A strategy for eating Cap´n Crunch
Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap´n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets´most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests.
Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy´s strategy would never work. But then, Cap´n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the real engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidian geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow information. The important thing, for Randy´s purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap´n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap´n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler.
From the novel Cryptonomicon by the utterly brilliant Neal Stephenson.
Image by moliroli86 Flickr CC
