Slashdot Mirror
Dirty Dozen- The Most Dangerous Toys of 2001
An anonymous reader pointed us to The Dirty Dozen
which lists the most dangerous toys for children. #1 on the list is Metal Gear Solid 2 (which I finished this weekend and highly recommend)
Also making the cut are Gundam and Dragonball Zaction figures (nothing scarier then Bulma on a bad hair day I guess), Super Street Fighter II and Doom. Of course the specific version of doom they classify as one of the most dangerous toys of 2001 is the Game Boy Advanced port, and I gotta agree with them on the GBA thing, those things are dangerous. Play for more then 30 minutes, and you go blind.
It should be noted that #1 on the list is the MGS2 Solid Snake ACTION FIGURE, not the game.
Kids who grew up on a farm knew all about sticking pigs and chopping off chicken heads for dinner, as well as procreation. They shouldn't so be isolated from 'reality', it just creates people who are so darned squimish they donate money to PETA and worry about rabbits getting a rash from testing cosmetics on them.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Here's a page with links to previous years' Dirty Dozen lists.
I am always surprised when they list Nerf toys as dangerous and encouraging kids to be violent. It's Nerf for goodness sakes!
Not only that, but when they do single out a Nerf toy, it's usually one of the pathetically underpowered ones. Case in point: Their 1988-89 Dirty Dozen List shows the Nerf Pulsator as the top offender. My favorite gripe of theirs: "box refers to the darts as "ammo."".
Pinball was a different situation. The City of Chicago banned it inside the city limits, largely, I think, because it was used for illegal gambling. Which was ironic because Chicago was the place where most of the machines were made (Chicago Coin, Chicago Dynamic Industries, etc.). Or perhaps that was why it had once gotten out of hand.
I grew up in the New York area where pinball was everywhere and considered quite harmless. Sure, if you "won" (mostly on skill) you got a free game for your quarter. But that wasn't really gambling. Indeed a good resort hotel was one where the kids' area (in those days, the early sixties, many resort hotels had supervised summer camp-like kids' programs; as a parent today, I miss them) had a *free* pinball machine (often just the door taken off the coin box). I played them the way kids today play video games. And the video game largely killed pinball by displacing it from arcades, though there are some diehard pinball fans and some machines still around.
The Lionandlamb listing is, as others have noted, a list of violent, not "dangerous", games and toys. A different list comes out every year of dangerous toys, things that can actually hurt your body. Check out http://www.toysafety.org . Most of these look innocent but have parts that come loose in the wrong way, or have some other non-obvious hazard.
I really miss my old Micronaut toys. The rocket launchers on those things could fire small bits of plastic at near relativistic speeds.
Nail on the head. However, what scares me about people like this is their inherent need to impress their views on others. Maybe some are just looking out for their own kids (of course if this is the case why can't they just go to the store and look at the toy themselves..), but far too many of them want to rant to the world about how this or that toy is BAD. Very rarely is this just to share opinions, most often it's a nice subtle way of saying "this is how YOU should raise YOUR children".
Then again, I may be biased. I grew up with oodles of everything that was claimed to be violent/pornographic/bad for kids, and I'm a hell of a lot more stable and non-violent that a lot of people out there. *shrug* Guess my parents took the time to explain reality vs. fantasy to me.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Repeated exposure to sounds over 85dB can permanently damage adult hearing, and it doesn't take nearly as much exposure to harm an infant's still-developing ears. And some of the tested toys reached 105dB! Also, infants don't always have the capacity to get away from painfully loud sounds, nor do they necessarily try to move away from merely loud sounds.
It was an interesting listen. ('Course, I had to have the radio up to '8' to make out the words. Too much of The Who at age 1, I suppose... :-)
John
John