Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 04, 2015

My favorite, the monkey bars, at St. Helen, were a collection of half inch pipe held together by nuts and bolts, that we very exposed…It was all anchored in cement around each vertical pipe. Because the ground had eroded away, bare, jagged, pointed concrete met you at the bottom if you fell. Nobody got hurt,,,…. I should have, I was a monkey….

I remember an incident at school: in Gym we had, on a time, to run an obstacle course; you know the sort of thing climbing up ropes and across bars and the like, and at one stage we were required to jump from a beam to a rope and then shimmy down the rope and off to points unremembered (for reasons which will probably emerge shortly).

Our story being set in those halcyon days of child safety, when nothing was expected to hurt us but the cane (not even those fascinating blobs of mercury we were always playing with on the physics lab benches), the beam was of course set well above head height; something that would never be allowed in the more cynical and lawyerly times of today. … So …

So we boys proceeded along the beam indian file (not that we had much choice in that really) prompted towards simulacrum of alacrity by our mad sports master.

Now I have always had a bit of a tendency to be rather more enthusiastic than good at sports; and so maybe I was following a bit too closely on the guy in front of me, or perhaps I had annoyed him so that he pulled the rope a bit more than necessary as he left it, or it was just that a two inch wide climbing rope was just beyond my visual acuity, but as I launched myself from that beam I was aiming for a point that was at the end of the up-swing of the rope and as I approached it, it was moving away from me and we never did meet.

Have you ever watched those, I think they are traditionally Saturday morning, cartoons? The ones where, say, a coyote runs off a cliff? How, amusingly, he runs straight out legs a-spinning, gravity defying; then suddenly noticing some slight difference in his situation he looks down and immediately realising the untenability of his position he makes an instantaneous right-angled turn downwards, ignoring inertia just as completely as he had earlier ignored gravity? Have you seen that? Well whoever it was first started that convention must have had the most brilliant psychological insight—-well either that or had actually done exactly what I did.

So, to get back to our story having left me hanging in the air and just about to miss my rope for the last few seconds, that was exactly how it felt. My perceptions of the event were exactly the coyote’s: that I went straight out hung for a moment with my hands flapping about vainly for a rope that had left me and moved on with its life; and then, because I foolishly glanced below, I dropped straight down to the hard hardwood floor, where I broke both wrists and sprained an elbow.

My brain being somewhat faster than my body, somewhere on the way down I had assessed the situation and had what I like to think of as the ‘coyote syndrome’ firmly fixed in my mind so that I was laughing heartily by the time I hit and continued to do so—-though perhaps it would be more accurate to say the laughter was hysterical rather than hearty by then. Because of that it took absolute ages for me to convince the rest of the class that I was actually somewhat in need of a visit to the emergency department.

The point of this sad little story? The essential psychological truth of cartoon conventions: and not only in motion—-why MY eyes always do stand out on stalks when I see a pretty girl; and at least psychologically I do have six fingers, three on each hand, though I’m not convinced about the floppy white gloves and big round ears.

After leaving us maimed, crippled and scarred, both physically and emotionally..But I’ve got to say, I had a blast on all that unsafe equipment.

HAHA so funny

Is this a rerun? because I seen to recall a similar strip from some time before

Funny, but when I was that age a scraped knee (or elbow) was cured by rubbing dirt on the bloodiest part. Nobody ever got an infection, either.So what happened to our dirt?

When my kids were little, we used to go to a different park each weekend and visit all the varied playground equipment. One by one the equipment was all replaced by “safe” equipment, and soon all the parks were essentially the same, and we stopped going because it wasn’t “fun” or “new” anymore. No more “wizard tower park” or “treehouse park” or “weird merry go round park”, but just parks filled with plastic tubes, slides, and swings. The layout and colors varied slightly, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

I remember a playground designer named Joe Lewis (not the boxer) who contended that equipment was safer if it had a bit of danger built in. A bruise or abrasion is a part of growing up and educational in that it teaches the boundary between thrilling and foolhardy. The real danger comes in trying to make a bland swing, slide, seesaw a bit more exciting. Such as using a skateboard on a slide. By making falling well short of terminal velocity, and having the play interactive, the use of a given piece of equipment can be different each time and thus avoid boredom.

When I was growing up my family had an old slide in out back yard. It was an old slide my father had salvaged from his old school yard (circa 1920 or 30). It was really tall and didn’t have any guard rails, just a 2X4 that ran along both sides to help it hold it’s shape. When I was about a year old my brother (five years older than me) took me to the top of the slide and plopped me down on the top board thinking I’d slide down. Instead I leaned too far to the side and fell over, falling all the way to the ground and hitting head first (or so I’ve been told). My brother was so blaza about the whole thing he started sliding down the slide and then climbing the ladder for another ride, ignoring the screaming baby at the base of the slide. By the time my mom realized what had happened my screams of terror and pain were more like snuffles and somehow I’d gotten through with only minor injuries. But to this day I can’t climb more than a few feet up a ladder without seeing myself falling and hitting the floor.

My daughter has never seen a merry-go-round or a see-saw. She still managed to badly sprain her ankle jumping off the swings. Where there is a will there’s a way.

Another story — a neighbor boy fell off the rings at the park, broke his right wrist. The next day he was on them again, swinging around using his cast-wrapped hand like nothing had happened. He fell again and broke his left femur. That finally slowed him down (just a little).

But the lawn darts? Oh yeah, totally whack!

I remember when I was in Kindergarten oh some 33 years ago one of my classmates decided to jump off the top of the Metal 15-20’ high slide (don’t remember exactly how big it was… it was still huge when I was an adult) and broke his arm… yeah didn’t faze any of us… sadly that playground equipment merry-go-round and all have been replaced with the plastic stuff… :(

I loved playing on the bars—and really enjoyed gymnastics later on. Not good at ball sports, because I never learned the skill of positioning myself just right to catch the damn thing. We had slides, rings, merry-go-rounds. There were some mishaps then, but we didn’t go right out and sue someone. It’s the fakockta insurance companies raising their premiums that may have played a part in the removal of all that playground equipment.

I wonder if Mallett ever heard the Bill Cosby monologue about playground equipment—“An out-and-out attempt to kill us!”