At first I couldn’t believe this report wasn’t a joke – but as I read and re-read it, I realized that yes, some people are indeed that stupid. I bet Colonel Sanders never even dreamed of something this daft!
The US Food and Drug Administration is warning against a social media challenge which involves people coating their poultry in NyQuil.
Called the “NyQuil Chicken Challenge,” users on social media are covering their meat in the over-the-counter medication, which is used to treat flu symptoms, colds and allergies.
Unsurprisingly, the FDA warned it could have very dangerous outcomes — not just if it’s ingested but from the cooking process.
“Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways,” the FDA explained in a warning, adding that even inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body.
There’s more at the link.
Friends, many of you are middle-aged or older, as I am. Tell me, please . . . were any of us so utterly, bone-headedly stupid as to do something like this as a teenage challenge? I’ve perpetrated more than my fair share of stupid things, but I honestly can’t remember doing anything so flat-out insane as this.
Cooking chicken in medication??? The person who came up with that should be charged with an offense – and not a paltry poultry one, either.
Peter
Darwinian selection in action?
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Or, as Niven put it, "think of it as evolution in action".
I didn't have time for this sort of thing in the late Seventies; I was too busy working. Part-time work until graduation from high school, then college and full-time work. No time.
Vert the ferk???
This was after my "formative years, but remember the kids lying down on the double yellow on the roads? It was from some movie, I believe.
Then there were the NYC "subway surfers."
Then there were the kids who would lie down in front of a ramp while another kid went off the ramp on his bike, dirt bike, go cart, or the like…
Yeah, kids were just as stupid back then. Our "challenges" were just more local…
From what I've been able to tell, *one* guy on 4chan did this as a troll, and nobody else has done it.
Lots of people on Twitter and the FDA are having the vapors about it, though.
On the other hand, I'm not "extremely online", and maybe people really are that stupid. But I wouldn't bet on it.
I seems to remember hearing something about "swallowing live goldfish" being a thing back in the day.
Swallowing a live gold fish or a live worm is about all I remember. There have been many things the last couple of years that made me think we were *never* that stupid.
But maybe the news just didn't get around as quickly then.
Speaking of worms, I remember the challenge was to swallow the worm which was in a bottle of tequila. I think first you had to drink the bottle dry.
Dumb
TPTB tried fast and furious to suppress effective inexpensive remedies for Frankenflu: prompty thereafter and ever since horsemectin online stocks everywhere kept and keep depleting and repeatedly exhausting. It would be interesting to find out how many of those folks got sick or were horspittleized for WuFlu.
And now they get the message that if they are depressed, they can resort to the DM of Robitussin DM which is present in many other OTC products. That's gonna cut into another lucrative business.
In my town in 1976, of a group of teenagers, 4 died, three others seriously sick, from eating raw castor beans picked off a bush.
Teenagers trying to sort out who's in charge, who's stupid, who's a follower, and who's an outcast. Are you stupid enough to accept a possibly deadly challenge from a psychopath who wants to make you looks like an idiot or kill you? Well, like Javahead said, Darwinian selection in action.
Without taking my own thoughts too seriously – danger all we mature folks can recognise – I suspect that humanity has an inbuilt tolerance for risk. For young men, that is a need, because how else can they discover if they have virtues like courage and fortitude?
Back in the day, a young man could find hard, dangerous occupations fairly easily. Join the military, work in the mines or fight fires. Now everything has become so adulterated by the cultures of “safety” that it is far harder to find a job n which you are (a) responsible for your own level or risk , and (b) doing something that is so challenging that your little sister or mother couldn’t do it.
I’m serious about the latter. After 40 years as a volunteer firefighter, I’m seeing a serious decline in volunteers… and at least part of it is that it is no longer a field in which young men find unique challenges that only they are prepared to take on. The same goes for the military. Why would anyone consider the modern military a challenge when it must make room fir and approve of people who cannot even deal with the way nature has made them?
So those feeling the need for risky behaviour do stupid things, instead.
@PeterW: I have to wonder what part of the explanation for fewer and fewer is a declining sense of duty, a sense of giving back, a sense of a greater good. I heard the same numbers observation from a retired smoke jumper out in OR.
Maybe I'm just becoming one of those old crotchety geezers who stomps on large insects in front of little children, but I get a sour taste in my mouth when considering the majority of today's youth. I am SO thankful for the many others, but I feel they are in the minority.
"Friends, many of you are middle-aged or older, as I am. Tell me, please . . . were any of us so utterly, bone-headedly stupid as to do something like this as a teenage challenge?"
I've probably got ten or twelve years on you. I'm trying to remember the stupid sh"tuff" we did when young. Tide pods didn't exist yet. The usual adolescent and slightly post-adolescent stuff — driving too fast, drinking too much. Strange drugs with sketchy sources. We mostly survived it.
Well, in chemistry class…
two of us distilled molasses into …
got caught.
then, tossed a pretty good sized chunk of pure sodium into a 500 ML beaker of hydrochloric acid. took a while to clean all that up.
luckily no one was hurt.
SIGH!
At one point, there were credible questions about the high percentage of ADD/ADHD people here in the US versus most of the rest of the world. The theory was that it took a seriously adventurous person to uproot themselves and family to move to the New World.
Now, most kids that might fit that category are medicated from an early age, so the drive to produce those brain chemicals we desire is not much in evidence now. I wonder how much effect that might have had on the apparent reduced interest in dangerous jobs and activities?
Well, my brother and I wanted to know how loud caps (remember cap guns) could get. Since he was older and stronger, he held the anvil while I placed the box of caps under it. The anvil was a bit too heavy for him, so my hand barely cleared away before the anvil fell on the box. My ears still ring about half a century later.
And then there were the Lawn Darts.Do NOT try to hit a target in the back yard from the front yard…
BobF….
I think you’re probably right in that respect, too.
We used to consider some things just part of looking after ourselves, our family and our community.
We supported parents and grandparents in their old age.
Now everything boils down to “Da gubberment orta do sumting!”…… and “Leave to the experts/professionals/somebodyelse.”.
Over the last several decades I have seen too many stories like this that petered out into nothing to take this seriously. I remember the flap over ‘kids eating tide pods’, which as I recall I never saw any actual statistics on. Lots of hype; no actual confirmed cases. We see a lot of ‘human trafficking’ stories and on examination they are perfectly ordinary prostitution cases that somebody has decided to dramatize. There was the ‘bug chaser party’ story about Gay men deliberately having unprotected sex with the HIV positive, that I STILL think smelled like a Gay man pulling the leg of some particularly credulous reporter.
When I read about somebody ACTUALLY doing thins and winding up in the ER, THEN I will worry. Until then I think it says more about the credulity of the reporting agencies than the stupidity of people.
Not me. I had better sense.
An acquaintance who used to hang out with us would try pretty much anything to get high. There was a rumor going around that if you separated a Contact antihistamine/decongestant into the various colored pellets, you could eat one color and get high. I gather he tried it, but my own experience with this genius was managing to convince him that if he held an alka-seltzer tablet under his tongue while drinking a tumbler of warm water, he'd get an incredible rush. So he tried it.
Duty…
am I wrong in thinking that duty is at least partially reciprocal?
Ok, we owe a duty to God, but God has already given us life and all the benefits that go with that. Part of that is a duty to “love they neighbour”, but that is because God is good, not because my neighbour is.
But how can the argument be made for duty, by those who reject even the concept of God, and do not reciprocate by being dutiful, themselves? I don’t think that argument *can* be made convincingly, as the social failure of every marxist state, ever, should demonstrate.
I remember, back in the 1060s and 1970s, ironing my hair to make it straighter, and wearing extremely short skirts (WAY too cold for Cleveland winters).
And, I wore ridiculously high heels, injuring my ankles on several occasions rather badly (I feel those joints ache in every rainstorm).
But, I stayed away from drugs, and was generally a moderate drinker. Kept my pants on (mostly – I did have some raunchy times with the man who later became my husband).
But, no, not really dangerous activity, or criminal acts. I was well aware of the cost of defending a person in criminal court, and didn't have an indulgent dad. As for hospital bills, I was on my own after 18.