Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on June 26, 2024 - Rejected
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Here at the National Institute of Highlighting Interesting Lore, we always strive to get to the bottom of things. We ask the tough questions and don't hesitate to put our staff at risk to bring you the latest knowledge. This month we looked at the things parents tell their children to keep them from harm or even death. We've all been told some of these things when we were young. And sure, they all sound pretty dangerous, but we are not the National Institute of Threats and Myths and Hearsay (actually, we hate those losers), so we do test theories and confirm ideas and stuff.
So three of our researchers set off to test various supposed "threats" to their health. To keep it real, we chose those employees who already seemed a little suicidal, or at least didn't have too many good reasons to go on living (we took a vote here). We confronted them with some of the most commonly used threats and put them in supposedly precarious situations to either debunk the threats or, you know, prove the actual danger of the behaviour in question.
First, one of our brave scientists tried to kill themselves by running with scissors. That didn't work, so we upped the ante and had them run up and down a flight of stairs with scissors. Still no accident. We repeated this with the other two "volunteers" and had the same disappointing result. We then asked them to hold a pair of scissors in both hands and to open and close them rapidly. They were also blindfolded. No one died.
Next we made them all eat a bunch of peanuts, but as none of them are actually allergic to peanuts, nothing happened.
Volunteer 3 is a smoker, so we got them to blow smoke directly into the faces of V1 and V2. Even after doing this for 12 consecutive hours, no one died. (V3 claimed some chest pains, but felt fine the next day, so we'd count that as a miss too).
The next test was one that was eagerly awaited by the parents among our readers. BPA, the gender-bending chemical, is avoided like the plague by young parents, so using plastic bottles containing BPA must be deadly, right? Well, not only did we let our brave V1-3s drink from old plastic bottles, they also ate from plastic plates with plastic cutlery. What did they eat? Pure BPA! We had our friends at Big Plastic bring in a few bags of the raw material and pour it over the donuts we served. They were basically BPA iced deathnuts. Did they die immediately after eating them? No. Did they writhe in pain for hours? Again, no. According to V2, the BPA slightly altered the taste of the doughnut, but they could not even tell if it got better or worse.
Next came the first of our medium to long-term studies. We had V1-3 stare at screens for a whole week. Apart from 6 hours of interrupted sleep with running phones attached to their heads, they did nothing but watch the nastiest, weirdest, most annoying shit we could find on Youtube. Especially those slime and glitter videos your kids love. We had 20 of them running continuously, day and night, on the same number of screens. Also people making food (lots of seafood) out of Lego bricks and then pretending to eat it, accompanied by authentic crunching, eating and burping sounds. They were all on loop, too. And of course we provided those precious videos of children unboxing one expensive toy set after another, only to play with it for 5 seconds before opening the next. We also made them sit too close to the screens. This was actually one of the more difficult tests for our volunteers. One of them couldn't take it any more after 5 days and actually threatened to kill themselves. This would have proved the lethality of screen time, except that the victim had secretly closed their eyes repeatedly for many consecutive minutes during the day, rendering the experiment unscientific. Their suicide would have meant nothing.
Initially eagerly awaited by the 'veebees', as we were now allowed to affectionately refer to our subjects, the next test proved more difficult and less conclusive than expected. Even after two weeks on a sweets-only diet, one of the Veebees continued to vomit regularly, while the other two developed acne and constipation on an unprecedented scale, but otherwise seemed more or less fine. Losing teeth and gaining pounds is not fatal, but rather a testament to the determination and commitment of our participants.
Negative results were also reported for the following offences:
Not washing their hands when they came in
Not washing their hands after using the toilet
Eating food that was past its sell-by date but otherwise looked fine
Eating food that was past its sell-by date but looked bad
Sharing personal information online on highly dubious platforms
Not dressing appropriately for the weather
Swallowing chewing gum
Making a face and being startled
Eating watermelon seeds