Get comfortable, because there’s a lot to unpack here. Earlier this week, a traumatized cereal eater found what appeared to be shrimp tails in his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. That’s a pretty horrifying thing to wake up to and the aggrieved party, Jensen Karp, was rightfully upset. Karp took his beef to Twitter, where the breakfast mishap quickly went viral.
Ummmm @CTCSquares - why are there shrimp tails in my cereal? (This is not a bit) pic.twitter.com/tTjiAdrnVp
— Jensen Karp (@JensenKarp) March 22, 2021
Cinnamon Toast Crunch, one of several cereals under the General Mills umbrella, issued a boilerplate response to the complaint, promising to “investigate this matter.” That’s about where the story ends, though “ShrimpGate” has fueled a much larger discussion on Karp, a 41-year-old Calabasas native who, low and behold, is married to actress Danielle Fishel, better known as Topanga from the popular 90s sitcom Boy Meets World.
If that didn’t wrinkle your brain, this will. Karp previously rapped under the moniker “Hot Karl,” with one of his songs, “Blao,” appearing on the soundtrack to NBA Live 2003 featuring cover athlete Jason Kidd (then of the New Jersey Nets). If you haven’t heard it, the track is peppered with NBA references (all incredibly dated), namedropping the likes of Hakeem Olajuwon, Spud Webb, Dikembe Mutombo, Steve Nash, Mike Bibby, Kurt Rambis and John Starks. At one point, Karp, in boasting of his considerable defensive acumen, even referred to himself as “the white Ben Wallace.”
Though the title has since been retired by EA Sports, NBA Live was, at one time, the gold standard for basketball video games. The series was arguably at its most popular during the early 2000s, thanks in no small part to its soundtrack (along with Hot Karl’s contributions, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Fabolous and Joe Budden also recorded tracks), which, remarkably, was certified platinum in 2003.
This is all a very longwinded way of saying I’d like nothing more than to take a time machine back to 2003, when middle-school me would happily spend hours hooping on PlayStation2 with Knicks teams featuring Charlie Ward, Antonio McDyess and Kurt Thomas, among other blasts from the past. So thank you, Hot Karl, for that much-needed trip down Memory Lane. And maybe stick with Frosted Flakes from now on.
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