Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 11:36:09 -0800
From: "Dennis Dawson" <ddawson@us.oracle.com>
To: balloon@balloonhq.com
Subject: Re: Two-headed Baby Actually Elvis's Alien Lovechild?

Dave writes:

>While working the restaurant,
>I was told by the mother of a two year old
>that her neighbor had recently lost their baby
>of 21 months when she bit a balloon animal
>and inhaled at the startling noise, sucking a
>piece of the balloon into her air canal.
>The baby died.

Folks, please resist the urge to send in undocumented third-party
accounts of the horrors of balloons. If you can point to an article in a
respectable (non-tabloid) newspaper that describes an event like this,
fine. But this is most likely an urban legend. Why? Because it happened
to a third party that the hearer of the story had never met. There's no
name, date, or place so it can't be substantiated. You can't say it's a
lie, but you're expected to accept it at face value.

What's the problem with this? There are so few documented cases of
children choking on balloons, but everyone seems to know of someone to
whom this has happened.

Also, picture a scenario like this. Four parents at a school are
talking.

1: "The new rage is braiding your nose hairs."
2: "Yes, my daughter says there's a girl in her class with braided nose
hairs."
3: "Oh my! I saw a girl at the market with braided nose hairs!"
4: "There's a new girl at our church, and _she_ braids her nose hairs!"

All parents go home and admonish their children, "I don't want you to go
in for this crazy fad of braiding your nose hairs."

One week later, red-eyed, sniffling kids are sitting on the playground
with tweezers, painstakingly winding their nose hairs.

All those girls the parents were talking about...same girl. Except the
last parent, who hadn't actually seen it, but had seen a girl who had
braided nose hair in a Buddhist temple on PBS, so she wanted to chime
in, but to make the story more interesting she changed it to someone she
knew in the local Baptist church.

Kids can choke on balloons. We have to be ever vigilant. We have to
educate and sometimes restrict access to balloons. But for corn's sake,
no more "I heard that someone once had a cousin whose butcher once
thought that someone in his church had a friend whose mother's second
cousin had a granddaughter who choked on a balloon" stories.

If you can't document it, please don't post it.

Cap'n Denny (the Urbane, Legendary Red Flash)