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The deer hunter

Now that Christmas is a month old, it’s time for an annual Collision Detection tradition: Rolling up our sleeves to research which toys turned out to be not only fun and delightful, but completely and totally lethal.
So — it’s off to visit the web site for World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH), which compiles an annual list of the gleaming new playthings most likely to cause injuries worthy of the Gashlycrumb Tinies. My personal wince-inducing favorite? The “Stats Bounce Jump Around,” illustrated above with the two cherubs having a whale of a time. When the WATCH people examined the toy more closely, they discovered one of the more remarkable warning labels in the history of toydom:
Cautions found only on the package insert include: “Requires adult supervision at all times” and “Follow these rules to avoid drowning, paralysis or other serious injury”.
That’s right: Even the manufacturer is worried that the toy will turn your kid into a quadreplegic.
You can check out the rest of the list, and when you’re done — hey! Why not drop by Safe Child’s unspeakably gruesome Toy Recall Database, pump your favorite body part into the search engine, and find out precisely what toy would be most suitable for mutilating it beyond recognition. Predictably, a search for “eye” turns up some of the more bleak results. Apparently the “Flying Copters” produced by International Playthings has resulted in “permanent blindness not only to children but to adults as well.”
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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