The Grey Room

 

actually, it's because American comedies suck goat balls these days.

 

Remember when cap guns came with a ribbon that the hammer had to strike and sparks would fly out all over so you risked eye injuries?. You could also hit them with rocks and have them go off. My sister actually had to go to the hospital because my cousins accidentally got her in the eye with a cap gun ribbon spark.

 

I have one cousin who, as a kid, I swear had no less than five times he had to have stitches in his head from falling or running into banisters, gas meters, etc. That was back in the day you did not sue everybody and their brother if your kid got hurt doing stupid crap like playing with paper airplanes in church. you just hauled the kid to the emergency room, got him or her sewed up like you were repairing a jacket and turned the little darling loose again.

You're lucky a bruise and hearing loss was all it did. The Unibomber used to make his pipe bombs from matchstick heads.

 

Bastille Dude wrote: I had forgotten about those cap guns with the ribbon caps. When I was about 13 or 14, my best friend and I had this brilliant idea of taking a empty CO2 cartridge from a bb gun and filling the inside with hundreds of paper match tip heads. We fashioned a fuse from some leftover fireworks and found a copper tube with a diameter just wide enough to fit the CO2 cartridge. We rode our bikes to the local park and brought our crude, homemade firework with us. My friend lit the fuse while I dropped the CO2 cartridge into the copper pipe like a rocket launcher. When the fuse hit the match tip heads the copper pipe exploded and hit me in the leg very hard leaving a bruise, also there was a giant BOOM! That left me deaf in my left ear for like two weeks. We never attmepted that stupid stunt again.

 

A coffee shop I hang out in from time to time has a couple of them. They were clear plastic mazes that were in a circle with coloured plastic backing and these drops of mercury in them. You moved the maze and the mercury would slither through the walls of the maze.

 

I miss that sort of thing-lead paint, lead metal toys, toys and playground equipment that could kill you, anti-bacterial nothing, mercurachrome that stung the living sh*t out of you when your parents put it on your cuts...but no one would sue someone for their kids getting hurt and no one had these bizarre allergies such as eating a peanut butter sandwich and keeling over. i think that in the past few decades we raised generations of wusses who will be offed by a jar of Skippy. Like, when my grandmother made dinner, she cut the veggies and chicken on the same board with the same knife. Nobody got sick on it that i know of. Now everybody freaks over e coli in spinach-in the day, your system would be immune to this because everything was contaminated with SOMETHING.

 

You have doctors now relating allergies and such with a lack of immunity to bacteria and dirt. This one doctor would let his infant play with the dog's toy and would feed her off of the floor, claiming the child has never been sick a day yet and that it is actually good for the child because it wards off allergies. He is most likely correct. Over samitization, in my opinion, is as bad as utter filth. If you are not exposed to bacteria, your body cannot build an immunity. We are freaking out over spinach, for example, when our ancestors ate stew that sat in a pot cooking constantly without refrigeration and with fresh ingredients added to stuff that had been in the pot for weeks on end. They ate bugs and molds and stuff that is too gross to even think about in their bread. They would go get meat that had been hanging in rafters since fall and that was crawling with all sorts of unclean thing sat a market and it would not be refrigerated. They left butter and cheese out in all sorts of temperatures. And they lived. Now, you have people being rushed to the hospital because they ate something that came in contact with a pistachio.

 

I'm not suggesting it either and I am well aware some died. My point was is that when you are exposed to bacteria and dirt that you build immunities. Our systems could not last a day eating and living like our ancestors did even in pre WW2 days.