Boringcomb

Excellent source of boredom

A couple of weeks ago we left Palm Springs after staying there for a month and a half. We really enjoyed our time in the desert, with the fantastic San Jacinto mountains looming 10,000 feet over our heads, the almost omnipresent beautiful weather, the stunning cactus and desert scenery, the golf and some beautiful modernist architecture in a ton of residential homes.

From that, you’d think that I loved Palm Springs. But that would be a slight misapprehension. Greater Palm Springs is an area that has nearly half a million residents. Palm Springs, the town, has a mere 40,000 or so. And whilst we enjoyed being in Palm Springs city, and whilst we loved being in the desert, the greater metropolitan area is dreary.

It holds so much promise: 125 golf courses (but they all look the same, have nothing to do with the desert, and cost a fortune). The newer, shinier, more recently built houses – but if you thought they’d carry on with the cool modernist aesthetic, you’d be mistaken; instead they’ve just plonked down McMansions or miserable retirement communities on the golf courses without the slightest thought for how it might look. There are a ton of restaurants, except they’re all chains, or bad steak houses. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. There’s no “there” there.

Which brings me, as a tenuous link, to Post’s Honeycomb. Kerry visited us in Palm Springs and generously bought a couple of packs of cereal for me. This is the first, and I was excited. You’d think an American breaksfast cereal called “honeycomb” would be awesome: sweet, crunchy and wonderful. Perhaps like a delightfully bad-taste version of a Crunchy.

Sadly not. It is the cereal equivalent of greater Palm Springs. It is deeply underwhelming. It has no character. No excitement.

A bowl of Meh

The cereal itself is hugely puffed up, and massively inflated (the only cereal so far where a portion is a cup and a half, because so much of it is air). It’s shaped more like cartoon snowflake than honeycomb. This gigantism is actually really annoying, as it’s hard to shovel it into the mouth fast enough. And you get very little of any note with any bite.

The texture is OKish, but no better. It’s crunchy, which is good. But it’s not that nice, biting crunch. It’s a bit soft and airy. It’s not quite like eating Styrofoam peanuts, but it’s not far off. If you go halfway between a Styrofoam peanut and some stale toast, you’re probably on the right tracks.

The flavour too is sort of OK. But that’s as good as I could say. It wasn’t offensive, but it was very mild. Although there was honey, there wasn’t very much of it. Although there was cereal, there wasn’t much. Mostly there was little flavour at all, and at the base it was that bland, cardboard taste that seems to be the root of some of the worst cereals here.

As I mentioned already, it’s the cereal equivalent of Rancho Mirage or Indian Wells. You think it all sounds good, the component parts all look great,  but it is so much less than the sum of its parts, just leaving you bored and disappointed.