Snap, Crackle, Thud?

Is your world becoming increasingly devoid of pleasure? Is life getting to be unbearable? Could your problem be that Rice Krispies are just too small? If that's what's kept you in the dumps, Kellogg's has anticipated your need for increased magnitude in crisp cereal by offering new Jumbo Krispies.

A couple of things need to be mentioned:

They're not Rice Krispies. The full name of this new product is Jumbo Multi-Grain Krispies, and besides rice flour and sugar they contain whole-wheat flour, corn meal, oat fiber and much more.

And Jumbo Krispies have a lot more sugar than Rice Krispies. A 33-gram serving of Rice Krispies has 3 grams of sugar; a similar serving of Jumbo Krispies has almost 10 grams of sugar -- unlike Rice Krispies, they taste like sweetened cereal. (Mr. Tidbit hasn't made any Jumbo Krispies bars; he expects they would be pretty darn sweet.)

Oh -- and Jumbo Krispies aren't all that jumbo. Each Jumbo Krispie is maybe 2 or 2 1/2 times the size of a Rice Krispie.

On the other hand, perhaps your problem is that even Frosted Mini-Wheats, Kellogg's scaled-down, sweetened incarnation of Post Shredded Wheat, are just too big. Fear not, Kellogg's has a life-altering solution for you, too. It's new Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites, each piece being about half the size of a Frosted Mini-Wheat.

Do you know what else Mr. Tidbit is going to say about Little Bites? That's correct: They cost lots more. At one discount supermarket, where the 24-ounce box of regular Frosted Mini-Wheats was $3.95, the 14.5-ounce box of Little Bites was $3.55.

At this point Mr. Tidbit would normally point out that this means Little Bites cost 49 percent more per ounce. If that doesn't disturb you, allow him to put it another way: At the per-ounce price of Little Bites, that $3.95 24-ounce box of regular Frosted Mini-Wheats would cost $5.87.

AL SICHERMAN