Cal Jacobson's Blog

Do not try this at home: hypothetical AquaDots ingestion!

Tonight the Jacobson family hit the jackpot in the latest round of the Chinese Slipshod Toy Quality Lottery. AquaDots have apparently has been recalled. The problem?

If swallowed, the seemingly harmless pellets metabolize into a date-rape drug known as Liquid Ecstacy.

The toy itself is pretty clever: take a bunch of colored beads, place them into entertaining shapes on a special tray, spray them with water and voila! They stick together as sort of a 21st-century doily. My kids made a couple of stick figures and a darling yellow and black kitty, as seen to the right.

A yellow and black kitty ready to take the young’ns on a wild ride of self-discovery and trippitude, that is!

After hearing about the recall on the radio tonight on the drive home, I burst into my house and snatched the evil thing away from my helpless offspring. Well, not quite: they were busy playing with Play-Doh and didn’t notice. Still, crisis narrowly averted, I say!

Fear not, parental units…according to this New York Times article, the bead manufacturer has promised to “add a safe but foul-tasting ingredient to future beads to discourage children from eating them.” Yeah, that’ll work…since the kids who were affected by the drug ate them not because of their bright, candy-like colors but obviously from their sublime flavor.

And does anybody want to take bets as to how long it will be before we hear of some paint-huffing asshats buying two dozen of these kits from Wal-Mart? I mean, the meth-heads have already made the purchase of over-the-counter medicines a pain in the butt (in my area, at least), so is this scenario that outrageous:

Cashier: I’m sorry sir, you’ve got too many toy items.

Parent: Excuse me?

Cashier: You have three Chinese-manufactured toy items in your cart; by law I’m only allowed to sell you two at a time.

Parent: Uh…ok. I guess I won’t take the G.I. Joe action figure.

Cashier: All righty. Can I see some I.D., please? (In walkie-talkie): Can I get manager approval on lane 8?

At least the stuff China is producing right now is only toxic. Wait until they start shipping toys that somehow, inexplicably, explode when they get too hot. Or too cold. Or on Tuesday. Gosh, the American public might even demand somebody to be accountable for that sort of thing. Maybe even decide to stop buying products from a Communist country with an abysmal human-rights record, few environmental controls whatsoever, and more oversight as to what their citizens see on the Internet than the products they sell to the rest of the world.

Yeah, crazy talk. I must be getting a contact high from the yellow and black kitty.

At least in Connecticut….

Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming [courant.com's] reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.

[...]

… even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.

You may have heard about how the Kim family ordeal ended.

I mention this because for some unknown reason I bothered to read the related thread on Fark.com and was moved by the tremendous amount of stupidity I found…and I don’t just mean the typical trolls that post something insensitive. No, I’m also talking about the emotional hand-wringers who are calling Kim a “hero” for leaving his car and dying alone in the woods.

Mind you, I’m not saying that James Kim deserved to die.…but I can’t help but wonder why the hell they were on that road during the winter in the first damn place.

One Farker posted a picture that allegedly showed one of the warning signs along that road. Call me crazy, but I don’t doubt him one bit; I’ve seen plenty of roads with similar signage in Colorado and Washington state. If the Kim family drove past one of those large, brightly-colored signs and ignored the cautionary text, then they were stupid.

Maybe I’m going to hell for suggesting such a thing. Some of Fark’s more sensitive posters suggested that the sign, which supposedly said “road may be blocked by snowdrifts,” wasn’t a strong enough warning.

Poppycock. That mentality is why we have warning labels on hammers instructing people to wear goggles during use. There is a very good reason why you must pass a couple of tests to earn the privilege of operating a motor vehicle: it’s easy to kill yourself or others with a car if you don’t pay attention to details.

I am very happy to hear that Kim’s wife and two young children survived. I’m sure that James’ decision to leave his car and family to search for help was a difficult one. But doing so does not, as so many Farkers emotionally penned, make Kim a hero. He may have been a victim – of somebody else’s incompetence or his own — but to call his actions heroic merely illustrate how abused and meaningless the word “hero” has become.

The Kim family, once they found themselves stuck, did do some smart things. They stayed in the car, as is suggested by survivalists and law enforcement officials. They ran the engine sparingly — just enough to warm the car — and were able to make the most out of their remaining gas. They set their tires on fire: something that had not occured to me but would have provided additional heat as well as a plume of thick black smoke for rescuers to see. Mrs. Kim and her children were spotted thanks to an umbrella covered with reflective tape, another good idea.

What happened to the Kims is a tragedy. But calling James Kim a hero is nonsense, perpetuated by people who want some sort of happy ending or uplifting note for this story.