Vodka Eyeballing: Someone Might Do It, Sometime

Be afraid of this made-up trend! Be very afraid.

You know what's bad? When we can't tell the real headlines from the Onion headlines anymore. Case in point: "Teens warned about the dangers of pouring vodka in their eyes."

This is an actual headline from the Washington Examiner today.

But is this an actual danger?

Let's try some others out, shall we? "Teens warned about the dangers of dropping anvils on their heads." "Teens warned about the dangers of crashing their cars into brick walls." Well, for all we know, those could totally be the next worried-parent trend pieces to hit the media.

Gawker traces this back to the U.K.'s Daily Mail:

What the Mail have [sic] done is find one woman who damaged her eye while pouring vodka in it as a student stunt and convinced their readers that this is a sweeping trend and that Something Must Be Done To Stop These Kids and Their Wild Vodka Ways. They then get a lot of experts to opine on what a bad idea vodka eyeballing is, to fill out the story. And those experts are doubtless right that it is dumb as all hell to pour vodka into your open eye.

The Examiner reports:

"Younger teens who are the high school drinkers are the ones who are going to end up trying to do this," said Mike Gimbel, Baltimore County's drug "czar" for 30 years and now president of a substance abuse consulting firm in Maryland. "They are going to go to Ocean City, and some of these idiots are going to do it and make themselves blind."

"Some" of them are, really? Vodka's been around for centuries. It's hard to believe this is actually A Thing, but if it is A Thing, we're assuming that someone, somewhere, would have considered doing this before -- although why, we have no idea -- so all those historical paintings of vodka-blinded people must be lost to the ages.

"It stings for a couple seconds," a 2009 college graduate told the Examiner -- before adding that snorting bourbon is much more popular.

Meanwhile, we're just gonna stick with pouring coffee (warning: bad language!) into our nasal passages. Yum!

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