We always did it on Halloween – well lit area at night, ran a line of shaving cream across the street, as a car (or big bonus, a bus) approached we’d reach down as if to grab “the rope”. Never got a “screech”, but boy, when that bus came to a stop………..better than a bag full of candy. Especially the one time the expression on the bus driver’s face turned from a scowl to a nodding grin/tip of the hat. Would’ve loved to hear his stories.
Yeah… but when someone tries it for real, it gets in the news… recently someone strung plastic wrap around a stop sign and another pole to trip up bicyclists in the Ladds neighborhood in Portland.
I wasn’t involved… However, someone really blocked the road in an area where many people will do a rolling stop. car’s wouldn’t be affected, however, this plastic wrap was some serious stuff, they had a hard time ripping it off to prevent someone from being clotheslined.
Some crazy “person” in the village near where I live (Nellingen A.d.F., Ostfildern, Germany) actually strung a wire up across a sidewalk/bike path high enough for a walker to pass, but it caught a woman on a bike in the face and almost killed her. They never caught who did it, but I always look carefully when in that area. I cannot believe someone would do that, it’s beyond me.
They do that with fishing line here in Des Moines from time to time… Usually cuts up people pretty bad Lucky no one has been killed if it hit them in the throat or blinded if it hit them in the eye. I am always afraid of that if I take a trail early in the morning.
I recall reading once that in the 1800s police in small villages sometimes put string or wire across paths to stop cyclists, who were considered outlaws and menaces to the public.
I’ve heard such stories about ropes in the forest: Someone wanted to teach a lesson to cyclists, who rode in forbidden areas. A great example of fighting a good case with the worst methods!
(Love the prank-rope, though. If noone drives behind the victim!)
As Steve McQueen did in ‘The Great Escape’ to get a motorbike.
Standard trick of special forces, tie a piece of piano wire at neck level of a biker, tie to one street lamp and the next one on the other side (the sloping angle works to ‘slice’ the neck!) - takes the head off a motorcyclist! Messy way to get a new helmet…. I am having second thoughts about this comment as it can be viewed as a training tip for a terrorist.
Old guerilla/thief tactic.
Heavily used by the partisans in the forests on the eastern front during WWII.
Liban 83, all our jeeps had a steel bar welded vertically on the front bumper to avoid this.
Nobody seems to have commented upon the behaviour of the driver of the blue car. Drinking coffee, talking on a cell phone; this is a bad, bad driver. Perhaps it is the blue car driver that killed Fred?
Would that really make him a jerk? Why not get everyone excited? I’m waiting for the day when we can finally put all of the pieces together and see the clues
The blue car that killed Fred is almost certain to be off the road by now. Its driver, realizing that the collision proved fatal to the cyclist, probably garaged the car for a few days (or even weeks), then drove the damaged vehicle into a telephone pole and submitted a fraudulent insurance claim for it. Didn’t anyone else see the film “Reservation Road”?
“Spilled coffee, dropped phone, success!” Clearly, the driver was distracted: yapping on a phone, drinking a cup of coffee, and, oh yeah, maneuvering a few thousand pounds of metal down the street. Sounds like a prescription for mowing down cyclists and pedestrians. If the driver had been focused on driving, the sudden stop would probably have happened anyway, but without the need for a trip to the detail shop and the dry cleaner.
I remember this trick from my childhood, too, in the ’60s. Judging from some of the other comments, I don’t think some readers noticed the “imaginary clothesline” label in the first panel. What makes this funny is that the kids are pantomiming, and the driver stops to avoid something that isn’t really there. It’s not something I’d recommend for kids to do, but it’s a lot less dangerous than throwing rocks or dropping things off overpasses or other things kids have been known to do to passing cars.
There is a gigantic differencen between an imaginary line and a rock through through your windshield. In fact, “had” there really been a rope between the kids and the car kept going, no damage to the car but the kids hands would have suffered assuming the line just slide through otherwise it would have been worse.
If stopping suddenly is likely to kill someone, then I must not have long to live. In my neighborhood, I have to hit the brakes unexpectedly to avoid a squirrel or chipmunk about once a week. (And frequently, they play their own little trick on me and run the opposite way, so that I end up stopping unnecessarily.) So far, I’ve survived. (Fortunately, none of them have ever thrown a rock through my windshield, either, so I can’t say from personal experience how dangerous that would be.)
“dropping things off overpasses” yeeeesh. That kills or seriously maims people from time to time in my news market. Every few years the local news is dominated by a story such as this where kids are dumping bricks or chunks of concrete off overpasses, sometimes under a headline like ‘Two Parents and One Child Killed, Another Child in Coma…” etc. That’s some serious business.
I agree. While this game the boys are playing isn’t much of a crime, if you do something and immediately know you have to run away from it, you’ve done something wrong. And, yes, it isn’t as bad as throwing things off overpasses but what if the phone-booth driver had been injured somehow because of their little trick?
I talked to a boy in Juv. Det. who had tossed a bowling ball onto a freeway and was apprehended. He thought the car would block it because “in the movies it just breaks the window or bounces down the road.” No deaths on his hands but some pretty serious injuries, not to mention the destroyed vehicle.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT think the behavior in this comic is serious business. Are these children behaving? No, obviously; but real children don’t behave. Although my friends and I had never heard of this trick, we did lots of stuff we weren’t supposed to, and some of it was a heck of a lot worse than what these kids are doing. If a motorist is driving so fast on a residential street that they cannot stop safely on a dime, they are driving too fast. It’s high time we held them accountable for that.
@Widsmith – We noticed, but it reminds us of those incidents when the ‘clothesline’ was NOT imaginary.
As for stuff thrown from bridges – in the UK that has become a regular pastime for some!
The discussion reminds us of the homicidal actions of a small minority and the ‘copycat’ fun that results. Not fun but a sober warning…
Here we go again. ??????????????? This is totally unrelated to anything cycling – or kickstand – or ???.
The writer of this kind of drivvel is an errant and disturbed child. Grow up!!!!!!!!
This USED TO BE a very good strip. What happened? Seems like all this low-minded crap started after Rick announced he’d taken on a new writer. If this is his stuff, you didn’t do yourself any favors, Rick. You were better off without him. What a moron.
Oh no! A few strips NOT related to cycling. Everyone panic! Are you that insecure about your identity as a cycliest that EVERYTHING must relate? There is more to life then bikes.
yah,I’m sure you were just waiting to authorize your new paypal so you could sub and this changed your mind, uh huh. This is a comic, and it’s not a children’s book either. It’s for adults, and we all remember childhood mischief, which is all this is!
Wow, I guess you’d feel really stupid if Rick logged in and said “Actually, this is one of my strips.” I still think you should add “Un-” to your screen name. Sheesh.
hahaha! I remember hiding somewhere waiting for cars to appear, and then on the street place a small imaginary timebomb and run away to hide again to see if the car would come to a screeching halt. it was definitely summerholiday pasttime fun as a kid, not entirely responsible. luckily noone ever got hurt.
I had never played this game and some kids got me and my wife a couple summers ago.
I think I was driving our blue mini-van, even!
I slowed down thinking I’d kill them if they really had a rope and I hit it at 25mph… Then we all laughed when I realized it was a pretty good trick.
(I did actually hit a rope once and it scratched my mom’s cars window. Some idiot at the local grain elevator was pulling something with a long rope tied to a tractor. The rope went across the street…)
As 8 year olds, my cousins and I played this game on backroads in Michigan where drivers are not the most tolerant of folks; one day a guy slammed to a stop and we were laughing until he got out and, Man, that guy was fast! A lot faster than I was, at least. I got a spanking my mother later called “well-deserved.”
When I was like 7 or so we would wait down by the street and throw rocks at cars as they drove by, until we hit a cop car that is… Or put a bunch of sharp rocks in the road (with the idea that one might pop a tire).
in other words there are worse things they could be doing. Kids will be kids= Stupid and easily amused
Some don’t like this story line. I was just thinking a month or two ago how the neighborhood kids needed to be featured more in the strip. I have long wanted to see the lives of these kids fleshed out more. And the kids in the strip have bikes and use bikes as an integral part of their adventures, but don’t see the bike as the adventure itself. I think the more time spent on the kids and their games, the better. While detailed explorations of roadies vs hipsters, bike lanes vs VC, barends vs brifters, etc etc, are all fun things to see in the strip and comment on, they are tangential to the main focus of the strip and the fictional Kickstand Cyclery. Bikes are meant to facilitate real life exploration and adventure, and that’s what they are doing here in this strip. Those who can’t empathize with the kids here and their piss-off-the-adults-in-the-cars games bred of summer boredom, really missed out on something.
But exploring and adventure is the start of the slippery slope towards recreation! Next thing you know you’ll be wanting drop bars, bike shorts and an odometer, and from there it’s a small step to a roof rack and country rides. Best to keep the bikes clunky and the cycling urban and joyless.
Oh. And one more thing. I hadn’t gotten around to re-upping my subscription after Rick’s break. After today’s comic, I did so. Just so we’re clear on what kind of strip motivates ME to open up my wallet a trickle.
Maybe I am a stick in the mud but NOT KEWL to play a prank that might get someone seriusly hurt. Causing big hunks of metal to slam on their brakes or manuver unexpectedly is NOT a good idea.
In response to the comments saying that R&B should not have featured this theme…
1. Without acting as a defender – it is another strip showing what real world cyclists get up to
2. The discussion quickly got into decrying the stunt as a bad idea while admitting guilt for doing the same thing when young
3. If it was a real clothesline the only ones hurt would be the kids, maybe a mirror torn off?.
4. If a real line was tethered to a substantial thing, the result would be different!
So what is different about this strip and others? Nothing. Rick shows another theme of bike folk living their life normally.
Hey, these kids are OUTDOORS, playing with each other, messing with an adult’s head! I’m kinda surprised that no one has mentioned that the kids are NOT inside, each at their own computer, playing nintendo or grand theft auto or something else glorifying violence and lawlessness. They are developing real-world skills of dealing with each other, and with their (sometimes not-so-smart) choices, and discovering that real life, unlike computer games, has no “extra lives,” no “reset” button.
Sure what they’re doing is dumb. They’re children, not adults. They’ll learn. I did dumb, dangerous, things as a kid, and so did you. And we learned, and survived. And they’ll learn better in the healthy outdoors, and as a group, than otherwise.
And, as I’ve pointed out before, this is a CARTOON! Part of humor is exaggeration. Lighten up, guys.
I’ve done much, much worse in my time but, contrary to some here, I don’t find it ‘natural for kids’ or harmless, nor is it funny, even retrospectively. BTW, outside your fantasies, the vast majority of the kids just never try something that they understand could land them in a bad place.
The worse that I see in those recent actions in Yehuda’s strip is that those kids will turn into self-righteous pricks if someone doesn’t stop them.
Did this once with some buds with a real clothesline when we were about 12. One of us nearly got his arm torn off. He was lucky to get off with a VERY nasty rope burn and a lifelong 4 inch scar. We weren’t juvenile delinquents- just a few bored pre-teens.
One boy is just a boy. Two boys are half-a-boy. Three boys is no boy at all.
Yes – this is the sort of stupid thing kids will think up. They don’t intend any real harm. But if I saw kids doing this I would give them a real talking to. They could easily startle a driver into losing control.
This is similar to a trick some kids did while I was bicycling. As I passed them one of them took a stick and banged the street sign. Huge “bang” sound. I nearly veered into a car that was passing me. I could have been killed. I chased the kids down and told them they could startle someone in traffic and get them killed. And if I EVER saw them doing it again I was calling the cops.
good work!
My friends and I used to do this when we were about their age, maybe 10 or 11. As I recall, it actually worked all the time.
We always did it on Halloween – well lit area at night, ran a line of shaving cream across the street, as a car (or big bonus, a bus) approached we’d reach down as if to grab “the rope”. Never got a “screech”, but boy, when that bus came to a stop………..better than a bag full of candy. Especially the one time the expression on the bus driver’s face turned from a scowl to a nodding grin/tip of the hat. Would’ve loved to hear his stories.
Yeah… but when someone tries it for real, it gets in the news… recently someone strung plastic wrap around a stop sign and another pole to trip up bicyclists in the Ladds neighborhood in Portland.
Ladd’s Circle shouldn’t even have any stop signs. It should be a round about, like we have in my neibourhood, here in Seattle.
Sounds familiar… stupid cable.
um how would this thing trip up bikes and not cars? or you couldnt see the stop sign now ??
I wasn’t involved… However, someone really blocked the road in an area where many people will do a rolling stop. car’s wouldn’t be affected, however, this plastic wrap was some serious stuff, they had a hard time ripping it off to prevent someone from being clotheslined.
Trail Nazi’s out here use barbed wire.
Some crazy “person” in the village near where I live (Nellingen A.d.F., Ostfildern, Germany) actually strung a wire up across a sidewalk/bike path high enough for a walker to pass, but it caught a woman on a bike in the face and almost killed her. They never caught who did it, but I always look carefully when in that area. I cannot believe someone would do that, it’s beyond me.
@Mark Possibly a Times columnist and former MP?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article3097464.ece
Incidentally the litter he’s complaining about almost certainly comes from young men in cars rather than cyclists.
and…. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3110970.ece
Being reminded – I remember the news item…
It would be pretty hurtful if someone on a bike cought a string in face while doing 50kph/30mph.
That would suck, that is why i ride on the road and use drop bars. but all joking aside closelining people is not cool.
They do that with fishing line here in Des Moines from time to time… Usually cuts up people pretty bad
Lucky no one has been killed if it hit them in the throat or blinded if it hit them in the eye. I am always afraid of that if I take a trail early in the morning.
I recall reading once that in the 1800s police in small villages sometimes put string or wire across paths to stop cyclists, who were considered outlaws and menaces to the public.
I’ve heard such stories about ropes in the forest: Someone wanted to teach a lesson to cyclists, who rode in forbidden areas. A great example of fighting a good case with the worst methods!
(Love the prank-rope, though. If noone drives behind the victim!)
These boys have been on vacation too long. What’s that old saying about mischief, work and idle hands?
Those damned kids need to be “counciled” to where they can’t sit down for at least a week.
Is “counciled” a British term?
Perhaps “counseled”, which is “advised”, but definitely in this case referring to a spanking.
I think mongo is referring to corporal punishment, i.e. paddling
As Steve McQueen did in ‘The Great Escape’ to get a motorbike.
Standard trick of special forces, tie a piece of piano wire at neck level of a biker, tie to one street lamp and the next one on the other side (the sloping angle works to ‘slice’ the neck!) - takes the head off a motorcyclist! Messy way to get a new helmet…. I am having second thoughts about this comment as it can be viewed as a training tip for a terrorist.
Old guerilla/thief tactic.
Heavily used by the partisans in the forests on the eastern front during WWII.
Liban 83, all our jeeps had a steel bar welded vertically on the front bumper to avoid this.
I don’t understand these storylines lately – this seems just rude and violent. I’m glad I didn’t subscribe.
Kids are bad by nature. That’s usually fully explained in the opening sequences of Sam Pekinpah movies.
Not just kids in this strip. There is an adult, which from the text of the comic taught them how to do this.
Where is the adult?
Nobody seems to have commented upon the behaviour of the driver of the blue car. Drinking coffee, talking on a cell phone; this is a bad, bad driver. Perhaps it is the blue car driver that killed Fred?
…or just yet another reckless driver, coincidentally driving a blue car!
: P
I suspect that Rick tosses blue cars into the strip on occasion just to see our Pavlovian reactions.
Could Rick be such a dickhead really? I doubt it.
Would that really make him a jerk? Why not get everyone excited? I’m waiting for the day when we can finally put all of the pieces together and see the clues
Or the driver was driving and the boy is talking about the passengers woes???
Blue car! Blue car! etc. ad nauseum.
The blue car that killed Fred is almost certain to be off the road by now. Its driver, realizing that the collision proved fatal to the cyclist, probably garaged the car for a few days (or even weeks), then drove the damaged vehicle into a telephone pole and submitted a fraudulent insurance claim for it. Didn’t anyone else see the film “Reservation Road”?
While I cannot condone bad behaviour, that did make me laugh! Especially Chunk’s comment:
“Spilled coffee, dropped phone, success!”
“Spilled coffee, dropped phone, success!” Clearly, the driver was distracted: yapping on a phone, drinking a cup of coffee, and, oh yeah, maneuvering a few thousand pounds of metal down the street. Sounds like a prescription for mowing down cyclists and pedestrians. If the driver had been focused on driving, the sudden stop would probably have happened anyway, but without the need for a trip to the detail shop and the dry cleaner.
Given the distractions, I’m surprised they didn’t just blow on through without even noticing.
Hasn’t everyone played this game with cars when growing up, or something like it?
I know I did (and maybe Rick, too).
I remember this trick from my childhood, too, in the ’60s. Judging from some of the other comments, I don’t think some readers noticed the “imaginary clothesline” label in the first panel. What makes this funny is that the kids are pantomiming, and the driver stops to avoid something that isn’t really there. It’s not something I’d recommend for kids to do, but it’s a lot less dangerous than throwing rocks or dropping things off overpasses or other things kids have been known to do to passing cars.
both, throwing rocks or scare someone to enforce a possibly dangerous action are intended crimes. i cant see much of a difference.
There is a gigantic differencen between an imaginary line and a rock through through your windshield. In fact, “had” there really been a rope between the kids and the car kept going, no damage to the car but the kids hands would have suffered assuming the line just slide through otherwise it would have been worse.
how big can the difference be if both kill someone ?
If stopping suddenly is likely to kill someone, then I must not have long to live. In my neighborhood, I have to hit the brakes unexpectedly to avoid a squirrel or chipmunk about once a week. (And frequently, they play their own little trick on me and run the opposite way, so that I end up stopping unnecessarily.) So far, I’ve survived. (Fortunately, none of them have ever thrown a rock through my windshield, either, so I can’t say from personal experience how dangerous that would be.)
“dropping things off overpasses” yeeeesh. That kills or seriously maims people from time to time in my news market. Every few years the local news is dominated by a story such as this where kids are dumping bricks or chunks of concrete off overpasses, sometimes under a headline like ‘Two Parents and One Child Killed, Another Child in Coma…” etc. That’s some serious business.
I agree. While this game the boys are playing isn’t much of a crime, if you do something and immediately know you have to run away from it, you’ve done something wrong. And, yes, it isn’t as bad as throwing things off overpasses but what if the phone-booth driver had been injured somehow because of their little trick?
I talked to a boy in Juv. Det. who had tossed a bowling ball onto a freeway and was apprehended. He thought the car would block it because “in the movies it just breaks the window or bounces down the road.” No deaths on his hands but some pretty serious injuries, not to mention the destroyed vehicle.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT think the behavior in this comic is serious business. Are these children behaving? No, obviously; but real children don’t behave. Although my friends and I had never heard of this trick, we did lots of stuff we weren’t supposed to, and some of it was a heck of a lot worse than what these kids are doing. If a motorist is driving so fast on a residential street that they cannot stop safely on a dime, they are driving too fast. It’s high time we held them accountable for that.
@Widsmith – We noticed, but it reminds us of those incidents when the ‘clothesline’ was NOT imaginary.
As for stuff thrown from bridges – in the UK that has become a regular pastime for some!
The discussion reminds us of the homicidal actions of a small minority and the ‘copycat’ fun that results. Not fun but a sober warning…
Here we go again. ??????????????? This is totally unrelated to anything cycling – or kickstand – or ???.
The writer of this kind of drivvel is an errant and disturbed child. Grow up!!!!!!!!
This USED TO BE a very good strip. What happened? Seems like all this low-minded crap started after Rick announced he’d taken on a new writer. If this is his stuff, you didn’t do yourself any favors, Rick. You were better off without him. What a moron.
the tell us how exactly the story should be to make you happy. seems you already know what is an should be coming.
Oh no! A few strips NOT related to cycling. Everyone panic! Are you that insecure about your identity as a cycliest that EVERYTHING must relate? There is more to life then bikes.
yah,I’m sure you were just waiting to authorize your new paypal so you could sub and this changed your mind, uh huh. This is a comic, and it’s not a children’s book either. It’s for adults, and we all remember childhood mischief, which is all this is!
Wow, I guess you’d feel really stupid if Rick logged in and said “Actually, this is one of my strips.” I still think you should add “Un-” to your screen name. Sheesh.
hahaha! I remember hiding somewhere waiting for cars to appear, and then on the street place a small imaginary timebomb and run away to hide again to see if the car would come to a screeching halt. it was definitely summerholiday pasttime fun as a kid, not entirely responsible. luckily noone ever got hurt.
I had never played this game and some kids got me and my wife a couple summers ago.
I think I was driving our blue mini-van, even!
I slowed down thinking I’d kill them if they really had a rope and I hit it at 25mph… Then we all laughed when I realized it was a pretty good trick.
(I did actually hit a rope once and it scratched my mom’s cars window. Some idiot at the local grain elevator was pulling something with a long rope tied to a tractor. The rope went across the street…)
http://www.videobash.com/video_show/invinsible-rope-prank-2238
some guys doing this on a residential road w/slow traffic.
I can’t believe the stories posted here about people who set death traps for cyclists.
Thanks for that, it’s even funnier in action!
As 8 year olds, my cousins and I played this game on backroads in Michigan where drivers are not the most tolerant of folks; one day a guy slammed to a stop and we were laughing until he got out and, Man, that guy was fast! A lot faster than I was, at least. I got a spanking my mother later called “well-deserved.”
I like Rick’s story lines much better than this one.
Just realized the car is blue… but then again, it’s lacking front end damage.
Not as fun as Pabst trappin’…
When I was like 7 or so we would wait down by the street and throw rocks at cars as they drove by, until we hit a cop car that is… Or put a bunch of sharp rocks in the road (with the idea that one might pop a tire).
in other words there are worse things they could be doing. Kids will be kids= Stupid and easily amused
Another argument for year-round schools…
Some don’t like this story line. I was just thinking a month or two ago how the neighborhood kids needed to be featured more in the strip. I have long wanted to see the lives of these kids fleshed out more. And the kids in the strip have bikes and use bikes as an integral part of their adventures, but don’t see the bike as the adventure itself. I think the more time spent on the kids and their games, the better. While detailed explorations of roadies vs hipsters, bike lanes vs VC, barends vs brifters, etc etc, are all fun things to see in the strip and comment on, they are tangential to the main focus of the strip and the fictional Kickstand Cyclery. Bikes are meant to facilitate real life exploration and adventure, and that’s what they are doing here in this strip. Those who can’t empathize with the kids here and their piss-off-the-adults-in-the-cars games bred of summer boredom, really missed out on something.
But exploring and adventure is the start of the slippery slope towards recreation! Next thing you know you’ll be wanting drop bars, bike shorts and an odometer, and from there it’s a small step to a roof rack and country rides. Best to keep the bikes clunky and the cycling urban and joyless.
Oh. And one more thing. I hadn’t gotten around to re-upping my subscription after Rick’s break. After today’s comic, I did so. Just so we’re clear on what kind of strip motivates ME to open up my wallet a trickle.
Maybe I am a stick in the mud but NOT KEWL to play a prank that might get someone seriusly hurt. Causing big hunks of metal to slam on their brakes or manuver unexpectedly is NOT a good idea.
In the strip, it is not JUST kids playing a trick. There is an adult there.
So where is this adult? I see three kids, with an age span (I’d guess) of about 8 to 13.
@Rzar – Do you mean Stokely. the kid nearest us?
Yeah, Stokely is not an adult. He’s a tall kid.
In response to the comments saying that R&B should not have featured this theme…
1. Without acting as a defender – it is another strip showing what real world cyclists get up to
2. The discussion quickly got into decrying the stunt as a bad idea while admitting guilt for doing the same thing when young
3. If it was a real clothesline the only ones hurt would be the kids, maybe a mirror torn off?.
4. If a real line was tethered to a substantial thing, the result would be different!
So what is different about this strip and others? Nothing. Rick shows another theme of bike folk living their life normally.
Woulda been cooler if it was a real rope that got twisted around the little assholes and they got dragged a couple blocks.
um….
mom didnt show you enough love when you where a kid mongo?
Dad “touch” you?
Hey, these kids are OUTDOORS, playing with each other, messing with an adult’s head! I’m kinda surprised that no one has mentioned that the kids are NOT inside, each at their own computer, playing nintendo or grand theft auto or something else glorifying violence and lawlessness. They are developing real-world skills of dealing with each other, and with their (sometimes not-so-smart) choices, and discovering that real life, unlike computer games, has no “extra lives,” no “reset” button.
Sure what they’re doing is dumb. They’re children, not adults. They’ll learn. I did dumb, dangerous, things as a kid, and so did you. And we learned, and survived. And they’ll learn better in the healthy outdoors, and as a group, than otherwise.
And, as I’ve pointed out before, this is a CARTOON! Part of humor is exaggeration. Lighten up, guys.
I’ve done much, much worse in my time but, contrary to some here, I don’t find it ‘natural for kids’ or harmless, nor is it funny, even retrospectively. BTW, outside your fantasies, the vast majority of the kids just never try something that they understand could land them in a bad place.
The worse that I see in those recent actions in Yehuda’s strip is that those kids will turn into self-righteous pricks if someone doesn’t stop them.
Now now. Never screech to a halt for the imaginary rope. Accelerate and aim for the nearest kid.
Did this once with some buds with a real clothesline when we were about 12. One of us nearly got his arm torn off. He was lucky to get off with a VERY nasty rope burn and a lifelong 4 inch scar. We weren’t juvenile delinquents- just a few bored pre-teens.
One boy is just a boy. Two boys are half-a-boy. Three boys is no boy at all.
BTW, it’s a COMIC STRIP, folks. Get over it.
We now return you to our regular programming.
End of rant.
Peace.
Out.
Yes – this is the sort of stupid thing kids will think up. They don’t intend any real harm. But if I saw kids doing this I would give them a real talking to. They could easily startle a driver into losing control.
This is similar to a trick some kids did while I was bicycling. As I passed them one of them took a stick and banged the street sign. Huge “bang” sound. I nearly veered into a car that was passing me. I could have been killed. I chased the kids down and told them they could startle someone in traffic and get them killed. And if I EVER saw them doing it again I was calling the cops.