Ridete, Pagliallergi:

A British clown has had the smile wiped off his face after being told he couldn’t use balloons in his act because children might be allergic to latex.
Barney Baloney said he was told by bosses at a supermarket where he was booked to appear that he should leave his balloons at home because of the potential for allergic reactions.
The 47-year-old entertainer, also known as Tony Turner, has previously had to ditch his bubble-making machine because he could not get public liability insurance as companies assessed that youngsters might slip and hurt themselves.
He said he was also told by one venue he could not twist balloons into the shape of guns for fear of encouraging youngsters to commit violence, although swords were deemed acceptable.

On the other hand, the bit where they all pile into the undersized clown car does encourage youngsters to carpool in a Mini.

Still, give it another year or two and I’ll bet they discover that AIDS is caused by latex allergies from safe sex. Rush had great sport with this, and rightly so:

Do you realize that in 25 or 30 years we’re going to have a nation of no adults..? We’re going to have a growing percentage of our population as adults as the biggest bunch of wusses on the face of the earth.

I was deep in the woods with my little girl the other day when we came to a rickety old footbridge over a river on a tree next to which some gnarled old woodsman* had hammered a sign:

A ship is safe in a harbor. But a harbor is not what a ship is for.

Very true. Especially if it’s full of latex buoys.

(*Strictly speaking, I don’t know if it was a gnarled old woodsman. That’s just for local color. It could have been the assistant choreographer of Hello, Dolly! on a hiking vacation.)