Did anyone here ever read “The Toys of Peace” by H.H. Munro, aka Saki.? It may be close to a century old, but it’s adult characters worrying about the affect of violent toys on children are totally contemporary. As are what the children end up doing with the “peace toys.” Here is a link:
Blowing up MAILBOXES?
Hey, that’s a federal offense, bud.
At least the GOV’MENT wouldn’t come after you if you got caught blowing up trash cans…
You lucky Bastages. We couldn’t get explosives until we were old enough to drive unsupervised to a neigboring state.
Now to tie the ends together…
The GI Joes, being a fighting force for democratic capitalism, seem to have had a vast arsenal of devices designed to elicit covetous responses from small children with a desire for change. Yes, these children desired to see big things made into little things through the use of explosive technology.
Explosives and GI Joes being expensive, you had to learn to work the system hard to get the cash to buy more than your neighbor. Money earning strategies such as “Please please please please DAaaaaAADDD!!!” evolved to mildly profitable endeavors such as lemonade stands or the even more profitable extortion of smaller people running lemonade stands. Everyone wanted more and everyone learned to work hard to get more, consequences be damned.
But in galaxies such as Guinastasia’s, Barbies ruled in a socialist orgy of free love. People knew that their works would be stolen and distributed to the slackers, and so no-one worked hard. Why, history teachers ignored the battleships of WWI, engineers designed toilets with a filter. It was mass chaos. Guin’s parents, seing the destruction around them, sent her off to earth as their planet’s last hope. But their socialist scientists, in typical socialist sloth, didn’t realize that Earth’s yellow sun would take away all her superpowers.
So… Barbie’s rule = socialist chaos. GI Joes = freedom and democracy.
…and why, exactly, did they call you BoringDad again?
I mean the toilet tank. That’s what she called it, and I never really thought about it.
D’oh! I didn’t know that there was an HMS Queen Mary. I was thinking of RMS Queen Mary. :smack:
My dad and his sisters once blew up a neighbor’s newspaper roadbox, because the guy wasn’t paying his bill. Hehehehe…(My dad’s youngest sister was a paper girl).
Well, a PAPER box is one thing.
But we were convinced that the FBI would come after you if you blew up a MAILBOX.
J. Edgar Hoover was still alive back then, you see…
… and had all his GI Joes dressed in Barbie’s clothes.
Ah. Okay. Toilet TANK.
Found out the hard way what happens when you put a firecracker in THERE, too.
Fortunately, it wasn’t me. One of the older kids.
That school now has stainless steel toilets, these days…
Ignorance is a terrible thing. 
Oooh, do tell!
If you actually look at the storyline that Hasbro invented for the Takara Diaclone line that eventually became Transformers, released in 1984 many parallels can be drawn between the Autobot, Decepticon duality and the Republican, Democrat political divide.
Megatron after all was just a Republican with staunch Cybertronian self interest, backed by the Energon cartel, with hands all over the defence and aerospace industries. Optimus the bleeding heart liberal really took a pasting puting the environment and the earthlings first. Although he didn’t have an impetious young deputy after his job every episode.
See, that’s why I never got into Transformers. Too bloody political.
(Well, that and I was discovering how much more fun girls were to play with than toys when the 'Bots were breaking onto the toy scene.)
Not much to tell. Actually, this was something I learned from the older boys at the high school. It involved lighting an M-80 and tossing it into one of the toilets in the men’s room at the back of the building.
The explosion would cause the pipes throughout the entire building to reverberate noisily. Sometimes, it would also cause other toilets to erupt like volcanoes, elsewhere in the building. On occasion, the shock would cause one of the old porcelain thrones to shatter.
The older boys thought it was great fun.
Naturally, our elders disapproved, and there was more than a little effort to catch the ne’er-do-wells who were doing this. Some WERE caught, simply because someone pelting out of the restroom tends to look suspicious.
After the toilet in the teacher’s lounge erupted one day while the principal was sitting on it, all hell naturally broke loose, and that particular bathroom was patrolled nearly constantly. Other measures had to be taken – usually detonating in another bathroom. Sometimes, confusion was sown by simply sneaking into the girls’ restroom and detonating there – the problem being that being seen pelting out of the girls’ restroom was even more suspicious than being seen pelting out of the boys’.
My own contribution involved a delayed action boat fuse.
This consisted of a piece of corrugated cardboard, on one side of which was taped an M-80 and several feet of paper fuse, taken off a string of firecrackers. One could simply stroll into the men’s room, ignite the thing, drop it into the toilet, and casually saunter out. The thing would float atop the water, burning down, and you’d have several minutes before it went off, unless someone else came in the stall and peed on it or something. We also determined that the disc of cardboard acted as a plunger, increasing the probability and height of the volcano effect on other toilets.
I finally quit after one of the seniors was prevented from graduating due to one of these incidents. They made him pay for a detonated toilet.
End of an era… sigh…