For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for January 03, 2016

Reminds me of Flick in “A Christmas Story” (how DID the fire and police departments liberate him anyway?).

As Benjamin Franklin once astutely observed, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

See, t h i s is why you don’t let kids watch “A Christmas Story.”

That’s what I’ve never understood about the movie (which I love and watch every year) or the activity in general. Why the people don’t just pour warm water over the tongue to unstick it instead of yanking it off and leaving skin.

Lynn’s Notes:

My son, Aaron, really did stick his tongue to the school flagpole. A frantic teacher called me, and I ran to the school in time to see one of the staff trying to pour hot coffee down the flagpole to warm it up. Another said to just pull him off, so I worked at his tongue, which was stretched like an elastic, and his teacher pulled him…and with an “OUCH!” he was free. I thought he’d be upset, but Aaron was quite proud. When he’d stopped nursing his sore tongue, he happily pointed to the pole where a number of small, fuzzy spots marked battles with other frozen tongues. “Here’s Cathy, and here’s Bryan, and here’s…” I guess it’s a rite of passage: every kid has to see if the warning has merit…and every generation discovers that it does.

Warm water is as effective and avoids scalding.

I stuck my hand into a fire because it was pretty. I was 4 or 5 at the time. Ouch!

I will never like Lizzie…

My younger sister did that and my Grandfather, breathed warm air on it and that did the trick. I can guarantee that she never did that again.

According to my Mom, Uncle Gerald did that with the water pump on the family farm and lost some skin off his tongue in the process. And my brother always jokes, “And nobody double-dog dared him either.”

I’ve never had my fingers really stick to anything really cold like that. And I only got the very tip of my tongue stuck in the freezer once and I just pulled it away. It hurt for a while. But I did see a Rescue 911 segment where a kid got his tongue stuck in the freezer and he and his sister were the only ones home. He was calling 911 and it was hard for them to understand him. His sister was too little to know what to say. My mom and I kind of got a chuckle out of that one.

Trust but verify

Nowadays, a battery operated blowdryer would do the trick, that’s for sure.

Thermos of warm water. It’s not rocket science.

One yard cleanup years ago I warned my nephew not to touch the hot sides of the burning barrel. Later that day we noticed he was hiding his hand from us — the one with the big burn on it!

In the Christmas Story, the flag pole was a hollow plastic pole with a hole in it, a hose running inside the pole from the hole, and a small vacuum pump to create suction in the hose. IIRC, it was filmed when outdoor temps were well above freezing.

Was I the only one who thought Lizzie was going to say Michael told her to do it??

At least now we know she’ll never do it again.We hope…

http://scrapbook.majesticsteel.com/open-in-case-of-idiocy-how-to-unstick-your-tongue-from-a-frozen-metal-pole/

http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Stuck-Tongue-from-a-Frozen-Surface

Warm, not Hot. You don’t want to add Burns to the damage.

For what it’s Worth, even Cold water will work. It just might take a minute or so longer than Warm water.All you’re really asking is to Melt the Ice between the Tongue and the Metal surface.

That bit about the pretty fire was true. By granddaughter said that flame was “just air” when she was 2. We made sure to tell her that she could get burned like the piece of chicken we were cooking. She never did it. Her brother…. well we told him to stay away from the inside light bulb in the suburban( the cover cracked when I replaced it and I hadn’t gotten another). The first thing he did when he got in was to touch it, and he got burned – he was 5. He hasn’t learned yet, either.

So glad I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. You can keep the freezing cold. lol

And you didn’t grab some warm water, why?