Rubber Duckies Hazardous to Your Health?: It’s...

Rubber Duckies Hazardous to Your Health?: It’s getting so you can’t even take a bath without worrying that you’ll go in as a man and come out as a woman. In Europe, plastic ducks are reportedly being banned from bathtubs out of fear that they might cause cancer or sex changes in children. According to the London Evening Standard, plastic ducks have been outlawed in Denmark, Austria and Spain, with other countries set to follow. The demonic ducks apparently contain a small dose of phthalate, a chemical used to soften plastic in teething rings and inflatable swimming pools. Some experts claim the chemical might be linked to tumors and sex changes in fish. The toy industry dismisses the charges as absurd, but maybe this explains all those British comedy troupes whose members dress as women.

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My Kingdom for a Space: What’s the best strategy for finding a parking place? Should you grab the first spot you see or cruise the lot for a space closer to the store? According to a scientist with too much time on his hands, it’s faster to park in the first available stall. By applying probability statistics and “discrete-time semi-Markov chain mathematical logic” to a Wal-Mart parking lot in Virginia, researcher C. Richard Cassady, now a professor at Mississippi State University, proved that you can get into the store a few seconds sooner if you pick a row and take the best spot available, even if it’s at the far end of the lot, according to a report in U.S. News & World Report. Drivers who circle around looking for a space closer to the store cut their walking distance by 27%, but that’s canceled out by the longer time it takes them to park.

Also, if you park next to a rubber duck, your Chevy Suburban might turn into a Yugo.

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College 101: As part of our continuing effort to bring you tomorrow’s news today, our time-traveling journalist recently boarded Caltech’s experimental time machine and filed a June 2002 report from Cal State Maui University, where officials have just finished reading The Times’ 1,000-part series on the state’s education crisis and decided to do their part to remedy the situation. Beginning in September 2002, the school will beef up its curriculum with the following courses:

* Creative Embalming

* Income Tax Evasion for the Non-Major

* Life After Death (one field trip required)

* Advanced Trigonometry and Its Application to Particle Physics, Space Exploration and Parking-Space Procurement at Wal-Mart

* The Psychology of Sexual Addiction (textbook: “It Takes a Village”)

* Decline of Western Civilization I: The Urkel Years

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Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: It’s now Day 2 of having our Weekly World News missing in action, and we’re beginning to suffer withdrawal. This also forced us to dig through second-string choices for today’s weirdest headline. The nominees are “Blind Pooch Has His Own Seeing Eye Dog” (but it doesn’t quite work unless you see the photo of the sightless dog wearing sunglasses) or maybe “Titanic Iceberg Found--Scientists Recover Remains of Three Frozen Crew Members and Other Debris on Killer Berg” (which isn’t bad, but it’s not as goofy as a real story in Newsweek that says Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” from the movie “Titanic,” is becoming a favorite song at funerals).

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* Roy Rivenburg’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Contributor: Mike Precker