I have great ideas. Most people won’t agree with me, but I have great ideas. Take for instance, my brilliant idea for Milk Sludge ™.

When pouring the last of a cereal into a bowl, it is often followed by a cloud of fine cereal-dust. This cereal powder is wrongfully avoided by most breakfasteers. My dead depression-era relatives would roll over in their graves if I poured a cereal-dust-bowl down the sink. I gratefully disembogue every last granule of my cereal and its accompanying dust into my morning bowl, eat every bite of cereal, and slurp up the remaining gritty milk. Granted, I primarily eat sugary cereals, so as I finish my breakfast, the remaining cereal silt creates a unique milk beverage much like Nestle Quik. Wheaties, Raisin Bran, Total, and their ilk do not produce useful cereal dust unless you need a good wood filler.

I named the remaining milk/cereal-dust concoction Milk Sludge ™. I even created a jingle:

I figured that cereal companies had rooms full of cereal chaff that they would gladly lend to a new product. Existing materials + business genius = high profit margin. They could bottle it under the name of their current cereals: Froot Loop Milk Sludge™, Capn’ Crunch Milk Sludge™, etc.

My wife has scoffed at this idea for the last two years. Perhaps the jingle needed a little retooling and my business model was a smidgen rough, but who could deny that the original seedling of the idea was pure GOLD!

About two months ago I awoke in the morning, poured myself a bowl of cereal and Sludge™ and sat down on the futon to watch the Today Show. That morning the Today Show was featuring a representative of Cereality who was talking about their new restaurant chain. Cereality is a cereal bar and café that caters to lazy hipsters who find the notion of pouring their own cereal a tiresome chore. This representative of Cereality on the Today Show was highlighting one of their best selling products: the cereal smoothy, or Slurrealitie™

I gasped! That was my Milk Sludge™ in hipster’s clothing! They took cereal and milk, put it in a blender with some ginseng or wheat germ or bee pollen or something, slapped a huge price tag and a silly name on it, and made bank while I sat sadly sipping my bowl of Milk Sludge™

If Cereality’s lawyers would like to draft up a settlement for me right now I’ll be happy to field their offers.

Addendum / 04.05.05 / Cameron Moll has some suggestions to thwart the creation of cereal-dust in the first place. Prevention rather than treatment, that’s his solution. The Milk Sludge Zeitgeist is going around. All aboard!