bwzzzat!

Are we too safety conscious?

There has never once - not ever - been a reported case of a child dying because of sticking a piece of metal into a wall outlet (and that's a fact), yet there have been over thirty million plastic outlet covers sold in the United States alone over the last decade. In fact, the only person to ever die of sticking anything into any outlet, ever, was a man named Stanley Ipkiss from Polotnicky, New Hampshire, who, through a series of unfortunate events, ended up slotting a two-pronged salad fork directly into an outlet while nude, and coated head-to-toe with a super-conductive gel. The ironic thing was that he stuck the fork into the outlet while trying to do what millions of Americans had safely done before him: pry off one of those stupid outlet covers.

This story would be a lot more disturbing, if not for the fact that I made it up just a second ago, as I also made up the statistics on outlet covers. I did this to avoid talking about what really happened - which is that I got shocked last night while standing in the middle of my yard in my underwear, trying to plug two cords together. I guess it goes to show you that the least safe thing, ever, is trusting a storyteller to write anything other than a fib. Magic lies, we call them. Magic lies.