November 06, 2006

• The rogue nation link is not about elephants. No, really...
• "...and the toys were used as weapons in a gang-related murder in 1980 in Post Falls, Idaho." I grew up an hour away. To think such earth-changing events were going on in the little Idaho panhandle, and I had no idea. "Like a deadly version of horseshoes, lawn darts are played with short, pointy javelins with fins that are hurled underhand across the lawn, hopefully landing within a hula-hoop sized target and not between a ten-year-old's eyes." *Que thunder, ominous music.*
• I wonder how many kids have been stabbed with pencils? Killed on bikes? The infamous red wagon, who hasn't tried riding it like a skate board. I didn't need to see jackass to think I could parachute off my roof with a sheet/umbrella/kiddie pool. Lawn darts don't kill kids, being stupid kids kills kids.
• Ha, I get a security error trying to access the cia website. That's apropos in so many different ways, it's just beautiful.
• I had lawn darts when I was a kid, and I refuse to believe that they were more dangerous than horseshoes. They had blunt tips, and to be stabbed with them you would have to be hit directly in the eye or something.
• Disagreeable/careless/amnesiac adults and siblings can and have killed and maimed kids. They are not banned, are they? Ditto cars. Crappy drivers. Lawnmowers. Tractors. Cows. (And for all I know, urinals.) Food --> choking deaths of children. Refrigerators with the doors left on! Oh, no - a ferocious onslaught of plastic bags! Fear! Fire! Foes! No legislation will ever compensate for lack of reasonably competent/non-forgetful parents, nor for the natural propensity of kids themselves to find and test the limits. Though o' course ye can always snow the poor tykes under with drugs.
• The obvious solution is velcro grass. Duh.
• Idahoans should go back to throwing potatoes at each other.
• I still have mine, and will proudly pass them on to my children. As a concession to safety, I may tell them not to play catch, or just leave it to them to figure that out on their own, as we were, which was a lesson learned within the first five minutes, as I recall.
• When trying to come up with the worst promotion idea ever, a friend and I concluded that Lawn Dart day at the ballpark should be avoided.
• I've searched around for a set for a few years and thought about importing some but have kept holding out hope that I will find a set. Ebay yanks the auctions as soon as they find out about them. Stupid people and their stupid dying!
• So who's up for a game of lawn dart tag? Yay!!
• Hey! this would make for a good comment in this thread! See? I'm trying to up the comment count...
• No legislation will ever compensate for lack of reasonably competent/non-forgetful parents... Criminal negligence? Are age limits not enough for lawn darts? Seriously though, does anyone really care about this game that much? I'd much rather bash heads in with some Bocce. Although I am suddenly envisioning a cross between lawn darts, croquet and bocce - a sort of garden variety triathalon, if you will.
• I've long been thinking of forming a society for the re-blacktopping of playgrounds.
• You can still find lawn darts (or jarts, as we called them) at yard sales from time to time. A friend of mine had a set, and we'd play many games of (semi-drunken) lawn darts in his yard. Good times. And the only casualty was a pint glass -- one guy managed to land the jart right in the glass on accident, a total one-in-a-million shot. My cousins and I used to play a version of full-contact croquet that was particularly deadly.
• The Neanderthal family of my former office manager used to partake every Independence Day in a lively game of bottle rocket war. About a dozen of them would dress in heavy, preferably non-flamable sweatshirts and pants and would proceed to lauch bottle rockets at one another amid much beer drinking. I do not know how they determined the winner, perhaps it was the team with the fewest third degree burns. Jarts would not have been nearly dangerous enough for them.