i love that stuff. i agree with @RAvery: give it a 10-minute soak (or so) and have at it. so tasty.
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I was the weird kid that liked Grape Nuts (back then I had teeth to crunch with), Shredded Wheat, Fruit & Fiber, and the granola cereals.
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An update:
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Is that a common name for Grapenuts? A friend used to call it that, and I assumed he came up with it (he was a funny guy). He used to eat it while driving.
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My father called it that.
I may be misremembering, but I though I’d seen a Mad magazine parody of it call it gravel.
To me, it seems an appropriate term for it.
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I just had to invoke my non-white heritage. My great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side was Burmese. So, since it is not a) my culture and b) I am white enough / enough generations removed that few people even guess anything other than white. I am not ashamed of it (though my great-grandfather was, enough to tell my grandmother that his parents were dead, when they were very much alive), but I get all the privilege a white woman gets handed, and normally, trying to claim that heritage feels a little bit like playing oppression Olympics.
But my dad, watching the inauguration, (he was not a Trump supporter), decided it was safe to bitch at me about how much they were “emphasizing women and colour”.
Oh, fuck no. I’m going to pull all the knives out for that one. I don’t like to pull that one, for the reasons I stated above. I have never been discriminated against for it, so the only time it’s coming out is when I can use it to shut up someone on the attack. Someone who will maybe give a fuck.
Like telling my father to think about how that sounds when he says that to a woman with Southeast Asian heritage on a day where the first Woman VP and the first South Asian VP is being inaugurated. Coming out of an administration where the rights of women and POC (and especially Black people) were under constant attack and the president openly encouraged white nationalists.
Normally, I try to keep peace. I don’t have a lot of other family I am even willing to speak to. But today… not today. And if pulling that out gets him to even slightly rethink what he says… that strikes me as the only reason to do it.
But I hate it. Not because I am ashamed of my great-great-grandfather, or even entirely upset with my great-grandfather, knowing the societal pressures he was under. Yes, it was shit societal pressure, but I am not going to trash someone for protecting their non-white self and family in a white supremacist society. I am somewhat, for how he hurt my grandmother (who just wanted to have grandparents) but I can understand. No, I am ashamed of the other side, the side that’s been handed everything and feels the need to whine that those “others” are trying to take it away. Who parrot the white supremacist talking points while claiming they’re not racist, because they’re less racist than their friends and other family members.
I am not perfect. Hell, I won’t even claim to not be somewhat racist, just by the virtue of growing up white in a racist society, in an “I’m not racist, but…” family. But sitting around and saying nothing, in the face of that? Just to preserve my own comfort? Today of all days… it just felt even more like complicity.
TBC, this isn’t about cookies. There’s a reason I am putting it here, in the “grinds my gears” thread. Because I am mad. I am not proud of myself. I am sure as fuck not proud of the fact that we still have a society where a retired, white civil servant with a pension and property thinks that he’s hard-done-by, and doesn’t feel any concerns about saying so. Who thinks that reaching a hand down to help someone get back on their feet is like kicking him down to take their place. I am mad, because I need to do a lot of work deprogramming myself from the bullshit I was raised on, which I absolutely blame my family, schools, and general society for. I resent being put in a position where I hwve to repudiate so much of what they taught me, just to be a decent human being.
Especially when it’s so easy not to say something so blatantly racist and sexist. Just stop at the point before you do. And the irony is? My great-grandfather was being more considerate of his daughter than mine was of me. He was trying to protect her, in a fucked up kind of way. Mine couldn’t even be bothered to stop and think about who his is.
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Wanna know something that grinds my gears a lot? The twins of “Don’t bring up a problem unless you have a solution!” and “You’re so negative!”
To the second, first: pointing out a potential problem is not fucking being negative, you blithering tool, it’s because I want us to succeed, I see something that could cause failure and I want us to be ready to handle it. Saying “How are you going to handle corners?” when the vehicle you’re ptiching has no apparent steering mechanism is giving you a chance to fix that prior to taking the road and driving off a cliff. Wanting solutions in place before a problem arises saves a lot of panicking and trouble later on.
As for part the first… no, just no. Just because I don’t see a solution doesn’t prevent it from being a problem. I am bringing it up so you, me, Alice, Bob, Carol and Doug can all look at it and maybe come up with a solution together. Maybe we also need to call in Joan, who works on something that intersects with our project.
The whole “Positivity and Solutions only!” cult is really just a cute rebranding of Willful Ignorance. It’s a cult of laziness: rather than do the hard work of extrapolating about risks and mitigating them, we’ll only focus on rewards, and punish anyone who dares think otherwise.
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I opened up my Twitter feed for some light distraction while my dinner heats, and got this:
My initial reaction:
Are you serious??? No, we’re here, we’ve been here, if you look. We’re the first generation to get screwed by the system-- it didn’t start with you.
If we’re not as noisy about it, it might be because we’re busy-- many of my generation are struggling to raise their own families and care for aging parents. It’s tiring, and doesn’t leave a lot of spare energy or time for online fights.
We also didn’t grow up with social media the way younger folk did, so not all of us use it to the same degree.
But trust me, we’re here… and many of us Gen-Xers are in the same sorry boat, and are just as pissed off, as the younger gens.
But is there really any point in posting all that? All this intergenerational shit-talking is just a distraction, pitting us against each other. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful get further ahead while we’re distracted. Even posting my rebuttal feels like a waste of time.
But it pissed me off enough that I needed to vent… and if I post here, I’m less likely to post there. I’ve no wish to go viral over this.
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Yeah, it’s amazing how ignored we often are. We sort of got some attention during the 90s for a hot minute, but that was pretty short-lived and dismissive. And millennials are just a much bigger generation who managed to eek out more cultural clout than us for a longer period of time. But both generations ended up not being privy to some of the advantages that boomers had.
But all of us, whatever are generation, are suffering in all this.
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The system’s been screwing people ever since the system was created…so it’s NOT generational, it’s human. And generational differences are but a marketing tool, created when teenagers started being able to spend their own money. I guess the Boomers are responsible for that, eh?
And does Roger Daltrey still sing “My Generation”?
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True, but enough people bought into it and made it have more cultural meaning than just marketing, I’d argue. It’s a social construct, and one that started out with consumerism, but it still have a real force in our society that has a history that we can engage with and track.
I don’t think @Nightflyer is trying to say is about assigning blame either. Although of course it’s not true for everyone, the baby boom generation had some very real advantages compared to later generations. Most grew up in one of the longest and most stable economies in modern history, had more opportunities thanks to a general consensus about education up to college (including much lower tuition and cheaper, federal loans and more grants), better access to cheap credit, solid savings and pensions, a much more robust regulatory state, etc. This of course did not benefit ALL boomers, but it did many… They did not create much of that, of course, but they did benefit from it. Gen X grew up in the midst of the dismantling of the new deal consensus - which is also hurting lots of working class boomers and the younger generations, too. From a historical point of view, what everyone believed was going to be the new normal - that everyone would have access to housing, to education, to the benefits of regulations by the government, to most people doing as well as or better than their parents proved to be a short lived experiment that the conservatives fought tooth and nail to dismantle. We’re all pay the cost for that…
Roger Daltry…
Yep, still singing that, I’m guessing, if someone is paying for it! Kurt however, is not…
Anyways, here’s Millennial Millions from SNL which is not on the youtubes for some reason…
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January 1981 is an obvious line in the sand. During the primary in 1980, even the Republican party (the actual, behind-the-scenes party officials) couldn’t stand Reagan, but they knew he was their best chance to put an R in the White House (and they were right). They thought they could control him, but by 1984 he was controlling them. Gee, why does that sound familiar?
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My only caveat to that would be that it was less Reagan and more the coalition that supported him, especially the moral majority and the hard right libertarians. I do think Reagan was happy to go along and put a popular face of their attempt to gut the new deal and civil rights/women’s rights/gay rights, etc. But this gave them an in to the power structure of the GOP and as a result, it’s their party now. And they keep getting more extreme by the year, like new factions rise up to outdo the previous one. Let’s hope the party disintegrates before they can do even more damage than they’ve already done…
I know, I can’t imagine why!?!? 
But anyways here’s that SNL Reagan mastermind sketch…
God I miss Phil Hartman…
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I have to say, I have no idea what this is even about.
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“always overlooked and forgotten about” is our BRAND.
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Good question… the assumption that any criticism must come from Gen xers?
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That was the Republican party’s biggest concern about him when his ‘fanatics’ (as they would refer to them, behind closed doors) fought for him to be the nominee in 1976. It was who surrounded him and wanted him to be the figurehead that worried the party most.
This is not something I am guessing about: I was in those closed-door meetings, especially in Kansas City that summer.
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Gingrich exploited this. Along with Reagan he did more damage than any single person back then.
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Well, turns out they were right to be concerned!
They were correct that they are fanatics, both the religious kind and the libertarians, too, who are absolutely fanatical about their adherence to the “wisdom” of the “free” market. Their alliance has bee disastrous for the US.
Oh yeah, and McConnell, too. McConnell has backed away somewhat because he sees it as eroding his own power, but Gingrich continues to double down on support for the extremists now dominating their party.
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Oh, he would’ve done the perfect Biden, I just know it!
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