I’m actually really good at those claw machines you find in movie theater lobbies and arcades. A life of twitch reflexes and joystick clutching has made me extremely beloved by small children: I’ll just walk into an arcade with a pocketful of jangling quarters when I’m depressed, start playing the claw machine, and give out the toys to the bratty kids who greedily surround me.
kids
Wired On The Criminalization of Chemistry Sets
By 5.30.06
Those damned enemies of America, lurking about behind their laser-refracting coke-bottle glasses, sporting Al Qaeda pocket protectors, mixing volatile chemicals in their garage!
Oozinator YTMND
By 5.19.06
Cementing its status as a fully-fledged, card-carrying, dues-paying, internet meme, the infamous Oozinator has been splattered into a YTMND.
Huffy Gets Basketball Right
By 5.15.06
We remember Huffy for their bikes. Those first, off-the-rack bikes given by a grandfather hefting one down from the K-mart rack. He puts it down and says, take this for a ride and see how it does you, sport. Eagerly we climbed on, not knowing of course at that tender age that we would later mock the very transportation device for its middling charm, simplicity and inability to traverse mud splattered boulders.
How Not To Use A Trampoline
By 5.2.06
Years ago, when I was a daredevil lad, I once used a pair of pogo stilts to jump off of the roof of my house and onto my backyard trampoline. It seemed like a great idea at the time. For a brief moment, I was Icarus, soaring godlike into the stratosphere. The next thing I know, the nose cone of an oncoming Logan-bound Airbus had exploded into my crotch. As I plummeted a truly terrifying distance back down to the earth, I realized that my options were not really very good: either I fell, allowing the impact with the black asphalt below to trigger the nasal expulsion of my own gelatinated pelvis, or I braced with the pogo sticks and risked jumping even higher. Possibly directly into the sun.
Advertising in Schools: How Bad Is It?
By 1.23.06
Having been referred to an article in USA Today about advertising in schools, our initial instinct was the same as Nancy Cox, the quoted president of the Florida PTA, who said, “We are opposed to using children for commercial purposes.” That was the self-inflicted antibodies against indoctrination talking, though, and we quickly shook them off. (And not just because the fruits of child labor are as sweet as child-labor-produced sugar.)
