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.
4 comments:
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?
I 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.
I 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.
And 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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