I have to hand it to the Chinese. Why waste a bunch of money firing nuclear missiles at us, setting off World War III when you can just knock us off one at a time, starting with our children.
The vile plot came to light a couple days ago. U.S. Customs agents spotted 229 cartons of Halloween pirate costumes destined for a distributor in the Seattle area. Each costume, all 1,371 of them, contained 11 times the legal limit of lead.
Yes, the Chinese are continuing to try to knock off future generations of capitalist pig children in the U.S. by poisoning their trick or treat costumes.
Great. It’s not enough that kids have to worry about tampered candy laced with LSD and heroin. Oh, wait, that was back when I was a kid. My mother used to warn me not to take candy from strangers and any suspect candy she would hold onto. As noted previously, the suspected candy was almost always Snickers bars, 3 Musketeers, Milky Ways and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, which all, oddly enough, were also my mother’s favorites.
She’d leave me with the totally useless popcorn balls. Even if they had razor blades poking out of their popped corn sides I don’t think she would have cared. They weren’t on the “do not eat” list.
I suppose lead is bad for you, though I sincerely doubt that wearing a Halloween costume laden with lead for a day or two is really going to kill off a child. If I recall, my walls were painted with lead paint back when I was young and none of the paint chips I ate have affected me one little…ldasjdg;lgqpgg b aadoifdgi.
Sorry, I started to convulse a bit. It happens. Don’t really know why.
Back to Halloween costumes. O.K., so the Chinese are trying to kill us again. Should this be a surprise? It seems most of their products don’t meet our standards these days. I’m not sure we should be surprised. What? We want a cheap import and one that’s safe? Come on now, America. We really do want it all, don’t we?
I remember my Halloween costumes in the 1960s. Remember the ones that came in a box?
If not, here’s one to jog your memory. This is the President Jack Kennedy version in the popular Magic Glo version. It was supposed to be safer at night, largely because some mystery chemical was supposed to glow after being exposed to light.
I had a watch like that back then, too. The dial glowed because it used radium, which was radioactive. I’m sure Magic Glo technology wasn’t much better in its use of “Space Age” materials like radioactive glow-in-the-dark watch dials.
I never went out as Jack Kennedy. I’m not sure anyone did. What kid, outside of Mitt Romney, would want to trick or treat as the president back then? What a nutty costume. Small wonder it’s still available, in the box, on ebay.com.
Me? I went the popular route. I don’t really recall all the costumes I had as a kid, but I do remember being Fred Flintstone one year. My brother was the devil. Typecasting, I say.
Having worn these 1950s and 1960s costumes, I can’t really say that a little extra lead is a very big concern. For those too young to have donned one of these wonders of American manufacturing, I will walk you through it.
The body portion of the costume was like a gown you wear in the hospital. You put it on from the front and then your mother tied up the fabric ties in the back. The material was an equally space age fabric, one that I have since learned will easily burst into flames with the slightest contact with a candle.
I assume the reason why so many families had lots of kids back then was largely due to these costumes. At least initially, my mother would send me out trick or treating with a pumpkin with a candle in it to light the way. If I didn’t make it back from trick or treating, she had some back up children waiting in the wings to soften the blow. Sure, she’d miss me for a while, but then, like Mother Hubbard she would just overlook the fact that she had a Robb who tragically caught fire while going from house to house in search of candy.
The smockstume was bad enough. But to double down on the whole costume thing, they gave you a plastic mask to wear. The mask was secured to your face by an elastic cord that went over the back of your noggin. When the mask was on, you couldn’t see anything. There were just two small cutouts for the eyes, which totally eliminated any peripheral vision you had. So there you were, under 10 years old, crossing busy streets laden with candy, and you couldn’t see a car if your life depended on it, which of course, it did.
Even if you managed to get across the road, chances were good that you would suffocate. I remember breathing in these things, or should I say, trying to breathe. There were indeed two small holes in the mask for you to exhale, but they never seemed to match up with your particular nose. Every exhale stayed in the mask. As we know now, this fills the mask with carbon dioxide, which isn’t the best choice when you’re trying to take a breath in the cold October air.
Oxygen would never be in great supply, as you mostly sucked up the air inside the mask that you just let out. To add insult to injury, or perhaps even death, the exhalations would cause water vapor to form inside. All that breath you would ordinarily watch spill out of your mouth into the night air stayed inside, giving you a nice sweaty facial that had only one good aspect to it – it makes you forget that you can’t see out of the damned mask either.
So the Chinese put a little too much lead in the wench costume your daughter was looking forward to wearing it. Don’t let the Customs folks ruin Halloween. See if you can still find one of these babies on the market and fondly remember what it was like when you were a kid – trick or treating in a killer costume.
In the Emerald City, trying to buy that Jack Kennedy costume on Ebay so I can relive my youth as a total dork in a flammable smockstume,
– Robb