Buckyballs don't always show up on Xrays. Have them MRI'd, you'll find them if there are any inside your coworkers. And the MRI machine will remove them for you!
Some dumb motherfucker let their kid swallow a ball that expands in water SHUT IT DOWN Thanks, Texas.
Heh, I care less about that one, because as a kid, I thought those toys sucked and were stupid. Like, the least exciting toy ever. Hey look, my unexciting small thing, turned into a slightly larger sponge thing. Oh boy!
Wait, the exact toy in question was a ball.. that expanded into a bigger ball? Maybe I have overly high expectations from what a toy is, but that strikes me as entirely stupid. When I was a kid they at least turned into fucking dinosaurs or some shit.
Worth noting - I don't live in Humble. I live in Tomball. I used to live in the vicinity of Humble, because it's basically just a swollen appendage of Houston, just on the other north side from where I am and you have to drive through it to get to either Kingwood or Chez Nous. This is the first that I'm hearing this story and I can't find it written up in any local news accessible on the internet. My question, though, is how in the holy hell did an eight month old kid swallow a marble? And not choke? By all rights, the kid should have strangled to death. That's why marbles are labeled as a choking hazard - because tiny throats can choke on them. It's right there in the name. What happened here is some kid with an abnormally large orifice deep throated a marble and then the marble did something weird. I don't see how you evaluate an edge case as an additional risk when the operative lethal effect should be the choking hazard. The unique danger here is that you somehow swallow it (because you're either compulsive or too stupid to realize that swallowing things you find on the ground is generally a bad idea or possibly because you are a Jivaro Shaman) and then something happens, but if you swallow it, you're probably already dead anyway. The operative risk is the choking hazard - not the bowel obstruction. So why does the potential for bowel obstruction even enter into the thought process here? That feels like banning the sale of candy with razor blades in it because the razor blades contain high levels of accumulative poisons.
No toddlers who like to pick shiny things up in the house I hope :) The fact that they were marketed in toy stores, the toy section of Amazon, etc. gave me pause, but then we do sell toys for "____ and up," I think this is overprotection.
I agree with George Carlin who, in talking about the benefits of human evolution, said "the kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own."
Yeah I remember those dinosaurs you dropped into a glass of water and you watched them grow and it was all HOLYSHITBALLS AMAZING.
And then, in the end you ended up with a small dinosaur shaped sponge, which you could uhm, I dunno, like mop up a small spill or something with?
There's some serious fucking cognitive dissonance involved in seeing the 'feds ban buckyball toy' thread right under the 'maybe we should talk about gun control so kids stop getting shot' thread. I guess Buckyballs needed a better lobby.
The framers should have put the right to bare rare earth magnets in the constitution if they thought we should have them.
Unfortunately that is expressly prohibited by many decency laws, both at the federal and state levels.
