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©Lee J. Ostaszewski, 2007

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  • Column from the Week of August 27, 2007

    Caution: Made in China
    by Lee Ostaszewski

    A warning to all parents whose children play with toys: Chances are the toys that provide your children with many hours of fun and learning are extremely deadly. Not deadly like in those “Chucky” movies were a psychotic doll comes to life and starts chasing people around with a butcher knife. But deadly in the sense that they are made in China and might contain lead paint, or melamine, or tainted dog food, or some other extremely dangerous substance such as trans fats.

    Although, I bet if someone could get close enough to Chucky without being stabbed, they would find that Chucky was made in China and contains lead paint, also.

    Almost daily it seems that some product from China is being recalled here in the United States. This makes me wonder if perhaps it is more than an accident. Perhaps it is a devious plot by the Chinese government to kill off Americans one at a time in an extremely slow manner so the Chinese could eventually take over our country and gain control of the single most powerful force in the entire universe.

    It is a force more powerful than nuclear fusion or even that trick where you drop several Mentos into a soda bottle and it shoots a soda fizz geyser a dozen feet into the air. What force, you ask, could possibly be more powerful than a Mentos-soda geyser?

    That force is Oprah Winfrey.

    If the Chinese government controlled “The Oprah Winfrey Show” all I would have left to say would be whatever the Chinese translation for “Goodnight, America” is.

    But your focus right now shouldn’t be on the fate of our nation; that’s because your child just stuck another lead paint encrusted Chinese manufactured toy product into his mouth.

    While you are busy extracting the toy, then tossing all the toys into trash bags to take them to a hazardous waste drop off site, take a moment to reflect back on your own carefree childhood.

    It was a childhood filled with wonderful toys that were not only fun and missing batteries, but were also choking hazards, had sharp metal edges, or had cords that were too long and could get wrapped around your tiny, child-sized neck.

    And while you are remembering these good times ask yourself this one important question: Which were better, Playskool Weebles or those Fisher-Price Little People?

    I wasn’t previously aware that this was a major issue because I was not of the Weebles generation per se (per se is Latin for, “I’m way older than that”). But apparently this was a point of contention among some children at the time.

    I learned about this a few weeks ago when a relative, Chrissie, confessed that when she was a child in the 1980s she loved her Weebles and thought that her best friend’s Little People were bogus. I can’t recall if she used the exact word bogus, but the meaning she wanted to convey was that the Fisher-Price Little People were wicked lame.

    But Chrissie’s Weebles weren’t today’s choke-resistant, rotund Weebles. These were the original Weebles that could perfectly lodge themselves inside small throats. The Fisher-Price Little People had a similar airway-blocking design and also, like the old Weebles, were armless and legless.

    Chrissie couldn’t really explain to us the differences between the two in detail. And all I could remember about Weebles were that, “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”

    Luckily, we have the second most powerful force in the universe at our disposal, the Internet. Anything you could imagine has already been posted there by someone. This became official on April 2, 2003, when Art Smigler of Tonganoxie, Kan. added the final missing piece by uploading his collection of photos of farm pigs dressed up as historical American Colonial figures such as Ben “Frank”-lin and John “Ham”-cock.

    What I discovered after looking at Internet pictures of old Weebles was that they were these freaky, egg-shaped people that for some reason remind me of a happy-go-lucky Dick Cheney.

    When today’s Weebles start resembling an Asian version of Oprah, however, that’s when we know China is ready to swoop in.


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