Dill Wedekind, Alice's mooncalf friend & neighbor, has at least three older brothers, near as I can figure. Also, from what I can tell, his family are kind of suburban hillbillies; his mom and dad are former late-generation hippies who've lived on farms. So the stuff inside their house sometimes sprawl out into their yard and beyond, just because they're used to outbuildings & sheds & barns. On a farm you can have big projects that get worked on outside, you can tear down buildings and put up new ones, you can build a trebuchet.
We had neighbors some blocks over who were probably suburban hillbillies and there was a trebuchet parked in thier driveway for a year or so. In a suburban neighborhood there's no hiding stuff like that, which I like as it makes the landscape more interesting. Their trebuchet is gone now, which is a shame as I heard it wasn't all that successful at throwing things. I knew a few people back when who built a trebuchet, and a catapult, and a small cannon that shot onions. If I was handy I'd build a seige engine, one of those tower things, just to make the landscape more interesting. And maybe earn some cash on the side cleaning gutters.
Property values? What about 'em, I say! What price are you gonna put on being able to gaze up at your neighbor's trebuchet as you drive past every day?
ReplyDeleteI really enjoy today's strip. There must be all kinds of kid-wersions-of-old-wives-tales out there. My personal favorite: my grandmother used to cover all of the mirrors in the house with towels during lightning storms.
ReplyDeleteI know, Paul, it isn't very practical, but these days I can barely afford our neighborhood anyway. About 6 or 7 blocks over there's a house with a dead tree out front that the owner commissioned a chain-saw artist to transform into a sculpture. The sculpture's of a mermaid, topless like a mermaid should be, with her arms outstretched towards the house. Traffic slows as it passes, and it's on a major road. About 8 blocks over there's a little grandma-size house that's been torn down and replaced with big, bloated grey house that's so enormously ugly its picture appeared in a story about eyesores in the Washington Post. Betweem the little grandma-sized houses with the yards all gone to hell (basically my house) and the 1.5 million dollar mcmansions taking their places, a trebuchet is somehow refreshing.
ReplyDeleteAnd CHB, I'd never heard that one! My daughters do the ice cube in the toilet and wear their pajamas inside out & backwards to invoke the god of snow. I'd never heard this when I was a kid.
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