Think outside the box

The cereal box, that is. Oddly enough, the humble cereal box has come to my attention several times in the last few days and none of them really having anything to do with cereal.
 

The first instance was in the midst of a novel I am reading called Beginner's Greek by James Collins. The novel has very little to do with cereal or boxes, but there is a recurring mention of a half-crazed senior executive at the investment firm the protagonist works at, who has a crazy scheme to monetize all those cereal box tops that people save to get points or prizes or donate philanthropically. As I'm not an investment banker or anything close, I don't know yet if the scheme will turn out to be crazy genius or just crazy crazy, but I expect I'll find out.

Next, cereal boxes appeared on Collagemama's Hearty Breakfast Blog. You may be thinking that cereal would pretty naturally come into play on a breakfast blog, but actually Nancy is talking about cubicles and cereal boxes as forts. She links on to a cool looking blog called Seize the Absurd, which has many illustrations of said cereal box forts and which you should definitely check out for your own defensive strategies.

There is also this short excerpt from Family Guy which may illustrate some of the shortcomings of this idea:






I maybe didn't think too much about all this until last night when I read Bookwitch's latest blog, which was called Through the Cereal Box. Guess what it's about?

Watching eclipses with a cereal box. Here's a short video that shows you how. For next time.


So there we have it. The cereal box as currency, military defense and scientific instrument. I'd like to say that I've added to the stream of creative uses, but all I've done is develop a  worrying new penchant for eating cereal straight out of the box.

photo by Dan Taylor at Flicr