Remember when we were kids and Mom said, “If your friend told you to jump off a roof, would you do it?”
The correct answer to Mom is “no”.
And our teachers delighted in instructing us about lemmings and how they would foolishly plunge to their deaths following the lead lemming.
They reveled in the lemming lesson and its obvious metaphor.
But it seems a generation has missed the metaphor entirely because the current young generation seems to have a habit of following each other off cliffs on Tik Tok.
Last week, I kid you not, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. had to put out a cautionary press release after a sensation arose on Tik Tok.
The subject?
How it’s not a good idea to eat chicken basted in NyQuil.
Let’s start at the beginning and for us oldies the beginning is ‘what is Tik Tok and why are they advising people to eat chicken and NyQuil?’
So TikTok is a social media platform for creating, sharing and discovering short videos.
The app is used by young people as an outlet to express themselves through singing, dancing, comedy, and lip-syncing, and allows users to create videos and share them across a community. That’s what the Google says.
Further, the aim is to create videos that grab users interest within the first few seconds to stop them scrolling and pay attention.
The more a user spends time on a specific TikTok creator video, the more likely it is to become viral.
And that is what you want, fellow fogies, virility.
No, not that kind.
You want your video to go viral.
But what has happened in the quest to go viral, is that people have come up with some truly dumb stuff and encouraged others to do it.
Viral internet challenges have definitely become a thing and for some reason, the kids are eager to take up that challenge. Perhaps they missed the class on lemmings.
In one case, a girl challenged others to style their hair with gorilla glue.
She had to be surgically repaired, but a few others tried it too.
Another super glue case saw people super-gluing vampire fangs to their teeth last Halloween.
The videos attracted over nine million views, totally the point, although there are quite a few people walking around with vampire fangs that won’t come off.
There are many other cringe-worthy challenges, such as full face waxing, and the skull breaker challenge — where three people stand together and the two on the outside kick the feet out from under the middle person, causing that person to fall and land on their head.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Makes eating chicken and NyQuil sound pretty tame.
Let’s move on to that shall we? It’s called the ‘sleepy chicken’ challenge.
Tik Tok has blocked the videos after the FDA put out a notice saying, “Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways.
Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs.”
Now here’s the thing, why, why, why would you want to eat chicken and NyQuil.
First of all, it’s blue-green, which is not an appetizing colour for a chicken marinade. And in what world would you want to eat something that tastes like flu medication?
Buckley’s cough syrup’s slogan is “It tastes terrible, but it works” for a reason.
It tastes terrible.
But nonetheless it was necessary to tell people not to do it.
Maybe we should put the phones down and start interacting naturally again.
You’ll come over for dinner.
We’ll talk.
I’ll make chicken.
Carolyn Grant is editor for the Kimberley Bulletin.