Cap'n Crunch  Cap'n Crunch

Welcome

Welcome to the only page I know of that has a serious collection of Cap'n Crunch links, pictures, and an illustrated story. If you've never heard of Cap'n Crunch before, you should read this. Otherwise, enjoy the links.

Links

Story

This is an excerpt from the story ``CRUNCH'' by Neal Stephenson, that I find really captures the essence of the Cap'n Crunch experience. The story is part of the story/novella collection Disco 2000, edited by Sarah Champion.
The gold nuggets of Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in halfNew Cap'n Tiny fragments spiral away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has a set of mental blueprints worked out for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next-best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which takes about thirty seconds in the case of Cap'n Crunch.

He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when the cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary layer a molecule wide. Crunch Kids Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon-handle, the polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole milk, because otherwise why bother with the whole exercise? Anything less is indistinguishable from water, and besides he thinks that the fat in the whole milk acts as some kind of a buffer that retards the dissolution-into-slime process. The giant spoon goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek its own level. Seadog A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the milk-pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Smedley This happens without thinking about it; all his concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armour of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain-mute for three days.

Randy has over time worked out a really fiendish Cap'n Crunch-eating strategy that revolves around using the nugget's most deadly features to his advantage by playing them against each other. Harry
Hippo The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated in a way that he has always thought is supposed to echo piratical treasure chests or something. Now, in a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work, but the Cap'n Crunch could never be manufactured in flake form because then it would be all surface area, and it must been obvious to the cereal engineers at General Mills that this would be suicidal madness, that Cap'n Crunch stuff in that configuration would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, they had to find a shape that would minimise surface area, which ideally would be a sphere (this is why healthy cereals tend to be flakes and sugary ones tend to be round). As some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamouring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. Old Cap'n The important thing about which, 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 use the Cap'n Crunch against itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, making the cereal chew itself, like stones in a lapidary tumbler, minimising any contact with gums and palate --- contacts bound to be bloody, violent and painful. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes while sitting on your ass) only go so far and then your body has to learn how to do this.