Welcome to the Kitschmas Advent Calendar 2012 ! T - 32 Days ... and Counting !!!

     You better watch out, You better not cry, Better not pout, I'm telling you why ...
  The K.A.C. is coming to town!!! 

     Hello again, boys and girls, and welcome to the 2012 edition of the K.A.C. !!! For those of you new to all this, see my Conjure Cinema entry from November 11th, 2011 (to see what you're about to get yourself into). For the rest of you, our annual Christmas Countdown begins today! After last year, I decided to delay the beginning of the countdown until a more appropriate time ... to that crassest of "holidays", Black Friday! That senseless, tasteless, classless exhortation to shop, shOP, SHOP !!! Oh, and how do you like the NEW spin on Black Friday this year? It used to be the greed-merchants proudly trumpeted "get to our stores on MIDNIGHT --- be the FIRST in line for our BIG DEALS!" Well, after the multiple tramplings and other exhibitions of near-savage human behavior (I'm looking at YOU, Mace-to-the-face-of-the-other-customers-Lady!) - and the accompanying lawsuits they invoked, Wal-mart, Target, et. al, decided to go with a more SANE approach ... what, you ask? By moving the shopping time up to THANKSGIVING NIGHT! 

     As I told my wife, "I can see certain people now turning THIS into their 'Thanksgiving with the family' tradition!" Bleah ... Well, we're all about wallowing in the trash here at the K.A.C., so with that in mind, let's take a nostalgic look at Christmas toys past - specifically, the most DANGEROUS toys. How dangerous? Would you believe RADIOACTIVE??? Oh yeah ... how I ever missed getting THIS beauty above under my tree is beyond me! So come along and take a look at "The 10 Most Dangerous Toys Of All Time".

http://www.takejusticeback.com/news/10-most-dangerous-toys-all-time

     I was rather surprised when reading this article that one of the most notorious toys of all time wasn't mentioned - the Klik Klaks! Also known as Klackers, Clackers, Klacker Balls, etc., these bad boys were a disaster waiting to happen from the word go! Take two pieces of cheap, round plastic, run a string between them and a place to hold the string in the middle ... then SWING them at an insanely high velocity so that they smash into each other on their top and bottom loops! Hours of fun! Look, Mom, I'm a Junior Hadron Collider! Kids would drive their parents nuts listening to them whacking these things together for hours on end (they were LOUD!) - and then the plastic would start to chip ... and disintegrate ... at high speed ... the old adage of, "You'll put an eye out!" had a new champion. While I can not say I knew anyone who DID put an eye out with these crazed Whirling Projectiles of Death, I did know a number of kids who got WHOPPING wrist injuries, mainly from losing control of them at high speed and one or both of the plastic balls cracking (klaking?) them on the wrists. After a number of these injuries, the Klik Klaks were banned from our school (and other schools nationwide).


     For me, there was the My Favorite Martian Chemistry Set which (according to family lore) I almost poisoned my mother with (and turned our bath tub black!) - it mysteriously went away after that ... :(

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     Join me tomorrow and the next 30 or so days as our Holly Hilarity continues!