Baby Boomers had a cinnamon challenge they won’t talk about that may be the reason why toothpick-chewers in classic movies are seen as cool

My mother is 65 and right bang in the middle of the Baby Boomer generation, but she’s very cool and does her best to be and stay woke, keep up with shifts in vernacular, and takes care to do things like make sure she’s strict with getting pronouns correct, etc. Her meme game is a little lagging, and she only just discovered the cinnamon challenge. I was surprised to see her... not surprised. If anything, she seemed a bit pleased and said, “Yep, kids are still kids.”

I stared at her for a while. “What do you mean?” I asked her. She’s seen other ancient memes like planking and never had that reaction before. Seeing the cinnamon challenge was downright satisfying to her.

She looked me dead in the face and said, “Sweetheart, I grew up in a time when you could get crystal meth over the counter at the pharmacy. They were called diet pills then.”

“Whaaaaaaat.” I knew that Nazi Germany passed meth around like candy, but that was in the 30′s and 40′s. I had just figured it had been prohibited already in America by the time my mom was growing up. “Did you have a cinnamon challenge or something in school?” I finally asked.

She half-nodded and half-shrugged and said, “Similar. You couldn’t have candy or gum in school when I was growing up. It was about 1969 in San Francisco and parents were starting to limit cigarette smoking to kids under 18, too, so a lot of my school friends were squirming all day long with nothing to at least chew on.”

“What did they do instead, mom?” I asked suspiciously, because she would not bring this subject up after I had explained to her that the cinnamon challenge was dangerous because of how horrible it is to accidentally inhale it into your airways.

“Well... Back when I was in school, you could get cinnamon extract from the pharmacy. It was just cinnamon suspended in canola oil, and you could use it for cooking or treating a skin fungus. Stuff like that,” she explained. “So the boys at my school would take toothpicks and dip them in the cinnamon extract. That’s why chewing on a toothpick was so common back then. If you were trying to quit smoking or couldn’t have chewing gum, you could carry a little bottle of flavor extract about the size of a bottle of nail polish in your pocket and dip a toothpick in it. Then you’d have something to chew on that the teachers hadn’t banned, and you could hide them in your cheek easily.”

“So what did the boys at your school get into, mother?” I asked again. We were still on the topic of ridiculous memes. This had to go somewhere.

She smirked. “Well, after a while, the boys started noticing that the cinnamon extract from the pharmacy was spicy. It burned. So it started to get to be a challenge to see how many cinnamon toothpicks you could hold in your mouth at once. It got so bad that kids would get blisters and burns on their mouths from it, and you could tell if someone had a few of them tucked in their cheek in class because their face would turn red from the neck up like a cartoon.”

“Why have I never heard about this?”

She wasn’t done. “Finally, the teachers figured out what everyone was doing and it became a pretty big deal. Cinnamon extract started getting banned or restricted to adults. Then they banned toothpicks for sale to anyone under 18, too. That’s why it was a sign of being cool, particularly among guys, to walk around with a toothpick in your mouth. It either meant you had a fake ID or that you were 18.”

I stared at her for a long time. “Mom, why didn’t they just use hot sauce? It was California. Didn’t you have peppers?”

Without missing a beat, my 65-year-old mother replied, “Honey, we were white as fuck.”

This dude spitting facts! Please consider listening to this if you have the time, it's just under 3 mins. :)

(Inb4 all the people who claim this video is 'defending boomers' when there's a big difference between explaining something and justifying the outcomes.)

Very much off topic but it has occurred to me that the half-life of intergenerational discourse has shortened considerably over the last few years.

I made a post not too long ago where I was surprised Gen Z was redefined as 1996-2009 (or any such similar range) and I've been thinking about it- and the more I do the more I'm sure of one thing:

Gen Z and Alpha are being exposed to more ire at their existence at much younger ages and much faster than Millenials did from their elders.

When the whole "Blame Millenials for everything" era was in full swing, the vast majority of Millenials were adults (the fact Millenials were adults and not children was a pretty big part of the backlash against the ire). All the "avocado toast rhetoric" peaked when most Millenials were adults.

But Gen Z (my apparent generation) is half adults, half minors at the time of writing. I was born in 2000, I'm 23. But Gen Z kids born after 2005 aren't adults yet. So all of the current doomerism about our generation is annoying for me, but must be so demoralising if you're born after 2005. Like, I can't escape the feeling current generation discourse has given up on finding hope in late Gen Zers. It doesn't seem to know how to categorise early Gen Zers. We straddle Millenial and typical Gen Z experiences and so kinda get the worst ire from both.

Not to mention I've recently seen a whole lot of ire directed at Gen Alpha. C'mon these are literal children now being roped into generation discourse about how they're apparently hopeless or ipad babies.

It was one thing for Millenials to deal with this as adults. It's annoying as fuck for me to deal with it now as an adult. But I worry so much for younger Gen Zers and Gen Alpha who have to bear the brunt of grown ass adults using generations like they're star signs. If you find yourself saying "Gen Z/Alpha are so doomed lol" genuinely take a look at yourself and remind yourself you're talking about literal children. Especially if you're a Milennial yourself who went through the banality of being shit on by every generation preceeding.

It's so easy to not be a dick, yknow?

"Millenials and Gen Z have no work ethics at all!"

No, boomers, we don't. And we don't care. We run on adrenaline, caffeine and anxiety - we have neither the time nor the mental resources to care about the firms we work for. If we don't get paid enough to care - we don't. If someone demands from us to work unpaid overtime - we quit.

Work is a means to an end. It's not our life.

Los escucho hablar y desearía que se callaran, pero no opino ni hago nada porque les debo respeto. Sin embargo, no puedo evitar estar en desacuerdo con cada palabra que dicen, y lo peor de todo es que ellos creen tener la razón absoluta ya que han vivido más años que yo.

Dios, estoy tan cansada de la gente de su generación, que lo único que hacen es llamarnos débiles y hasta vagos. Se jactan de que desde muy temprana edad ya estaban trabajando, nos presionan a casarnos desde que cumplimos los veinte, y nos critican por todos nuestros problemas mentales cuando muchos de ellos han sido por culpa de ustedes.

Pero la verdad es que si nuestra generación les hiciera caso, estaríamos aún en el retroceso y no tendríamos los grandes avances que nos han llevado a pensar por nuestra cuenta, a hablar sin miedos ni tabúes, a promover la salud mental y a no tolerar problemas sociales como la homofobia, el racismo, el bullying, el machismo etc, que por cierto, eran muy normalizados en su tiempo.

Nos denominan la generación de cristal porque hablamos y actuamos en contra de problemáticas que ustedes tenían miedo de enfrentar y preferían callar.

Euphoria.

My mom decided to state that my generation uses Tumblr often. I was unsure. Sleuthing in the internet prompted mixed but affirmative results. Now I am curious to actually see.

The History of “Random” Phases

Silent Generation: Ignorant idiocy, silliness (Monty Python, “In His Own Write” by John Lennon)

Baby Boomers: Stupidity, silliness (ex. “This goes to 11”, National Lampoons)

Gen X: Self-indulgent while self-deprecating (caricatures of public expectations of them, ex. Joey and Chandler with the white dog, that one Zoolander face)

Millennials: Scene kid/ rawr XD CRAZY!, horror-inspired, MS paint (ex. The Duck Song, Salad Fingers, badger song)

Gen Z: Surreal/futuristic memes, 3D models, conspiracy/tragedy (ex. stonk, E, Dat Boi, Bush did 9/11)

Gen alpha: Absurdism, new language, exclusivity (Skibidi toilet, gyat for the rizzler)

Republicans Are Soft on Fascism

(I try to put my head in the sand, but I suffocate.)

Stephen Jay Morris

9/7/2023

©Scientific Morality.

Billionaire Elon Musk blames Jews for the failure of his social Media venture, “X” (formerly “Twitter). It has something to do with the ADL. I saw recent videos of neo-Nazis on a Florida bridge, waving their swastika flags left to right in view of the oncoming traffic. Hitler fan and podcaster, Nick Fuentes, tells the world he hates poor people. Anti-Semitism has come full circle, again, to being blatantly expressed in public. There used to be repercussions for talking shit about the Jews. I am watching this cadre of Jew haters unfold in front of my very eyes.  Lots of American Jews once thought that if they converted to Christianity and married a Gentile, they would be immune to being put in concentration camps or thrown into ovens. I can still hear my father pounding his fist on the dining room table, in a rage, yelling that the Jews are a religion not a race. “Why is he yelling at his family and not to real Jew haters?” I thought. That is a story for another time.

 But alas, you can’t convince a Nazi that Jews are white. They think and feel that Jews are a mogul race of mud people and should be destroyed. Once they find out that you are Jewish—bye, bye!

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a book, “It Can’t Happen Here.” It warned about the possibility of Fascism in America. I read that book in 1969. I told my parents and they thought I was crazy. America is the strongest country in the world, they said; it would never happen here!

It is now happening here. What about the owners of massive wealth and the military industrial complex? Do they care? First, the so-called deep state couldn’t give a damn about Jews at risk for death! Second, Nazis are pro-capitalism so long as White men control it. I’ve asked this question a million times: have you ever seen a Right winger protest a Nazi? Neither have I. Conservatives are soft on fascism. They get embarrassed by Nazis because they say the quiet rhetoric out loud. They say things like, “the East elites (Rich Jews) want to run our country” or “the globalists (Rich Jews) want to run the world!” They say, “the Jews will not replace us!” to which the conservative agrees, but thinks the Nazis are giving the game away.

But when it comes to Communism? Holy fuck burgers! Bomb them! Kill them all and let God sort them out! They know that Communists would take away their property and businesses and give it all to the poor. If you ask me, I’d rather live in Stalin’s Russia than in the 1950’s America, anti-communist hysteria. Fuck anti-Communism!!! Conservatives outlawed free speech in America in the 50’s. If you slightly inferred liberal tendencies in your speech, the FBI would tap your phone and follow you to work! You think I am exaggerating? Go through some time machine and find out. During the 50’s, if you were in America and, simultaneously, in the then Soviet Union, you wouldn’t know the difference! In Russia, The KGB would follow you around and, in the USA, the FBI would follow you around.

As an anarchist, I am not surprised. As a Jew, I am highly concerned. Oh, and your gentile spouse will not be spared. During the Nazi’s regime, many Aryans were put into camps for marrying non-Aryan husbands or wives. The price for race-mixing is death.

I sure miss the Jewish Defense League, even though they were Right wing, Zionist revisionists. They were pro-active. Whenever there were Nazi rallies, they were there with baseball bats. I am not pro-violence, but I am not pro-surrender, either. I’ll tell you one thing. I will not walk into a gas chamber peacefully. Never again, motherfuckers!

Old people