So, you found us. (Patreon)

Welllllllllll well well. Look who just sauntered right into this Top Secret Base of ours. Congratulations. You're part of this now.

For both of our sakes, I (this is Will typing. Hello!) won't go into detail here. That's partly to protect you, but more so because all the details are above/in the video/in the about us section and you're probably tired of hearing about that. Instead, I'd like to offer this: just about 100 years ago, you used to be able to mail children.

This was the early days of the USPS parcel delivery service and how it could/should be used was still getting sorted out. They had the foundation down - if someone had the money for postage and an item to ship, then the USPS would deliver it. That included kids. In 1913, a couple in Ohio paid 15 cents for stamps and gave their infant son to their mailman who carried him about a mile down the road to the boy's grandmother's house.

Having been a part of way too many episodes of Weird Rules, this feels very familiar. Basically, a governing body had set something up with some amount of regulatory oversight but had left enough gaps that needed filling in. So, people tested the limits. They mailed bricks and snakes, eggs and children, and forced their local postmasters to figure out what was allowable.

But like the rulebook governing a sports league, the fixes needed to happen on the fly and not disrupt play, or mail. That meant while the USPS sorted things out, you had one family mailing their six-year-old daughter 720 miles from Florida to Virginia. For just 15 cents in stamps.

Seven years after that first child was dropped off at his grandmother's via USPS, the folks in charge made a decision. The First Assistant Postmaster General Koons ruled that children "do not come within the classification of 'harmless' animals, and therefore are not mailable." Now, that raises a new question of how animals are/were considered. A snake? Oh, I get that one - not harmless, easy, moving on. A cat? Well, my cat is perfect and wouldn't harm anyone unless they deserved it. So where does Bumper rank? And then children. If I ever have kids, I will be better at raising them than that dumb mail man Koons. My kids won't harm a thing. Well, not physically. Emotionally, they will ruin you.

That's not the point though. The point is, you couldn't keep mailing kids. To contexualize this decision, I will leave you with the headline for this ruling that the Des Moines Tribune ran with on June 16, 1920: CHILDREN NOT "FISH," SO CAN'T BE MAILED.

Children ain't fish. That's that.