The Top 10 Cereals That Leave The Tastiest Milk

Some cereals leave milk so good at the end, that I look forward to it more than I enjoy the cereal itself. My list seems to skew towards cinnamon, but that is only because cinnamon is great.

10. Frosted Flakes - In my mind the epitome of sugar cereal, it is inedibly sweet, but the milk is nicely sweetened. I suppose you could just add some sugar to your milk, but it won't dissolve nearly as well and would require some rigorous stirring.
9. Cookie Crisp - The leftover milk is pretty good, except that, like Cap'n Crunch, it is greasy with puddles of oil in the milk, which is always disconcerting, and so I put it near the bottom of this list.
8. Life - One of the few times when the cinnamon variety is not as good as the original; Life leaves a milk that is a great flavor but too weak. Also, it is difficult not to leave a milk that doesn't have little Life pieces of straw in it, and that ruins it.
7. Special K Vanilla Almond - I always get it in my mind for some reason that Special K is healthy and plain, and therefore pass over it, but it's actually fairly sugary with good texture. The Vanilla Almond leaves especially good milk because it is probably the sugariest one and has a bit of vanilla as well as honey in the undertones.
6. Honey Nut Cheerios - As far as honey-flavored cereals go, Golden Grahams is superior, but the Bee-sponsored cereal leaves a sweeter, and therefore tastier, milk.
5. Cocoa Krispies - I like Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Pebbles far more but those corn-based chocolate cereals just don't leave as much chocolate goodness in the milk as the Krispies does, which seems to spill into the milk like dripping paint. Just like chocolate milk, but better somehow. (Cocoa Puffs, by the way, is the best cereal of the three if you can time the puff-milk saturation just right and leave a softly-giving epidermis into the firmer, but not crunchy, dermis.)
4. Fruity Pebbles - Similar to Trix, but with more surface area, the resultant milk isn't so much fruity as it is rainbow-flavored, but rainbows are delicious. Fruity Pebbles is, incidentally, probably my favorite sugary cereal.
3. Boo Berry - A highly underrated cereal, probably because it is difficult to find, but its blueberry-sugar flavor dissolves into milk quite nicely.
2. Cinnamon Toast Crunch - An intense and unabashed sugar and cinnamon rush, but sometimes a little too sweet, depending on how quickly you eat the cereal.
1. Apple Jacks - Leaves a delightful pink/orange-hued residual milk that is the perfect balance of sweetness and cinnamon, even if it doesn't taste like apples.


Speaking of cereals and hippies, I used to buy Good Friends cereal now and again. On the box, they profile a pair of friends, one of the silliest ways to sell a cereal. Anyway, they once had a woman on it so unattractive that I couldn't stomach the cereal with the box sitting in front of me. I stopped buying Good Friends cereal after that.

Lost in the Bookstore.

The travel section in Barnes and Noble is terribly disorganized, or perhaps just very illogically done. There are the two main subdivisions, which are fine: US and World. I did not look too closely in the World section, but within the US, it seems haphazardly alphabetical by both city and state, but after you go from A-Z, somehow it starts up again at A for another go around to Z, again haphazardly with both cities and states. (Washington DC mingles with Washington State, and then Yellowstone National Park, which is inexplicably next to Alabama. or something.)

If I were to redesign the section, I'd have a large shelf made in the shape of the United States and put the books where they belong geographically. Then people could learn some geography while they're at it. (Though it might take the uninformed longer to find what they're looking for.)

conversation I had today.

Andy: I somehow gained nine pounds in the past six weeks.
Emily: Jesus. What the hell were you doing?
Andy: Eating.

The Second Greatest Toast

I thought it was lost forever, but I've recovered the index cards on which I wrote the toast I gave for Jason's wedding. Here it is:

I would like to preface this by saying that when Jason asked me to be best man, he said it was on the condition that I be nice. I had no idea what that meant. So I tried to reassure him by saying that I would give the greatest toast ever and strangely this only worried him more. So let me just say that at best, this is only the second greatest toast, and we can all thank Jason for that.

I first met Jason in the first week of college almost nine years ago and I said, "you look like Alex James," who is a good-looking popular-with-the-ladies British musician. I did not speak to Jason again for a year, but I saw him again, he remembered me, and we started hanging out. It is funny because I imagined that Jason must know all the pretty girls, must be really good around them. Turns out I was absolutely wrong. See, Jason and I would go to parties and end up talking to each other. It was hard to tell which of us was actually worse around girls, and it was like we sat around trying to figure it out to no avail.

Well today, Jason got married. It would seem that he figured it out before I did. This is not true. I'm pretty sure Jason did everything wrong and I can prove this because Jason asked me for advice. What happened was that Jason got extremely lucky. That is honestly what I think. Jason got very lucky because he met Sunny and Sunny was a girl for whom none of the games and posturing mattered, and she saw Jason for the great person he was right away. The two of them realized very early on that they had something special not even my bad advice could deter.

I was there on their first date, for part of it anyway, with some others at a bar in Ithaca. I wish I have an amusing anecdote, some snippet of conversation, to report, but I don't. The two of them were sort of off to the side whispering to each other, and if you saw them at any point tonight, you'd know what I mean because they do exactly the same thing now.

I think this tells us two things. The first is that from their first date, they knew they'd found someone to confide in. The second is that they still constantly find new and fresh little secrets for each other today just as they did when they first met. I know them both very well and I don't think they'll be running out of things to whisper to each other. So please join me in a drink for Sunny and Jason, both of whom I love dearly. I hear they're going to Costa Rica so instead of cheers let me say: Arriba, abajo, al centro, para adentro.