After I brought Plooblewagon home in October, Adda and I had a good time riffing on the various admonitions, threats and warnings in the owner’s manual. “Mazda does a pretty good job of inspiring paranoia, but Volvo takes the prize for excess caution; their TV commercials generally feature cars being driven sensibly in a straight line at reasonable speeds on public roads with a superimposed “professional driver on closed course””
One of my favorite recent examples of namby-pamby intrusive mommyism was brought to my attention by my dad, who several of you have pointed out is Way Funnier Than Me, and who it doesn’t take a clinical behaviorist to figure out is the person I got most of this from. On Saturday he handed me a copy of the Raleigh Yellow Pages, and I was momentarily perplexed until I saw the warning notice printed prominently on the cover. Maybe the small size of the new phone book would lead certain common sense-impaired morons to think it was designed for use in the car. Who knows. Maybe it does need an explicit warning to the contrary. But why should you stop at that?