cereal

While cereal fifty years ago had such recognizable benefits as “keeping the brain warm” or “staving off the croup”, today’s cereals seem only to be concerned with providing mindless entertainment to a generation of increasingly stupid and increasingly ugly children. We’re all used to seeing games on the back of kids cereal boxes. These got their start during World War 2, when the British government printed pieces of Nazi and Japanese code on jars of Marmite, then challenged patriotic children all over the country to “crack the code!”. Of course, if it weren’t for these programs we’d all be living under the crushing heel of national socialism. The war went away, but the games stayed, slowly transforming over the years into the puzzles and word-jumbles we know today. Take “Sun Fun”, from a box of cereal I recently bought from a Winn-Dixie in Yazoo. Why not? Let’s show kids how much “fun” the “Sun” can be. There’s an exploding thermometer, to remind kids that the Sun is, like, HOT. Like HOT hot. And then a turkey(?)… riding a UFO(?)… into the sun(?)? I understand that on some level it makes sense. Turkeys need to be cooked, so let’s do it inside a star that burns at 27 million degrees. If you’re going to do it, do it up phat. But the turkey is already cooked. And dressed. So why is it riding back into the sun? Fifty years ago, our greatest generation broke the Enigma Code. Kids today know that the sun weighs 300,000 times as much as the Earth, but if it were a clerk in a butcher shop, it would weigh… meat. It sure would.

Let this be a warning, to you.

Blu-Ray swings with a right. What a beautiful swing…

And the punch knocks HD-DVD, clear out of the ring.

It done, and it’s official. This from Toshiba:

TOKYO–Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.

Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.

This decision will not impact on Toshiba’s commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.

Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD.

Retailers Put Down Crackpipe, National Nightmare At An End

It’s raining Toshiba executives, because they’re all jumping out of windows! This past week, Netflix, Best Buy and retail giant Wal-Mart announced that they would either be focusing strongly on pushing Blu-Ray, or dropping HD-DVD from their shelves entirely. Now, Toshiba is expected to announce that they are giving up on the format entirely. What does this mean? It means that this format war BS is finally over! Of course, Netflix and Best Buy helped push things along after Warner Bros. announced they would be supporting the Blu-Ray format exclusively, but I think it was Wal-Mart that really pushed things over the edge. We all know that if Wal-Mart came out and said they were dropping their support for water, people would stop drinking it, and then the oceans would go out of business, right along with Toshiba. But that makes no sense. Anyway, if any of you were looking for an excuse to replace your already expensive DVD collections with even more expensive next generation format discs, it’s your lucky day. $35 for Waterworld? Bingo!