Go Out and Play!

By KaBOOM.

$39.00 (29.00 elsewhere for the backpack alone)

What do you get? What's inside? What are the activities?

1) A book by the same title. About activities and games. The ultimate antidote to "Mom! There's nothing to do! 

The book is rated highly on Amazon, 4.5 stars. By four people. One review that I thought had to be put on, too glowing and warm and positive, caused me to check who wrote it. The worst review is a woman who felt misled into thinking there would be more traditional games that she remembered.

Actually, I thought the idea is for a backpack of fun outdoor things. Like a pocket fisherman. Flashlight. Knife. Matches. Bicycle tools. Folded poncho. To change the association of backpack with books. And books are an indoor activity that you must go somewhere sit down and read and doing that is the opposite of go out and play.

I heard that phrase a lot. My tendency was to hang around and be a pest so I was told go out and play quite a lot. The other thing I was told repeatedly, "Stop running in and out." Those two together implied tacitly and received concretely, "Get out and stay out."

That can be the next activity book, "Stop Running In And Out!"

And the third in a series of activity books, "Get Out And Stay Out!"

The book is for adults and seeks to incite community activism. Looking inside, we see a series of suggestions and imperatives: Let's Get Started. Do this, do that, close a street for play. Build a playground. Rally your city to become a playful city USA. To be fair,  some 91 pages of outdoor games.

You can buy a new book for $10.25 or elsewhere for $6.49 + $4.00 shipping while options continue for used copies for 1¢.  

2) Backpack. 

3) Essentials Pack. 2 boxes of large sidewalk chalk, 2 jump ropes,  8.5" ball, frisbee.

I was hoping for more.

Michelle Obama teams up with KaBOOM! through her own initiative Let's Move that shares the same interests, the concern being childhood obesity, considered epidemic. 

I must admit that... I must whisper this... I secretly applaud Michelle Obama's efforts even though I feel in every fiber that it is none of her biz wax. Then I realized she is not talking to me and never was. She is talking to somebody else. Get over myself. She is role model to somebody else. 

To be clear, she just said, "The President and the First Lay of the United States joined millions to remember 911 with service by assembling backpacks with KaBOOM volunteers." 

Honestly, the first thing I thought was Kaboom cleanser. And the second thing I thought was a children's television show called Kaboom. I do not have a problem with Kaboom + 9-11 association even as wisecracks about packing a pressure pot into them, sinister and macabre, pond-bottom level like Joan Rivers, have me falling around laughing.   

Concurrently in the news, poll results show most Americans want to criminalize pre-teens playing unsupervised by 68%. 

Mixed signals here. Go outside, stay outside, read a book of activities, stay active, you are unacceptably fat, do not go to a park unsupervised.

Good luck sorting the conflicting imperatives to go out and play but never unsupervised.  

I get Michelle Obama by realizing she is not talking to me, not about food, gardening, nor this, but she is talking directly to somebody else and that is the odd part, then, unseemly peering like this into a private conversation in a space where kaboom + 9-11 goes unnoticed. But honestly, we did know all that right off. Did we not? Looking back, nobody, and I mean nobody has a Christmas tree with Mao Tse Tung ornament least of all president of United States so that does tell you right off it will be insistently a different space being created a different language spoken with such odd phrases that invite satire in the terrestrial world, as "remember 911 with service by assembling backpacks with kaboom."