Looking up the ducks ass

On the news last night (yeah, I still watch it but I am trying to confine myself to the national news) I saw a young mother looking up the ass of a stuffed toy duck. The reason she was doing this is that the Mattel Toy Company has everyone with young children checking every toy they have, checking for lead and magnets. This is the 2ND time in a couple of weeks that major recalls have been issued.

We have banned lead for the past 30 years in the U.S. but we just can’t seem to control the introduction of lead into products sold in this country. I used to contend that beyond toys, lead may also have been introduced into the food chain in the early 1970’s, primarily food consumed by children and teenagers.

When I was a child, I couldn'twait to get outside and play, it didn’t matter what we played, we just did not want to be inside. In the early 70’s, I started to notice a lack of children outside so I checked to see if the birth rate had declined. Nope, no decrease in the birth rate (we provided two for the world) so I started looking elsewhere for the missing kids.

What I eventually discovered was children over the age of five had large amounts of lead in their system and they were staying indoors. Did exposure to the sun cause some chemical reaction that I was not aware of? I had to know why since I was concerned that our two kids would suffer from the same prognosis. Since I did not have the Internet then, research was difficult so I had to depend on asking parents why their kids were absorbing lead in record numbers, what kind of diet did they have?

What I found was not what I thought at all. Yes, there was lead, no it did not come from their diets. It came from a change of habit. Since all I did at that time was work, go to school and sleep, I had missed a major change in the everyday life of kids (and many adults), the introduction of video games. What I found was not lead from paint, all of the lead was in their ass and they could no longer lift their large behinds off of the couch.