When I was a kid my parents got me a plastic maze game from the grocery store. It was comprised of two halves, a red plastic lower shell and a clear plastic upper shell which had maze walls molded into it. The point of the game was obviously to tilt and tumble it around to get the ball from the start to the finish.
Except.
The ball was a goddamn blob of mercury.
Many of the ends of the walls were deliberately V shaped so if your mercury blob hit one it’d get split, part of it going down one path and part of it going down the other. So then you’d have the added challenge of either bringing them back together or separately getting two or more progressively smaller segments of it to the finish. This was an interesting and highly amusing take on the usual kiddie maze-game concept if it weren’t for the fact that the ball was a goddamn blob of mercury.
Can you imagine if such a thing were made today and handed to children? There would be a riot. 60 minutes would do a hard hitting prime time exposé. The Biden administration would take out the factory making them with a drone strike.
Yeah I had a mercury maze, it was second hand but somehow ended up in my toy collection. It isn’t that dangerous, but you’re right that it wouldn’t get made nowadays.
unless its thrown down a flight of stairs onto hard wood, Oopises! now you got a mess of mercury all over the floor! What a mess! you need asbestos mop! the only number one recommended mop 3 years in a row! /s
I was scientifically-minded enough to know the mercury should probably stay in the maze, even if the point of a maze is to find your way out of it. That was the cruelest part actually. Even if the mercury made it out of the maze, it was still in a plastic prison. Brings a tear to my eye.
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