Rio + Instrument + Box Annoyance + Bad Dream

I want to go to Rio de Janeiro:

It looks like hyrbid of San Francisco, Ha Long Bay, and city-sized slums.

Yesterday I bought a Yamaha electric guitar. I hook it directly into the line-in jack of my laptop and let Garageband be my amplifier, and with the real-time effects I can make the guitar sound like an acoustic, arena rock guitar, slap bass, etc. And now I can practice at all hours and as loud as I want through headphones, hopefully speeding up my education and getting some higher quality recordings.

In other news, this cereal box pissed me off this morning:

Seriously, is there any visual hierarchy to the “design”? Family Size, Whole Grain, and the dynamic Lose 10 Lbs. ribbon are all as prominent as the name of the cereal. To the marketing department, every message is equally important. But four large elements don’t communicate better than four small elements, it’s just more crowded. And while it’s fine to promote a cereal as healthy, this box is whored up with labels and endorsements from top to bottom. Does the consumer care that this is part of the Post Healthy Classics line? Do they even know what a Sensible Solutions green ribbon means? People have always thought of Grape-Nuts as a healthy cereal anyway. This push seems excessive. If grasshopper legs and rat shit were the new buzzwords in health, certainly they’d be called out on the box too. Until then, the unenlightened consumer will be eating them anyway.

Last night I had a dream where my sister died in a water-skiing accident and her corpse became fetus sized and trapped inside my laptop. I woke up in a sad weird mood this morning.