing up in Ft. Worth, my brother and I used to listen to the radio together at night. Once, we were scanning through the dial and we came across a local college station that was playing rap music. We put a tape in the little jam box we had and taped the songs off of the radio and listened to it for weeks. Basketball was one of the songs on there. I also remember some Run DMC and Sugarhill Gang. There was also an awesome song that we think was called Einstein. I would love to find a copy of that song. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the artist and Einstein was really the only decipherable lyric (the rest was just random onomatopoeia).

Track 7 would be easy to skip as long as you don't make it to the chorus. Once you hear that you're hooked and the payoff is huge if you can make it to the two minute mark.

Track 8 was on the last radio.blog playlist, too, but I thought it fit well with the rest of this list. It's kind of like a leftover Color Me Badd track, or any other early 90s r&b crap. This is actually a pretty fun song, though. The half-time beat at the second verse (around 1:10) is totally hot.