Art Imitating Preventing Life

So today at work, as usual, there was a crash, followed by snarky commentary:

Stuff: (crash)
RR: Safety first!
NP: Safety third!
VFD: Safety somewhere in the consideration, but let's not get carried away.

This sort of amusement happens more-or-less constantly at our company, so this one slipped into my personal /dev/null. Then to my surprise, I read a story from Skegness (in England, as you know) that illustrates the principle that we can, indeed, get carried away with safety considerations.

Skegness has a jolly fisherman for a mascot. There's an antique statue and everything. The statue has its arms out to the sides, all gay & skippin' around & whatnot. Well there are plans being laid for another statue. This replacement was to have its arms tight in by the body. This, of course, prevents children swinging on the outstretched arms, slipping off, getting hurt, and bringing lawsuits. The decision to be safer than reasonable so outraged the citizens that the plan to sissify the statue is being reconsidered.

Because [deleted] the kids. And safety. They'll figure it out after a couple of falls anyway.

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England used to be the power of the western world, and truly manly beards were in evidence everywhere. They barely decided not to have Awesome be part of their name but settled on Great instead. Now look. Look and point and laugh, and be sure to never, ever vote Democrat.