Yes… I think young kids bounce more and have more forgiving bones and have less mass and less distance to fall… us oldies are all brittle and stiff.
I was looking for a story I recalled about a skier who had happily skied the pistes all day but was killed slipping over walking down some icy steps in town afterwards. I didn’t find that but did find this story about a veteran mountaineer & skier who died falling downstairs at home. Which I think probably is ironic, not just “that sucks”.
Little kids can run barefoot across the stones in the driveway or the legos in the living room without any distress. Adults can’t.
Little kids can take a fall and they get right back up again. The last time I fell like that I was out for the rest of the day, lying in bed and wishing I could take aspirin.
Chak is right. Kids can fall all day and be fine. Adults suffer a lot. We have more mass and farther to fall, and are also no longer “made of rubber” like kids are. I’ve had a couple of slips like that. One had me hobbling for more than a week because the fall forced me nearly into a split – something I’ve never been able to do, even as a child. My son did something similar when he was about 6, and he was fine by the next day.
After much consideration, I prefer Kilby’s That’s All, Folks tag to my suggested, Yes, that is all there is to it tag.
But…. yes, “He survived all his childhood winter dangers unscathed but was done in decades later by a patch of ice” is precisely the joke.
I guess you’re right… though personally, I seriously injured my right knee diving for a Frisbee when I was 12, and seriously injured my left wrist diving for a Frisbee when I was 57.
In between, were you better at diving for Frisbees, or smart enough to avoid diving for Frisbees?
“Smart enough to avoid diving for Frisbees”… You jest.
It’s really all about luck. Did you know that if you dive for a Frisbee and hit the ground right at the top of a slope, you’re going to damage many parts of your body before it comes to a stop?
Bill, I don’t dive for Frisbees, and haven’t for a very long time. Too lazy, too smart… there’s a case for both, though I prefer one over the other. But my approximate number of Frisbee-related injuries is holding steady at 0.
Why is Little Arlo holding a banana in panel 2?
I suspect it’s supposed to be part of the sled he’s destroyed – I never had a rail sled like that, so I’m not sure, but I think they have a handle at the front. Which is all he hung on to when it hit…whatever it hit.
It looks like the sled smashed into the tree. Also, there appears to be a rock in the snowball that hit him in the face.
Alas, “smart” has never applied to me where there’s a Frisbee involved. Which I guess is obvious.
@ woozy – I can’t take credit for that, the link to the Looney Toons closer was posted by someone else.
His life is flashing before his eyes.
I got a severe wrist injury diving for a Frisbee in my early 20s. The girl who threw it, however, made it worth it.
Bob, fortunately my only girl-related Frisbee injury only left me unable to walk for a day or two — so I wouldn’t have even thought about it if not for your comment.
My just-graduated nephew played on his college Frisbee team, and was operated on twice for match-related injuries. Which makes me kind of thankful there were no such teams when I was in college, because I probably wouldn’t have MADE IT to graduation.
I dove for a Frisbee once and landed on my wrist weird — and my cheap digital watch took the entire force of the hit. It shattered, and my wrist wasn’t even sore. Weirdest thing ever, and I remain grateful to Casio F91W, the watch that you think of when you think “cheap digital watch”.
Hubby was at a family reunion; for some reason, a volleyball game was begun. He tore the ligaments in his knee and needed major surgery. ‘But I got the winning hit,’ he told me several times, all the way in to the OR.
Next family reunion: NO VOLLEYBALL!!
It is the loss of weight I managed that scares me these days. My old bones have much less padding than the used to and I am concerned about breaking a bone.
Robert had a pain in his left shoulder and arm in early October, after 8.5 hours in the emergency room we knew that it was not a heart attack (yes, if he says he had to go to the emergency room – it hurt that much). He was not out of pain until the end of November. One day he was complaining to me that I did not understand being in pain from something like this (a muscle pain).
I was getting a bit short on “nice” after 2 months – he tends to be a bit of a big baby – when he said to me “you have no idea what it is like to be in pain.” Other than when a glass soda bottle exploded and sent glass into his leg when he was boy, this was the first time he was in pain “like this”. I looked at him and said “do you want the injuries by pain or by date? – ripped left ankle in high school ( I fell off a curb) – it still hurts now and then, broke 2 toys in junior high, 2 attacks of bursitis in my left shoulder, fell on my right knee full (fat person) weight twice – ripped the skin off it the second time on the first day of vacation and kept walking for 2 weeks – still cannot sleep more than an hour on my right side without having to turn over, virus in left leg in 3rd grade, missed about half the year, and of course my broken collar bone when I was 3, although technically that did not hurt as I told the doctor that it didn’t” He has not again tell me that I don’t know what pain is.
I took a fall like that once walking my dog one icy day. Both feet went out from under me and I did a perfect all-points landing flat on my back on cold concrete. I knew I wasn’t hurt but I thought, “I’m just gonna take a moment here.” As I’m laying there my dog came up to sniff my face like, “You ok man? That looked painful. Should I just finish my walk without you?”
There was an old Simpsons episode where Homer threw his back out or something, and was unable to move, lying on the floor, and the cat and/or the dog came over to investigate, and decided to lay down with Homer and take a nap — he was eventually found hours later with all the pets comfortably dozing around him.
The reason that episode sticks out in my mind (even though nothing else about it does) is that I had a very similar situation: I was cleaning out gutters on the roof, and decided to just step over a discontinuous piece to access the little bit of roof in the front. Well, after cleaning out those gutters, I discovered I was cold and stiff, and really didn’t trust myself to take the step back to the main roof (and the roof access/egress). No one else was home. This was before the age of cell phones. So as I’m sitting there, our cat comes to investigate. Jumps over to the roof part I’m on, sees I’m not going anywhere, and snuggles in for a nap…
Oh, larK, don’t keep us in suspenders – did you ever get down from the roof? I’m picturing a comic of a skeleton with a cat napping on it.
“His life is flashing before his eyes.”
Apparently just one day, judging by the clothes.
Okay, I feel a bit less bad about my Frisbee injury:
You know, I can’t rightly remember if after a point, I roused the peacefully sleeping cat off my lap, got up and stepped over to the main roof, or whether I sat there until my mother and/or sister came back about an hour later and put a ladder up. Is it because I choose to not remember the painful humiliation of the latter (with the ladder), or because the former rendered it a non-event?
Or maybe it was a melange of the two, where with other people around to immediately assist me should I fall stepping over, I stepped back with no big deal in front of an audience, making the whole thing seem silly? Memory is a funny thing…
larK – don’t you hate it when you remember two overlapping memories of something and only version can be correct?
Meryl: I’m resigned to it. No point fighting reality (even if you are convinced that they changed it on you Philip K. Dick style). My father was an extra in a movie when he was a med student back in the 60s. He remembers seeing the film in the theater and there was a huge close up of him in the audience of a lecture. I found a copy of the film on DVD, and it had him in the audience, just like he described — there even was a close up, but it was a two shot, of him and his friend (whose namesake I am). When I showed it to him, it didn’t match his nearly 50 year old memory of it, and rather than concede that his memory might be off after all that time, nope, he insisted that they changed it, that it was a different cut, that, that, that. He was always very sure of his memory, even (or maybe especially) when it was wrong.
(He also had an elaborate story that the Tokens got together again to re-record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, because he had a version he recorded off the air in the 70s, and it sounded different to the version he had on reel-to-reel recorded from someone’s 45 (I think) in the 60s; the reason the two sounded different was because in the 70s they started playing songs on the radio up to 3% faster so they could squeeze more commercials in. Of course he preferred his story that they came out of retirement to record an exact but not quite copy of the song.)
“He was always very sure of his memory, even (or maybe especially) when it was wrong.”
My father, also. Makes life difficult for those of us who are, sometimes, actually right.
@lark: re “My father was an extra in a movie when he was a med student back in the 60s. He remembers seeing the film in the theater and there was a huge close up of him in the audience of a lecture.” etc. —
My first wife had the smallest possible sort-of speaking part in (at least the original release version of) CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. She had appeared in a local TV commercial in Los Angeles, and during the “sculpting potatoes into shape of the monument” living room scene, the TV is on in the background and we can see a pitch guy saying something like “You don’t want to pay high prices for groceries, do you?” and a glimpse of her saying “No.”
I believe that part was altered in a later cut, possibly just muting the souns, but I never re-saw the movie after first release. In any case, a rerun of a previous unrelated TV appearance which shows up as background noise when the focus is on a gripping main scene, featuring as Doris’s moment of glory a two-letter word which was (perhaps) subsequently eliminated. You can’t get much more marginal than that. . . .
If my father had been in a George Lucas film, then his conspiracy delusions of course would be grounded in fact…
“he preferred his story that they came out of retirement to record an exact but not quite copy of the song.”
It’s not unusual for some songs by some artists to exist in multiple formats. Sometimes it’s because of a dispute between the artist and the label, so the artist re-records a cover of their own song, and sometimes it’s because the band lineup changes. (I think the most famous case of that was Kiss giving a big F-U to Peter Criss by not using the Criss version of “Beth” on the “Greatest Hits” album, and instead recording a new version with Eric Carr instead.)
And yes, Hollywood DOES sometimes change films for release on “home” media. Usually, it’s because something in the soundtrack wasn’t licensed to cover home media, and so they have to re-record or re-edit to cut out the unlicensed material. (When DVD box-sets of old TV shows started appearing, this problem re-surfaced. The most notable case is the original release of WKRP on DVD, which is heavily edited because they didn’t have the copyright clearances for all the pop music playing in the background.)
Disney has had to make edits for some other things… in the original home-video release of “The Rescuers”, it was possible to stop the playback and notice that the animators inserted a topless woman in the background as the heroes are plunging off a skyscraper, and the original home-video release of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” revealed that Jessica Rabbit doesn’t wear underpants… or at least, she’s drawn that way, visibly, for 2 or 3 frames (she’s apparently a natural redhead.)
BEFORE there was home-video releases of movies, there were some alternative versions of movies made alongside the theatrical release versions. The “broadcast” version had missing or blurred nudity and a soundtrack missing Carlin’s 7 words. There’s also a different version of movies produced for airlines.
I’m not saying dad’s right about whether or not a movie was recut between what he remembers and what you can see today, but it’s not impossible.
There’s also been cases of reshooting/re-editing to remove an actor who is mid-scandal when the movie is due to release, but those are modern era, AFAICT.
Purely by coincidence (of course), I watched this on YouTube last night – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M7N_TSZdic – and learned there are three versions of Tim Curry’s film, ‘Legend’. One for American audiences, one for European audiences, and a Director’s Cut. Even tho I’ve not seen the movie, I found this interesting. Warning: the narrator loves to throw the f-word around for no discernible reason.
Way back in 1973 we saw the movie “Touch of Class” with George Segal and Glenda Jackson for the first time. We saw it again many times afterwards, including on VHS tape, which we owned. It takes place mostly in London.
One of the things which stands out in both our memories straight through the decades is Glenda Jackson is cooking and goes to one of the women in the other apartments in the building (all the other building tenants are women who have the last name “French” and are supposedly prostitutes – the two of them have an apartment in that building, in that area for assignations.) She needs oregano to for what she is cooking and she is out of same. We both remember her asking the woman for “or E ghan O” (accent on the ghan) not “or reg an O” (accent o the reg) as we had always heard it pronounced. We presume that this is the British pronunciation. It was this way every time we saw the movie on TV for decades and when we played the VHS tape.
Suddenly we noticed while watching it on TV that oregano was pronounced as we would pronounce it and wondered why. Did it get edited for American audiences? We pulled out the VHS tape and played it – it was the American pronunciation there also, but there it sounded cut in – but if it was cut in, it should have been same all the other times we saw the tape.
We have no explanation for this . Both of us individually have the same memory. Our standard comment to each other when something such as this happens is “Must have been another rift in the time line.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Yes, “That’s all, folks!“
Yes… I think young kids bounce more and have more forgiving bones and have less mass and less distance to fall… us oldies are all brittle and stiff.
I was looking for a story I recalled about a skier who had happily skied the pistes all day but was killed slipping over walking down some icy steps in town afterwards. I didn’t find that but did find this story about a veteran mountaineer & skier who died falling downstairs at home. Which I think probably is ironic, not just “that sucks”.
Little kids can run barefoot across the stones in the driveway or the legos in the living room without any distress. Adults can’t.
Little kids can take a fall and they get right back up again. The last time I fell like that I was out for the rest of the day, lying in bed and wishing I could take aspirin.
Chak is right. Kids can fall all day and be fine. Adults suffer a lot. We have more mass and farther to fall, and are also no longer “made of rubber” like kids are. I’ve had a couple of slips like that. One had me hobbling for more than a week because the fall forced me nearly into a split – something I’ve never been able to do, even as a child. My son did something similar when he was about 6, and he was fine by the next day.
After much consideration, I prefer Kilby’s That’s All, Folks tag to my suggested, Yes, that is all there is to it tag.
But…. yes, “He survived all his childhood winter dangers unscathed but was done in decades later by a patch of ice” is precisely the joke.
I guess you’re right… though personally, I seriously injured my right knee diving for a Frisbee when I was 12, and seriously injured my left wrist diving for a Frisbee when I was 57.
In between, were you better at diving for Frisbees, or smart enough to avoid diving for Frisbees?
“Smart enough to avoid diving for Frisbees”… You jest.
It’s really all about luck. Did you know that if you dive for a Frisbee and hit the ground right at the top of a slope, you’re going to damage many parts of your body before it comes to a stop?
Bill, I don’t dive for Frisbees, and haven’t for a very long time. Too lazy, too smart… there’s a case for both, though I prefer one over the other. But my approximate number of Frisbee-related injuries is holding steady at 0.
Why is Little Arlo holding a banana in panel 2?
I suspect it’s supposed to be part of the sled he’s destroyed – I never had a rail sled like that, so I’m not sure, but I think they have a handle at the front. Which is all he hung on to when it hit…whatever it hit.
It looks like the sled smashed into the tree. Also, there appears to be a rock in the snowball that hit him in the face.
Alas, “smart” has never applied to me where there’s a Frisbee involved. Which I guess is obvious.
@ woozy – I can’t take credit for that, the link to the Looney Toons closer was posted by someone else.
His life is flashing before his eyes.
I got a severe wrist injury diving for a Frisbee in my early 20s. The girl who threw it, however, made it worth it.
Bob, fortunately my only girl-related Frisbee injury only left me unable to walk for a day or two — so I wouldn’t have even thought about it if not for your comment.
My just-graduated nephew played on his college Frisbee team, and was operated on twice for match-related injuries. Which makes me kind of thankful there were no such teams when I was in college, because I probably wouldn’t have MADE IT to graduation.
I dove for a Frisbee once and landed on my wrist weird — and my cheap digital watch took the entire force of the hit. It shattered, and my wrist wasn’t even sore. Weirdest thing ever, and I remain grateful to Casio F91W, the watch that you think of when you think “cheap digital watch”.
Hubby was at a family reunion; for some reason, a volleyball game was begun. He tore the ligaments in his knee and needed major surgery. ‘But I got the winning hit,’ he told me several times, all the way in to the OR.
Next family reunion: NO VOLLEYBALL!!
It is the loss of weight I managed that scares me these days. My old bones have much less padding than the used to and I am concerned about breaking a bone.
Robert had a pain in his left shoulder and arm in early October, after 8.5 hours in the emergency room we knew that it was not a heart attack (yes, if he says he had to go to the emergency room – it hurt that much). He was not out of pain until the end of November. One day he was complaining to me that I did not understand being in pain from something like this (a muscle pain).
I was getting a bit short on “nice” after 2 months – he tends to be a bit of a big baby – when he said to me “you have no idea what it is like to be in pain.” Other than when a glass soda bottle exploded and sent glass into his leg when he was boy, this was the first time he was in pain “like this”. I looked at him and said “do you want the injuries by pain or by date? – ripped left ankle in high school ( I fell off a curb) – it still hurts now and then, broke 2 toys in junior high, 2 attacks of bursitis in my left shoulder, fell on my right knee full (fat person) weight twice – ripped the skin off it the second time on the first day of vacation and kept walking for 2 weeks – still cannot sleep more than an hour on my right side without having to turn over, virus in left leg in 3rd grade, missed about half the year, and of course my broken collar bone when I was 3, although technically that did not hurt as I told the doctor that it didn’t” He has not again tell me that I don’t know what pain is.
I took a fall like that once walking my dog one icy day. Both feet went out from under me and I did a perfect all-points landing flat on my back on cold concrete. I knew I wasn’t hurt but I thought, “I’m just gonna take a moment here.” As I’m laying there my dog came up to sniff my face like, “You ok man? That looked painful. Should I just finish my walk without you?”
There was an old Simpsons episode where Homer threw his back out or something, and was unable to move, lying on the floor, and the cat and/or the dog came over to investigate, and decided to lay down with Homer and take a nap — he was eventually found hours later with all the pets comfortably dozing around him.
The reason that episode sticks out in my mind (even though nothing else about it does) is that I had a very similar situation: I was cleaning out gutters on the roof, and decided to just step over a discontinuous piece to access the little bit of roof in the front. Well, after cleaning out those gutters, I discovered I was cold and stiff, and really didn’t trust myself to take the step back to the main roof (and the roof access/egress). No one else was home. This was before the age of cell phones. So as I’m sitting there, our cat comes to investigate. Jumps over to the roof part I’m on, sees I’m not going anywhere, and snuggles in for a nap…
Oh, larK, don’t keep us in suspenders – did you ever get down from the roof? I’m picturing a comic of a skeleton with a cat napping on it.
“His life is flashing before his eyes.”
Apparently just one day, judging by the clothes.
Okay, I feel a bit less bad about my Frisbee injury:
You know, I can’t rightly remember if after a point, I roused the peacefully sleeping cat off my lap, got up and stepped over to the main roof, or whether I sat there until my mother and/or sister came back about an hour later and put a ladder up. Is it because I choose to not remember the painful humiliation of the latter (with the ladder), or because the former rendered it a non-event?
Or maybe it was a melange of the two, where with other people around to immediately assist me should I fall stepping over, I stepped back with no big deal in front of an audience, making the whole thing seem silly? Memory is a funny thing…
larK – don’t you hate it when you remember two overlapping memories of something and only version can be correct?
Meryl: I’m resigned to it. No point fighting reality (even if you are convinced that they changed it on you Philip K. Dick style). My father was an extra in a movie when he was a med student back in the 60s. He remembers seeing the film in the theater and there was a huge close up of him in the audience of a lecture. I found a copy of the film on DVD, and it had him in the audience, just like he described — there even was a close up, but it was a two shot, of him and his friend (whose namesake I am). When I showed it to him, it didn’t match his nearly 50 year old memory of it, and rather than concede that his memory might be off after all that time, nope, he insisted that they changed it, that it was a different cut, that, that, that. He was always very sure of his memory, even (or maybe especially) when it was wrong.
(He also had an elaborate story that the Tokens got together again to re-record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, because he had a version he recorded off the air in the 70s, and it sounded different to the version he had on reel-to-reel recorded from someone’s 45 (I think) in the 60s; the reason the two sounded different was because in the 70s they started playing songs on the radio up to 3% faster so they could squeeze more commercials in. Of course he preferred his story that they came out of retirement to record an exact but not quite copy of the song.)
“He was always very sure of his memory, even (or maybe especially) when it was wrong.”
My father, also. Makes life difficult for those of us who are, sometimes, actually right.
@lark: re “My father was an extra in a movie when he was a med student back in the 60s. He remembers seeing the film in the theater and there was a huge close up of him in the audience of a lecture.” etc. —
My first wife had the smallest possible sort-of speaking part in (at least the original release version of) CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. She had appeared in a local TV commercial in Los Angeles, and during the “sculpting potatoes into shape of the monument” living room scene, the TV is on in the background and we can see a pitch guy saying something like “You don’t want to pay high prices for groceries, do you?” and a glimpse of her saying “No.”
I believe that part was altered in a later cut, possibly just muting the souns, but I never re-saw the movie after first release. In any case, a rerun of a previous unrelated TV appearance which shows up as background noise when the focus is on a gripping main scene, featuring as Doris’s moment of glory a two-letter word which was (perhaps) subsequently eliminated. You can’t get much more marginal than that. . . .
If my father had been in a George Lucas film, then his conspiracy delusions of course would be grounded in fact…
“he preferred his story that they came out of retirement to record an exact but not quite copy of the song.”
It’s not unusual for some songs by some artists to exist in multiple formats. Sometimes it’s because of a dispute between the artist and the label, so the artist re-records a cover of their own song, and sometimes it’s because the band lineup changes. (I think the most famous case of that was Kiss giving a big F-U to Peter Criss by not using the Criss version of “Beth” on the “Greatest Hits” album, and instead recording a new version with Eric Carr instead.)
And yes, Hollywood DOES sometimes change films for release on “home” media. Usually, it’s because something in the soundtrack wasn’t licensed to cover home media, and so they have to re-record or re-edit to cut out the unlicensed material. (When DVD box-sets of old TV shows started appearing, this problem re-surfaced. The most notable case is the original release of WKRP on DVD, which is heavily edited because they didn’t have the copyright clearances for all the pop music playing in the background.)
Disney has had to make edits for some other things… in the original home-video release of “The Rescuers”, it was possible to stop the playback and notice that the animators inserted a topless woman in the background as the heroes are plunging off a skyscraper, and the original home-video release of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” revealed that Jessica Rabbit doesn’t wear underpants… or at least, she’s drawn that way, visibly, for 2 or 3 frames (she’s apparently a natural redhead.)
BEFORE there was home-video releases of movies, there were some alternative versions of movies made alongside the theatrical release versions. The “broadcast” version had missing or blurred nudity and a soundtrack missing Carlin’s 7 words. There’s also a different version of movies produced for airlines.
I’m not saying dad’s right about whether or not a movie was recut between what he remembers and what you can see today, but it’s not impossible.
There’s also been cases of reshooting/re-editing to remove an actor who is mid-scandal when the movie is due to release, but those are modern era, AFAICT.
Purely by coincidence (of course), I watched this on YouTube last night –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M7N_TSZdic – and learned there are three versions of Tim Curry’s film, ‘Legend’. One for American audiences, one for European audiences, and a Director’s Cut. Even tho I’ve not seen the movie, I found this interesting. Warning: the narrator loves to throw the f-word around for no discernible reason.
Way back in 1973 we saw the movie “Touch of Class” with George Segal and Glenda Jackson for the first time. We saw it again many times afterwards, including on VHS tape, which we owned. It takes place mostly in London.
One of the things which stands out in both our memories straight through the decades is Glenda Jackson is cooking and goes to one of the women in the other apartments in the building (all the other building tenants are women who have the last name “French” and are supposedly prostitutes – the two of them have an apartment in that building, in that area for assignations.) She needs oregano to for what she is cooking and she is out of same. We both remember her asking the woman for “or E ghan O” (accent on the ghan) not “or reg an O” (accent o the reg) as we had always heard it pronounced. We presume that this is the British pronunciation. It was this way every time we saw the movie on TV for decades and when we played the VHS tape.
Suddenly we noticed while watching it on TV that oregano was pronounced as we would pronounce it and wondered why. Did it get edited for American audiences? We pulled out the VHS tape and played it – it was the American pronunciation there also, but there it sounded cut in – but if it was cut in, it should have been same all the other times we saw the tape.
We have no explanation for this . Both of us individually have the same memory. Our standard comment to each other when something such as this happens is “Must have been another rift in the time line.”