So I ate a ricecake earlier today. A plain, no-frills, basic ricecake.

Not the worst thing in the world, honestly. Still, as soon as I crunched into it, I was reminded of one of my favorite one-liners by Bill Cosby from the “Food for Thought” episode of “The Cosby Show”:

“The air in my mouth tastes better than this.”

Watch the moment right here (note the direct link to the 4:11 mark, thanks to the ability to now deep-link within YouTube videos). Classic.

Bowing to the general consensus that the term “Baby Boomers” has been tainted by decades-long characterizations of self-centeredness and indulgence, the New York Times is re-dubbing the ever-greying post-WWII set as “Generation B”.

They’ve even set up an email address for the purpose: generationb@nytimes.com. Unfortunately, a straight-to-the-point dot-com domain is out for now, as both generationb.com and genb.com are both being squatted.

As for the societal rebrand:

It ought to be a simple demographic fact, one of 78 million people born during the post-World War II population boom.

But somehow — mistakenly I would argue — the term has become synonymous with greedy, spoiled, divorced, remarried mega-shopper…

Plus, our nickname is highly vulnerable to delicious irony: The baby’s now on statins, the boomer’s gone bust.

“Boomer” has gotten such a bum rap that even our new president, who is a clear-cut boomer demographically (the boom years ran through 1964), has sought to link himself to a younger generation with a postboomer mentality, one that types with its thumbs to communicate and is not tainted by the cultural wars of the 1960s.

As a member of the much-maligned Generation X, I resent this latter-day effort by the preceding American population wave to co-opt the letter-designation label. We had the idea first. What’s more, ours carried a derisive air almost from Day One — now that it’s lost its negativity, the Boom-Babes want to adopt a version of it? Screw that. Go find another demographic to emulate.