'Slow Death By Rubber Duck' Review




These are the book's authors, hiding behind their death-inducing products.
http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/slowdeath-authors.jpg

          So now we are just about finished with our unit on Slow Death by Rubber Duck, and not a moment too soon. We were instructed to read the introduction, the first chapter, and two others. So I did, even though I didn't want to. Hopefully the grade will make it all worth it. I also have decided to make this last post professional, so I apologize to those who read my posts for the sardonism.

I'll spare you the details of the intro and the first chapter because you can simply find one of my classmates' blogs and look there to see it. In short, it is about the overview of the authors' experiment and why they chose to write the book, obsess over unavoidable chemicals, et cetera. They sequester themselves in a room and load their bodies up with phthalates, which is neither a valid nor reliable experiment.

Starting with the second chapter, which was entitled Rubber Duck Wars, one of the authors, Rick Smith, goes on a quest to find out exactly what is in toys nowadays. He uses various methods, anecdotes, and pointless facts to prove his point. He, like the other author, has a hard time staying on point, and often just throws a few sentences in after an anecdote to grab the reader's attention just in the nick of time. He conducted experiments on his two sons' toys and found the high phthalate content within them. He then disposes of the toys and moves on to a rather hilarious (in a sarcastic sense of the word) anecdote about ketchup.

The third chapter introduced the dangers of teflon, that hideously evil substance on the inside of your pots and pans, coating your pizza boxes and computer mice, and even in your windshield wipers. See, the problem with teflon is that it is chock-full of PFC's, prefluorinated compounds. These chemicals last virtually forever, and some people think this is a problem. It's as the honorable Joe once said in the middle of the chapter: "It was like eatin' possum. The more you chew it, the bigger it gets." This quote stood out to me because it implies that this Joe person they were talking to has eaten possum, raising further implications to his reliability due to his bizarre eating habits.

This book, quite frankly was a waste of my time. It didn't affect my views on any of the things mentioned inside, and it barely held my attention long enough to write a professional article about it sprinkled with jimmies of sarcasm and sardonism. As Groucho Marx once said: "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend to read it."

~AbsolutePineapple~

P.S. One last bit of randomness:


TARDIS by me, on AbsolutePineapple.deviantart.com
https://absolutepineapple.deviantart.com/art/TARDIS-287838740