This time, seen on the bottom of a box of magnetic chess:

Warning: This toy contains magnets or magnetic components. Magnets sticking together or becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body can cause serious or fatal injury. Seek immediate medical help if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.

Woah! First off, ‘magnets sticking together … can cause serious or fatal injury‘. Really!? Maybe they meant something I’m missing, but this seems very unlikely. Perhaps that’s why the beams can’t cross in Ghostbusters.

Then there’s ‘magnets … becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body can cause serious or fatal injury.‘ Right, I guess we’re talking pacemakers and things here, that’s fair enough. But it says ‘becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body‘. Becoming attached? How? We find out in the next sentence of the warning. Before that next sentence, however, we have ‘inside the human body‘. Only the human body? If these things an occur to a human why can’t they occur to any other animal? My cat might have a pacemaker… Besides, if there’s a good reason why I’d have a metallic object in me, there’s surely a good case to be made for my cat.

Then we have ‘Seek immediate medical help if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.‘ Who swallows a magnet? More pressingly, who swallows a magnet shaped like a chess piece? Presumably the immediate medical help is not for the removal of the magnet, but to have you sectioned. In the latter case, for inhaling magnets, I guess the medical help is having your lungs downgraded from superhuman to human again. Because, let’s be frank, to inhale a chess-piece (magnetised or otherwise) is a very intense stunt to pull off.

Unless, of course, they are just trying to make sure that you call medical assistance if you’re choking on a chess piece (which is more likely than actually inhaling it). So let me ask you this, who wouldn’t!? Who would sit and choke thinking, ‘I wish I was choking on a fish bone, because then I could call for help. But woe is me, I’ll have to just sit here and suffer’.