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lethal potential. (That was a wacky pun! About tragic child death!) We all had that friend in grade school who swears up and down that his friend’s cousin’s babysitter once knew a guy who knew a guy who got stuck on a pool’s intake vent and had his guts sucked out through his anus.
    That kid was so ful of shit.
    Except he wasn’t. That’s totally true . In 2007, CBS reported on a girl who lost her entire small intestine while swimming at her family’s country club. It’s rare, but anything with even one check mark in the “might tear your guts out through your asshole” column deserves to be handled with a little caution.
    Studies have also demonstrated a link between chlorinated pools and cases of asthma and lung damage, and people who spend a good deal of time swimming in or working around chlorinated water are over 50 percent more likely to develop lung and kidney cancer. When you add all that together, owning a pool is like having an occupied tiger pit with a diving board attached (if tiger bites gave you cancer).
    4. USING A SLIP ’N’ SLIDE
    What do you get when you connect one ordinary garden hose, one long sheet of plastic, and one precocious child? well, either thirty years to life or a slip ’n’ slide (depending on how the parts were assembled). The slip ’n’ slide has sold over 9 mil ion units since its inception, which is fine: slip ’n’ slides are safe—provided that you are three to five feet tal and weigh less than 107 pounds. It’s only when you start moving into the gray areas of “drunken

    adulthood” and “childhood obesity” that things start to get paralytic. See, a slip ’n’ slide’s thin sheet of plastic is only capable of redistributing a certain

    amount of weight to create that cushioning hydroplane, so heavyset kids and drunk adults trying to use it tend to hit the ground harder than Hans Gruber.
    There has been a staggering number of injuries over the last fifty years from slip ’n’ slide abuse, ranging from torn skin to paralysis and even death. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has had an ongoing investigation in place since 1993, and despite all of this, sales of the product are as strong as ever. That just proves that Darwinism is alive and well, and its official motto is, “Woo! Do a backflip!”
    3. GOING TO AN AMUSEMENT PARK
    According to the CPSC (which should just go ahead and change its name to the Buzz-Kil Institute of Fun Destruction), in 2008 there were about eighteen thousand injuries reported at amusement parks in the United States alone. And that’s not even counting carnivals and state fairs—where you’re required to undergo years of meth addiction and inbreeding before operating a ride. (To any carnies who might have been offended by that sentence: Quit making the crossing guard read to you; she has important work to do.)
    Some of the injuries are just idiot comeuppance: Hundreds of people have been kil ed by releasing their harnesses and standing up on roller coasters, those spinning teacup rides, and Splash Mountain—not to mention one teenager who was decapitated by the Batman ride at Six Flags Over Georgia after jumping a fence to look for his hat.
    That’s not to say you’ll survive if you follow all the safety protocols: A thirteen-year-old girl was riding on Superman: Tower of Power at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom when a cable snapped and sliced her legs off. A man riding on the Columbia , a full-size replica sailing ship at Disneyland, was struck in the face by a metal cleat when a mooring line pulled it loose from the ship’s hull.
    There are too many moving parts to make most attractions 100 percent safe, so there’s always a chance that you’ll be horrifically murdered by some whirling steel monstrosity with cartoon elves painted on the side. And that’s the kicker: having to tell Saint Peter, upon entrance to heaven, that your life was tragically cut short by something called the Screamin’ Reamer.
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