AROUND TOWN | LAURA ANDERSON Getting my fill of online stupidity

In the ongoing saga of humankind discovering new and interesting ways to eliminate itself, we have yet another online challenge that proves that people will descend to the very depths of stupidity in the pursuit of Internet fame.

I’ve written previously about the Tide Pod challenge. Some teenage brainiac thought it would be a laugh to film himself eating a Tide Pod and post it online. Then another joined him. Before long, an entire wave of idiots made themselves sick, to the point where both Tide and Rob Gronkowski had to step in and say “Hey, kids.  Eating Tide Pods is bad for you.” As if they had to be told.

Before that there was the cinnamon challenge. Kids were daring each other to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon without drinking anything for 60 seconds. A friend of mine at work mentioned how he had done it when he was younger.  “Yeah, pretty much the minute you put it in your mouth, you feel like ‘oh my God, I’m going to die.’” The challenge can cause choking, gagging, coughing, and inhaling the cinnamon into the lungs.

Before the cinnamon challenge was the Ice Bucket challenge, but that hardly counts because there was nothing inherently dangerous about it (unless you dropped the bucket on your head) and it was all for a good cause. 

So, if ingesting laundry detergent or ground cinnamon wasn’t enough to qualify you for the Darwin Awards, fear not as there is now yet another way to share your sheer stupidity with the world:  the milk crate challenge.

If you haven’t seen this yet, you may have missed your chance. I heard just this morning that TikTok has banned all videos of people performing this challenge. In it, challengers create a pyramid of milk crates, with towers increasing in size up to 6 or 7 crates tall.  The challenger then attempts to carefully climb up one side of the pyramid and down the other without falling.

Hilarity ensues.

Except it doesn’t. Most of the time, the challenger doesn’t make it to the highest stack without teetering over, causing the crates to tumble, and then bouncing off the sharp corners of the crates so hard you can practically hear bones breaking. It’s kind of hard to watch, in a Joe-Theisman-breaks-his-leg kind of way. I could only watch four or five of these videos before I had to stop. Okay, maybe six.

For those of you who grew up watching "America’s Funniest Home Videos," this is like every painful video of someone getting accidentally hit in the privates, falling off a roof, bouncing off the side of a trampoline and skateboarding (unsuccessfully) down a flight of steps all rolled together.  All it lacks is the stretcher and the ambulance carting the victim off to the hospital.

Setting aside the sheer lunacy of performing such a challenge, which is bound to break at least one if not all of the 200+ bones in the human body, I have one burning question.  Where the heck is everyone getting these milk crates?  From what I saw, you’d need about 35 or 40 of them to create the pyramid. Are there bodegas and grocery stores and creameries that have been reduced to shuttling their milk around in cardboard boxes because everyone has swiped their milk crates? Or did they just buy those flimsy plastic crates you see in the big box stores instead.  They are nothing like the real thing and I should know.  I swiped a real milk crate over forty years ago when I was heading off to college.  As sturdy as it is, I wouldn’t think of even using it as a step-stool, let along stacking six or seven and scaling it like some mountain goat. I may be a thief but I’m not an idiot.

If you think it’s just a bit of harmless fun, take into consideration that people are performing this challenge with the very real possibility of needing orthopedic surgery in a time when elective surgeries are being canceled due to the rise in Covid hospitalizations. There’s never a good time to be hospitalized with broken bones or a spinal cord injury, but during a global pandemic? That’s taking stupidity to new heights.  Or depths. 

I’ll pass on the cinnamon challenge and the Tide Pod challenge and the Milk Crate challenge because I’ve got more years behind me than ahead of me, and Lord knows the aches and pains of aging will be more than enough for me. But when someone starts the Netflix binging challenge or the fluffy pillow challenge, before sure to let me know.

That’s a challenge I’ll happily accept.