I'm sure I speak for many parents out there who have had to deal with a threat to their children's mental and physical well-being more terrifying than television, more pernicious than pornography and more insidious than ijime.

I speak, of course, of the frightening phenomenon known as Game Boy.

This seemingly innocuous "toy" is capable of reducing a happy, active child to the state of a robotic zombie faster than you can say "Donkey Kong." In its defense, one could say that playing Game Boy is at least interactive, unlike TV. But most kids, at least in my experience, get bored with TV after a while, whereas with Game Boy, the situation is more like those laboratory rats that will keep consuming cocaine and ignoring food as long as those running the experiment keep them supplied with the drug.