November 08, 2007

• "Drawback"?
• Ah crap, it's GHB, not GBH.
• *plops old GBH vinyl on the turntable and cranks it*
• It makes you wonder where the toy industry is next headed, considering the recent spate of recalls from toys manufactured in China. It's gotten to the point that I am fully paranoid to purchase any toy (or any good for that matter) for my children that has been produced in China. They (and I use they rather loosely) don't give a rat's ass about the children coming into contact with these cheaply made items. It's bad enough that I have to worry about lead-tainted goods, now there's this bizarre new twist? I'm sure if this happened back when I was in high school, we would have piled in to a car and made a mad dash for the nearest Toys 'R Us to get all the Aqua Dots we could...
• Even worse, smt, is the fact that children are often suffering to manufacture children's toys. Between the recalls and the labor abuses, I've renewed my commitment to avoid consumer goods whose manufacture has been outsourced to countries with lax or nonexistence labor and safety laws. Problem is, it's pretty difficult, and expensive, to do that.
• An article about the same report cited above, but more focused on the use of underage workers.
• I completely agree, Nick. And you are correct, it is very difficult and expensive to avoid such goods. Child labor is another can of worms that makes me cringe while walking the aisles of the local toy shop (or clothes store, etc., and so on...). I was surprised to see that Silly Putty is still manfactured in the USA, after purchasing for my son a couple weeks ago.
• "considering the recent spate of recalls from toys manufactured in China." Nah, it's not recent, it's just that recently that the toys have come under suspicion.
• A more in-depth NY Times article re: Aqua Dots. Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, outside Sydney, first believed that the 2-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, had an inherited metabolic disorder. But when Dr. Carpenter checked urine samples the next day for the chemical markers of the disorder, he found GHB, which can render victims unconscious and even cause death through respiratory failure. “We suspected at that time the child had been surreptitiously given” the drug by a family member or friend of the family, he said by phone from Sydney on Wednesday. A follow-up test two days later showed that the GHB had disappeared from the boy’s body, which confirmed that the chemical had been ingested and was not occurring because of a genetic disorder. It was then that Dr. Carpenter learned that the boy had vomited beads before and after going into a shallow coma. Dr. Carpenter obtained more of the boy’s beads and tested them in a mass spectrometer, a device that helps identify chemical compounds. “I saw a large peak of a substance I didn’t recognize,” he said.
• when did Darwin become a toy-maker? *shudders*
• "SOLD OUT!" LOL.
• I still don't understand why a toy comprised of small, brightly-colored plastic beads is being purchased for kids young enough to want to swallow small, brightly-colored plastic beads. Then again, I also don't understand why people get sick from e. coli-infected hamburger. Did they not cook their hamburger? Isn't thoroughly cooking hamburger supposed to kill e. coli? Isn't that WHY we cook hamburger really well? Then again, I feel that every day I understand the world just a little bit less than I did the day before. Please excuse me, I'm going to hike up my pants and take a nice slow-speed shuffle through the mall.
• Because kids pop things into their mouth all the time, right up until about age 11, but most of the time you figure that a toy you bought them isn't laced with poison. I mean, I guess they could put warning labels on them: CAUTION: THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS MIND ALTERING DATE-RAPE DRUG. But I don't think that'd go over so well with their target consumers.
• Target consumers, no. Other consumers, yes.
• I left that open just for you, Captain.
• Pleasure doing business.
• Well, I hope my kids like the hand-made-in-rural-Ozark-workshops wooden train set I got them, since that's the only thing I won't be taking back to the store. (Hope the wood they used isn't treated with arsenic...oh, bugger...)
• Makes me glad my parents didn't go in for the whole buy-the-kids-the-latest-toy thing.
• It's pretty sad, because it looks like a kind of cool toy. You know, encouraging creativity and all that. Why couldn't it be Barbie poisoning kids?
• It is, just in a different way.
• Makes me glad I had to make due with an empty oatmeal tin and a bunch of mismatched Tupperware. And you are so, so right, roryk!
• Well said, roryk. That's the sad part, children slaving to make toys for other children. The scary part is that it's often hard to track where toys are made. And affording many of the US made toys is out of the question for many parents/grandparents on a limited budget. Pretty scary. I was all set to think about this one for Christmas. Bummer. Guess I better get started making presents now.
• I still don't understand why a toy comprised of small, brightly-colored plastic beads is being purchased for kids young enough to want to swallow small, brightly-colored plastic beads. Well, toys for big kids have turned out to be dangerous too...
• Don't be so sure about that oatmeal tin, Lara.
• Don't worry, Nickdanger! Barbie is poisonous, too. Personally when I was a kid, I made do with Milky the Cow. Yes, I had one, and it was just as awesome as you always imagined. Milky was probably poisonous, too, now that I think of it. :-(
• eeeeeeek to the Quaker story!
• The cow. Drinks water. Through. Her. Udders. The. Cow. Drinks. Water. Through her udders. The cow... *hed asplodes*
• *another hed aspolodes!
• Hey, watch again. When you pull her tail, her head lowers into a trough of water. She even comes with her own trough accessory.
• 
• Fuck this "date rape drug" shit. I want the beaded plastic toys that metabolize into MDMA.
• I stand corrected. I was too traumatized by that awful jingle to pay proper attention to the cow's anatomy.