The War on Fun

Today I went to the lounge to fill my water bottle from the water cooler. There was no water left in the bottle, so I went and grabbed another to replace it. When I took the cap off the new bottle I discovered, to my horror, that there was a leakproof valve on top of the bottle, to prevent water from spilling as you installed it. I'm sorry, but the only pleasure in replacing a water cooler bottle was seeing if you could do it without spilling water all over the place. I mean, there's plenty of other places where you can get water, but not many opportunities to take an open 5 gallon bottle of some liquid and turn it upside down. So I'm very let down.

From my recollection, this war on fun started with the popularization and eventual enforced use of bicycle helmets and continues unabated. When I was a kid, we had something called monkey bars. They were open structures made out of steel pipes, shaped kind of like a house or layer cake, 10-15 feet high, and you climbed up them and swung on them and hung upside down by your knees and it was the best thing in the playground. The fact that we were without adult supervision, hanging upside down in a place where if I slipped I would hit about a half dozen steel bars before crashing to the concrete (or asphalt if you were lucky) below, never seemed weird.

Now, of course, you can't even find such a thing anywhere. It took a significant image search just to find a picture. I always assumed it was because they were dangerous but now I'm starting to think it was because they were fun, and there's nothing that these people hate more than fun, at least for other people.