June 08, 2005

• This is one of the most outrageously stupid things I've ever seen. Instead of waiting the week or two it'll take for a kid to shoot a marshmallow down his or her own throat and choke to death, how about if we beat the rush and take these off the market now?
• Oh hell, I don't know STB, when. We were kids they would build our all metal playgrounds over asphalt. At the end of a normal day I would have blisters from the hot metal slide and skinned knees from the asphalt. Not to mention a kid's game so fucking suicidal as something called Lawn Darts. It should have been called "flying hunks of metal designed poke your eyes out". I'd have to say that this toy is pretty damn harmless in any case.
• squid! jarts! i loved those.
• Compared to bottle rocket wars and shooting each other with BB guns, this is nothing.
• Shooting each other with BB guns while chasing each other on bikes. yes, it came to an end when one of us got hurt. no, he did not loose an eye.
• *PIFF!* that is the sound I believe a marshmallow projectile would make upon impact
• bottle rocket wars, that takes me back. We used to spend hours creating the perfect PVC "bazooka"...
• Respectfully disagree. We had BB guns and bottle rocket wars, too, and while that stuff sounds worse than this, there's a limit to how bad you can hurt yourself with a bottle rocket or a BB. The odds of stopping one with your eye are pretty small, and as bad as that might be, it's still not going to kill you. And stopping one with any other part of your body is just going to hurt like blazes. A toy that's going to dispense a marshamllow is a tempting thing to put in your mouth. A squishy food like a marshmallow that can conform to the shape of a small space like an airway can, in fact, kill you pretty easily if you have a way of getting it lodged in your throat. I know- the world ain't safe no matter how you slice it, and I'm all for falling out of trees and jit like that- hell, if you go the first ten years of your life without at least a broken leg, you're probably not taking enough chances. But I still think this is a terrible idea.
• Jack handles work well too, as do used caulking tubes (we used to swipe them from house construction sites in the neighborhood). Man, I don't know how I'm going to be able to teach my kids this stuff with Mrs. Tool around.
• >A toy that's going to dispense a marshmallow is a tempting thing to put in your mouth. If you're a toddler or very young child, I mean. It probably wouldn't be tempting to me. Not so much that I'd shoot it into my mouth, anyway. ...if I could figure out another way of getting the marshmallow.
• MCT: sometimes we would use electrical conduit pipe, but for most of us inch-and-a-quarter pvc was the way to go. You could use Y angles to make *handles*, dontcha know...
• Take a pencil eraser and pierce it with a long hat pin. Wrap tissue around the eraser end and tie it off with a twisted rubber band -- leave some tissue dangling to make a tail. 3/4" PVC pipe. Best dart-gun ever!
• Personally, I most enjoyed the roman candleball fights. The bottlerockets wars were fun too, but there's nothing like colored flaming projectiles to get your adrenaline pumping! One crazy-ass friend decided to aim with one of those Saturn Missile batteries once. He took out ten of us single-handedly, but got a nice melted-plastic burn on his hand in the process...
• Tennis ball cannon. Take three soda cans. Cut the tops and bottoms off of two of them; cut the top off of the third. Join the three sections with electrician's tape (duct tape hadn't yet been invented, or at least, not discovered in my neck of the 'bama burbs) to form a single long tube, closed at one end. Punch a small hole near the base of the closed end. Squirt lighter fluid down tube's length into closed end, then load with a tennis ball. Hold the flame of a butane lighter to the hole. *FLOOMPH*
• When I was a kid we used to drop M-80s in those old glass jugs for water coolers (the containers alot of people keep change in now)... Nothing like a 30lb. grenade going off on a residential street. Now THAT, STB, was stupid. I would feel no sympathy for any 'tard who actually shot one of these things in his/her mouth and died from it. Good riddance to bad rubbish
• Yup- that's dumb. Again, though, an M-80 will take your thumb off, but it still won't kill you. Oh, and stuff like this- >I would feel no sympathy for any 'tard who actually shot one of these things in his/her mouth and died from it. Good riddance to bad rubbish -for some reason, once you have a kid, people who say stuff like this don't sound cool and funny anymore. They just sound like they're saying words without thinking about what they mean.
• STB, I think you might have a point if the marshmallows were aflame. Hell, think of the super duper fun you'd have with projectile flaming smores. Yum.
• Hey! A Darwin gun. Modern man has turned into a bunch of the aforsaid marshmallows. What a bunch of wusses. Our ancestors flung dead horses over castle walls on a catapult. Our kids shoot marshmallows at each other. OK OK. I know it's not true that marshmallows are made from horse hooves.
• I love it when you daddies go all paternalistic and hyperprotective on teh Internet.
• I'm starting to feel like a real wet blanket, here. Wet blankets aren't safe, either, y'know. They can smother you. You should keep them awway from your kids. Hey, I did stupid stuff when *I* was a kid, too! I broke- (hastily switches to low whisper) I broke some guy's window once and nobody ever found out about it. Sometimes we used to sneak out backa the house and eat marshmallows, too. We knowed we weren't to do it, but we done it anyway. Well, fine. Have your fun- it's all very well until somebody puts an eye out. But when you get a marshmallow lodged in YOUR throat, don't come gesticulating wildly at ME to heimlich you! I'll just stand there and laugh.
• *turns blue, gestures frantically*
• heck, give 'em all real guns and tell them to go play... in the long run we'll be a better species for it....
• and, you guys better get a handle on stan..he's gonna have EVERYTHING banned before he's done! /runs with scissors
• Guns don't kill people. Marshmallows kill people.
• This is so wrong, but I couldn't resist the imagery. Thanks HB.
• The flaming marshmallow gun is an idea of genius. Particularly if each shot was followed by a jet of scalding hot chocolate. Sweet blistery goodness.
• STB totally sounds like the mom on A Christmas Carol. It's even funnier because I think he's serious.
• and...SMT...he has a girl friend...
• A marshmellow landed in my mouth! OH NOES!!! Whatever should I do to get out of these dire circumstances? * GULP * Whew! That was a close one.
• I'm telling you kids once - if ANY ONE gets hurt with a marshmallow, you ALL are grounded. That's right, HuronBob, I'm looking at you! Now put those scissors down before someone gets hurt. And anyone that's carrying pencils in their front pcoket, take 'em out now. We'll have no pierced scrotums on my watch, ya little degenerates. *notices goetter standing in the doorway* Hey! IN or OUT!! What, are we air conditioning the entire neighborhood now?? *squints, glares, scratches butt* awrright then. Who wants a juicebox?
• My uncle was in the big one. A week before he was supposed to come home, his platoon got ambushed. A jerry threw a marshmallow into the trench where they'd taken cover. My uncle... he... threw himself on it. Sacrificed himself to save his buddies. It's... difficult for me to talk about it. Oh, sure- go ahead and laugh. (sobs quietly)
• The way your Dad looked at it, that marshmallow was your birthright. He'd be damned if any monkeys were gonna put their greasy monkey hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long years, he wore this marshmallow up his ass. Then he died of dysentery, he gave me the marshmallow. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of horse's hoof up my ass two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the marshmallow to you.
• never.eat.brown.marshmallows ewwwwwwww
• Ok, perhaps if you have a crap load of marshmallows stuffed in your mouth...
• marshmallows gone bad! worst thing i did as a kid: broke open an old-timey thermometer and played with the mercury balls. good times.
• Aaaah, that explains it!
• you there! Pick up that blood!
• Marshmellows around the world stand poised, ready to overblominate an unsuspecting world. After years of experimentation in MMHQ, they've finaly managed to invent a device so dastardly, so crazy that it just might work. Called a "Marshmellow Launcher", this device will distibute marshmellows where you'd least suspect them: In your mouth! Through subtle machinations, the marshmellows have managed to trick the CEOs of Playskool, Fisher Price, and Toys R Us into producing this vile "launcher" and are, even now, lying in wait. Soon the distribution of the "launchers" will be complete, and it'll be too late to prevent the overblomination.
• No doubt a lot of marshmallows are going to be lost in the heat of battle. No doubt they'll all be found by ants.
• In grade school, we constructed model African and Eskimo villages from powdered asbestos, which we mixed together with water in big bowls. Naturally, when the teacher was out of the room, we rolled the asbestos into little balls, put them into our mouths and shot them at each other through straws.
• Whoa. /Keanu Reeves
• Apart from breaking some 15th century church windows with a tennisball and inundating my new school building it's opening day (yay, two days off) I've been very good.