Hey, Don't Say They Didn't Warn You . . .

"We held hearings and took testimony from experts," says Pamela Gilbert, who was the executive director of the CPSC in the 1990s. "We used the state of the art in the science of labeling."

Under her leadership, Gilbert says proudly, the commission mandated that bags of charcoal carry a label warning people not to burn the stuff indoors, which can kill you.

"A lot of people were bringing [charcoal grills] indoors to keep their families warm," Gilbert says. "Many of them were immigrants who didn't speak English, so we mandated a picture."

Now, the warning on bags of charcoal includes three pictures -- charcoal burning in a house, in a tent, in a trailer -- all of them surrounded by a circle with a line through it, the universal symbol for "Don't even think about doing this."

Those pictures deliver their message effectively but, Gilbert admits, they're not nearly as memorable as a warning symbol so old that nobody seems to know when or how it originated -- the skull and crossbones.

"I have a 6-year-old kid, and he knows that a skull-and-crossbones means poison," Gilbert says. "It's a fairly effective warning. Nobody would drink something with a skull-and-crossbones on it." She pauses, then says, "Unless they wanted to kill themselves."

Indeed, at least one lonely, despondent fellow did use the skull-and-crossbones symbol to identify a substance that would help him kill himself. That fellow was Billy Joel.

This was back in the early '70s, before Joel became a rock star. He was depressed because his girlfriend had dumped him and his band had broken up. He decided to end it all.

"I looked into the closet and there was chlorine bleach, with that skull-and-crossbones warning," Joel told Blender magazine a few years ago. "And there was some furniture polish, with a smaller skull-and-crossbones. So it really came down to a matter of flavor."

Joel opted for the furniture polish. But it failed to kill the future author of "Only the Good Die Young." It did, however, cause a very unpleasant bout of flatulence, a malady the warning label had failed to mention. Maybe Joel should have sued.

The Coffee Cascade

We are living in the Golden Age of the Warning Label.

It began in 1992, when Stella Liebeck, then 81, bought a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-thru window in Albuquerque. As she wedged the cup between her legs and removed its cap, her grandson drove off. The coffee spilled, causing third-degree burns to her legs. She sued McDonald's, and a jury awarded her almost $3 million. (After appeals, the company settled with Liebeck for an undisclosed sum.)