Raising The Bar On Stupidity

If you read the newspaper and believe all the stories about dangerous or recalled toys out there today, you might also wonder how I managed to live past the age of twelve without the Consumer Product Safety Council there to protect my every move.

“Fisher-Price is recalling about 150,000 defective Grow-to-Pro Pogo Sticks and about 50,000 Lil' Wagster Dragster push toys because they pose an injury risk to children, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The CPSC says Fisher-Price has received 17 reports of injuries from the pogo sticks, including one of teeth being knocked out.”

Pogo Sticks and push toys are wrecking havoc??? Give me a break here, puuuuleaze. I guess that we need to hire every kid a lifetime lawyer to protect them, rather than raising them to employ a little common sense and develop some self defense skills.

We had things like Monkey Bars, BB guns, bow and arrow sets, gas powered model airplanes, and flying model rockets. By modern consumer standards is it not a miracle that I am alive today with ten fingers and ten toes attached? A pogo stick and push toys would have been a welcome safety improvement from the things we did in my neighborhood.

This list doesn’t even include things that I made up myself to play with—legally. Remember those “Junior Chemistry Sets” with real alcohol burning Bunsen burners and jars full of chemicals?

In case the FBI is reading this posting--I did not know that you could make black powder by combining sulfur, potassium nitrate, and charcoal. I also didn’t know that you could take common “sparklers”—you know, those wire things made out of magnesium and phosphorus salts that you lit with a match that would burn happily at 2000 degrees F while toddlers ran around helter skelter waiving them over their heads—crush the material off of the wire, combine it in a small container covered with masking tape, light the homemade fuse, and run like hell as it exploded in a pyrotechnic display certain to burn holes in the back of your T-shirt from thirty feet away. Luckily I didn’t know how to do that.

Or there was the time I produced the flying coke can. I mounted a Cox .049 model airplane engine on the closed end of a common empty Coke can, cut the other end off of the can and folded four sharp aluminum “blades” outward on the modified can, started the motor, and tossed the flying meat cleaver into the air in the midst of three or four of my juvenile onlookers. This thing would roar around our front yard until it ran out of gas or crashed into a tree or the ground or hit one of the aforementioned bystanders.

Hypnotized with Sony Playstations and Gameboys, Kids today just don’t know how to have a truely safe, good time.

Now where are my lawn darts? I wanna go outside and play…