Do you remember Quisp? Of course you don't. It's a cereal they stopped making in the '70s. It is too delicious to have been intentionally discontinued, so maybe it accidentally got thrown out with disco — but they are both due for a return. I'm a big fan of the '80s parties, but there are simply not enough venues in which I can get the hustle on.

But while there may be valid dissenting opinions on which decade had the best drugs, sex and music, it is impossible to deny that Quisp was the best cereal to come out of either, and its recent resurrection is cause for celebration and jubilant rioting in the streets. It is only available in six stores nationwide, and Woodman's here in Madison is one of them.

One of the great things about living in the major population centers of Wisconsin, as I have all my life, is that you get to be the subject of test marketing, because Wisconsin is like a little consumer microcosm of America where you can test all your craziest products without scaring off important, populous cities. You may recall the brief introduction of Olestra, the famous fat-substitute that not only made food taste half as good with none of the empty calories, but also made pooping more exciting and challenging.

Quisp isn't like that. It's like Cap'n Crunch, but some genius food engineer smoothed down the deadly edges that rip up the roof of your mouth and probably threw in some extra sweetener while they were at it. It's clearly the pinnacle of cereal technology, and yet we somehow abandoned it decades ago, possibly because hyper-stellar cereal mascot Quisp the 'quazy' alien deemed it too sublimely delicious for the undeservingly warlike ape-men of earth, many of whom, at the time, were mired in the senseless bloodshed of the Vietnam War.

But now that America has fully abandoned the pursuit of misguided military colonialism, Quisp has returned to spread his advanced semi-nutritious technology to the deserving people of Madison. I took it upon myself, as a person with a great deal of spare time, to taste-test it for you.

Okay, I admit it, it's a lot like Quaker Sweet Crunch, which is basically the same cereal but in plastic-bag packaging and not endorsed by a pink space alien (incidentally created by Jay Ward and Bill Scott of “Rocky & Bullwinkle”). Without a box, chatty mascot, toys or a cartoon on the back, that stuff isn't really proper cereal. It's just food in a bag with all the joy surgically removed, so we're lucky that the real nostalgia-soaked deal is back on the shelves.

A female friend of mine sampled it with me and said: "This is just like Cap'n Crunch, but worse for you. There's like a ton of sugar in this crap."

You may have noticed by this point that I take my breakfast cereal very seriously, and another thing I do is lace it with medically irresponsible amounts of sugar to give me the jump-start I need to tackle a day of classes during which I mostly doodle pictures of muppets with cyborg enhancements. The sheer audacity of this comment combined with the sheer volume of sucrose coursing through my veins enraged me beyond the point of reason and I got it into my head that something had to be done about the problem of females in general before one of them carelessly caused Quisp to return to space with his breakfast treats in tow.

When my faculties of reason had recovered, I used them to make a list of all the major problems with women that might cause them to bad-mouth Quisp, despite it being a perfect cereal in an imperfect world:

1. Their opinions about everything are wrong (e.g., cereal).

2. They are concerned about being the wrong size or shape (e.g., fear of sugary cereal consumption).

This didn't seem like sufficient evidence against women as a whole, so for number three I sort of implied that maybe she literally thought there was a 'ton' of sugar, whereas in fact there were only 12 grams per serving.

3. Some of them don't know the metric system (e.g., cereal measurement).

I applied my Quisp-enhanced brain to the matter and the solution was obvious: from now on all women will be used as uniform units of measurement, let's say three meters in height and 100 kilograms in weight. For example, you might speak of a three-woman-long boat, a half-woman tall midget or a bridge that can withstand 1,700 woman's-weight of pressure. It would involve a difficult cultural transition period and maybe some ethically troubling genetic engineering to make sure the next generation conforms to the standard, but it would work, dammit.

I explained my idea to Sean Carroll, professor of molecular biology, genetics and medical genetics here at Madison, who said it wouldn't work and asked why I thought we needed to turn half the human race into living yardsticks. I explained to him that much historical confusion is caused by the rapid pace and varying standards in the terminology of measurement. For example, researchers had only recently become aware that although William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, had long been known to be "a full tefach tall" in his garb of office according to records of the time, a tefach is in fact only approximately eight centimeters.

Carroll told me that wasn't true or even possible and that a "tefach" is an ancient Hebrew unit of measurement which has been out of fashion since biblical times. So I said, "Oh, I meant Herod, not Harrison … and that probably explains why he was afraid of the infant Jesus, since even such a tiny Jesus could easily trample him." At this point, Prof. Carroll asked me to leave. I couldn't remember where I was or what I was doing there by this point, so I said "Thank you," which seemed like the right thing to say, and left quietly.

There's a lesson here. Eat your Quisp responsibly as part of a well-balanced breakfast, including something other than pure refined sugar, and you'll be enjoying some '70s nostalgia without suffering cheesy retro drug-binge narratives.

As a scruffy college student, Ben Freund enjoys any food that takes two steps or less to prepare. Talk to him at [email protected] before he dies of malnutrition.