I’m not feeling sorry for Kelloggs or General Mills, but cereal sales have fallen off sharply. Apparently baby boomers who grew up eating cereal for breakfast and snacking cannot make up for millennials who rarely go in for the milky crunch.

We had Rice Crispies, Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Wheaties, Puffed Rice, Sugar Pops, and loads of other brands I can no longer remember. We ate them with milk and if they were covered with sugar, we ate them as snacks.

According to recent surveys, millennials forego the cereal habit because “it’s too much work.” Read that again. Too much work. You have to clean up the bowl and spoon afterward. Almost 40% of those surveyed gave that as the number one reason they prefer the convenience of protein bars or fast-food biscuits. I’ll grant you that some of the cereals we ate back then were just slick sugar delivery systems, but as we got older we turned to Wheat Chex, Rice Chex and other somewhat healthier alternatives. Then we added fresh fruits as well, all in the name of eating smarter.

Cereal makers have not given up on trying to attract millennials and the inducement of healthier offerings is still being used as a lure. Kellogg has come out with a variation that has quinoa in it. Can Kale Bran be far behind?

If it’s too much trouble to get out a bowl, spoon and milk, can we count on these people when we’re no longer able to feed ourselves? Are they going to put us on protein IV drips for breakfast? That may be the same way they get their morning nutrients, but for folks who grew up listening to their Rice Crispies making snap, crackle and pop noises it’s going to be a real downer.

Convenience is a great selling point for just about anything. Internet access, cruise control, electronic bill paying, ATMs, and more have made our lives easier and more pleasurable. But the pleasure of cold milk hitting a bowl of crunchy grains and scarfing it all up while the cereal is still crunchy – that may be an indulgence that future generations (thinking about the Matrix here) never get to experience.

Sugar Pops are Tops!

(This is a Best of BoomSpeak post from some time around 2016)

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

I miss Fridays.

More specifically, I miss that Thank God It’s Friday feeling one has when one is slogging along in a Monday through Friday job.

When I first started working at my last job, I was expected to show up on Saturday mornings because the office was open until noon. “Showing the flag…”  is a concept I never bought into. Just because the boss was in the office didn’t make the employees feel any more valuable or hate working on Saturday any less.

I always hated that, so eventually I convinced the owners that having the office open on Saturday morning with a skeleton staff to take care of three or four customers wasn’t really necessary. Of course what I really meant was: I HATE having to come to work on Saturday morning.

We had a strong online presence so 90% of customer service issues could be accomplished by visiting the newspaper website.

So those of us who showed up on Saturday just screwed around. Some tried to “save work” from Monday through Friday so do on Saturday to make the time go more quickly.

They were rare.

Of course we had a newsroom that showed up at various hours on Saturday to do their thing for the Sunday newspaper, and there was a production schedule that included Saturday work.

But there’s nothing like that Thank God It’s Friday feeling when it means Saturday and Sunday are available for just screwing around.

I like being retired because every day is available for screwing around.

But sometimes I Forget It’s Friday.

Mark Van Patten originally wrote this for his blog Going Like Sixty circa 2008 and we republished it on BoomSpeak. We just liked it so much we’re running it again in hopes that we can get him to contribute more for us. Oh, and yeah, he has been married to the same woman since 1968.

I’ve never seen a circus sideshow except in movies. I’ve read about them in books. But not real ones. I get the idea however…freak shows, hairy ladies, congenital twins and the like for folks who lived constrained and tedious lives. There definitely was a market for idle curiosity in the plain beige existence of middle America.

Well, all that has changed. Television takes us around the world. Movies expand our awareness of cultures and places otherwise unseen. But there is one medium that somehow feels like the offspring of the circus sideshow – the internet, specifically Google. We don’t need to wait for the circus to come to town. It comes to us, fits in our hand and updates daily with short visual clips of worldwide phenomena. How enlightening and helpful to the ACDC syndrome in all of us. And if not exactly that, some of the visual slots if not sporadic and unrelated can actually be thought informational, although I would hate to take a test on what I had just spent a half hour perusing online.

The subjects run to: felling trees, catching fish, wild animals, daring stunts, jokes and cartoons, woodworking, gags and gaffs. The variety of themes far outreaches a circus sideshow. But it changes so often in such short intervals that somehow it can feel like you’re attending class with a clever and animated teacher: This is fun. That is interesting. Look at the food, the life style, the clothes.

It amounts to curiosity candy with a few news fillers to justify the side trip down novelty lane. The distraction on a hand-held device may be justified because of the scope—international awareness, do-it-yourself hints, fitness suggestions, recipes. Not to mention sports, jokes, and travelogues. An hour of online scanning can feel like a semester in a college class broken into fascinating bits rather than a three month long, in-depth research of a specific topic like marital customs in Elizabethan literature.

This breeze through new, ever changing topics is interesting, exciting and engaging with no research papers or tests to weigh it down. Think college light. Exposure and learning at the tap of an icon. Too bad there isn’t a way to get a degree in internet exposure.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

A moment seared in my adolescent baby boomer brain. I was walking upstairs for algebra class. As usual, I passed Marsha on the way. She was “bad,” and getting “badder” fast. That day she appeared with a skirt above the knee — the first girl in my high school that dared to cross the Rubicon.

The baby boomer generation sexual revolution of the 1960s began in the bursting-at-the-modesty 1950s. The female knee became the symbol of pop culture risque.

Approaching the image from below enhanced the effect. She wore a thin white silk blouse collar up — hood style, the top two buttons undone, no bra. I could see the outline of her nipples. And she had bleached the pony tail on her jet black hair blond. As usual, her eyes looked like a hungry fox. She sported a new, very bright red on her pouting lips. A “baby” boomer Lolita before Lolita. Her attitude was classic bitchy: detached, you can’t have me, but maybe if you’re the quarterback, and beg.

The guy ahead of me stumbled at the sight and I bumped into him, causing a chain reaction of rear-enders and flying books. She strolled right by the chaos, smirking like a rock princess.

Marsha ended up having an affair with a geography teacher. The joke going around was that he showed her places she’d never been before. She got pregnant, he got fired. The femme fatale dropped out of school, worked as a waitress, then settled down with a truck driver for the local Caterpillar factory. I recognized Marsha at my class reunion twenty years later only after a classmate pointed her out. Alcohol, four children and sixty pounds had changed her appearance, but she still had the shortest skirt in the room. She seemed happy.

Terry Hamburg blogged about the exciting and revolutionary baby boomer years and wrote this circa 2009. It’s part of our Oldies But Goodies Best of BoomSpeak collection.