Personally, my own weekends have been full of comment spam-related freakouts. But just in case you haven't hand Ukrainian spambots take down your server lately, here are some recent, overwrought headlines from the worlds of science, safety, and parenting to freakout over:
- Boomer age helicopter parents have turned their kids into over-dependent neurotics. An alternate headline for this study: "10% of college freshmen's moms do one or more clingy, meddling thing." [msnbc via @workingdad]
- The headline, "Book Owners Have Smarter Kids," misses the point, which is that you and your fancy pants college education could be replaced at any time by a pile of 500 books and a guy from the Home Depot parking lot, and your kid'd never know the difference. [Salon, so a giant asterisk, obviously]
- If he swallows it--and doesn't poop it out--the 20mm [penny-size] button battery the kid popped out of the remote can kill, or burn a hole in his esophagus, according to dozens of local news outlets who reporting on this epidemic on the exact same day--and a new study in the AAP's Pediatrics journal, which has somehow ignored the threat of esophageal battery enlodgement for 18 years. [aap, poison.org]
- McDonalds has recalled 150 million Shrek collector glasses for being toxic to children, also for containing cadmium. [cpsc]
- Sprout Slings is recalling all 40 of the infant slings it sold after a 10-day old baby suffocated in one. In 2007. Which makes me think the CPSC has pretty much worked down their Bush-era sling death backlog. [cpsc]
- Artist freakshow Terence Koh has supposedly adopted a baby boy from China, which just makes no sense on so many levels. I really hope this is a performance piece. Says he named the kid Bei Bei. [papermag]
