Readers — Linn’s ershhitkza
Stamp News reports that the government is destroying the stamps below that were supposed to boost Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” movement. You have to guess why.
I’ll tell you tomorrow. Or you can check out Michael Graham’s post about them, which is where I found the story.
But really. Try to guess why three of the pictures were found objectionable:
94 Comments
Cannonball? Because it sounds “militaristic”?
No idea, really. I can’t believe safety Nazis would approve of anything shown.
I’ll say stretch, twist and (hand) stand were judged likely to lead to spinal injury!
How the heck is it even remotely possible to do a headstand with a helmet on??!! The reasoning behind destroying these stamps is by far the stupidest thing I have heard in quite some time.
Because they lack mouths and noses and eyes and therefore they should all be intubated and in the ICU?
I cheated. I’m super safety conscious when it comes to preventable injury (helmets, car seats, etc), but that’s stupid.
Ooooh, I got one out of three…not terrible!
I am so relieved that these stamps will never see the light of day. Just look at them! The batter isn’t wearing a helmet and neither is the skateboarder. The swinger is on a wooden swing instead of a much safer soft swing. There is a deadly rope in one of the images. That’s just for starters. In NONE of the images is there a parent watching over the kids and I think I can see the top of the head belonging to a child sexual predator in the Stretch stamp. I can’t believe none of the kids are carrying water bottles–and the Cheetohs the kid is ‘Toss’ing into his mouth are most definitely not a healthy snack.
Cartwheel, stretch, and balance.
I don’t know but I bet I’m not going to like it… Can’t wait until tomorrow to find out. I’m going to be as indignant as my 15 year old is about doing her chemistry problem the way her teacher wants her to instead of the way that she understands. I’m not sure we’re going to make it through this week with all this indignation.
Because their parents aren’t in the picture watching their every move (I read the real answer, but mine is plausible)!
On my honor, I have not cheated. Here are my guesses:
1. skateboard without elbow and knee guards.
2. baseball without a helmet.
3. climbing a rope.
This is a joke, right? This is one of those satire site that we mistake for real news, like the soccer without balls story, right? Right?! Please tell me it’s satire. Please!
I think I can see the top of the head belonging to a child sexual predator in the Stretch stamp.
Marie FTW!
Here’s my guess on the 3 stamps: skateboarding without a helmet and pads, batting without a helmet, and stretching on a rock surrounded by water. Such a cute stamp! Yeah, perhaps the kids should have helmets on…but why does everything have to be so scrutinized? I think it’s a cute stamp collection.
It’s obvious. None of these kids are being supervised! There should be no ball-playing, skateboarding, swimming, or any other sort of possible injury-producing activities unless there is proper supervision! Sheesh. A kid looks at these, gets wild exercise ideas, gets a bump on the head… then it’s just lawsuit after lawsuit. Can’t have that.
cartwheel, headstand, girl on rock, cannonball would all be my guesses.
Skateboarder does look like they are wearing a helmet. Guess they (and other pics) don’t have knee pads, elbow pads or wrist pads though.
It’s got to be helmets. They don’t have helmets on their creepy faceless heads.
So, “cannonball” is dangerous, but “cartwheel” stays? Really? What’s dangerous about doing a cannonball into water of appropriate depth? Actually, since cannonballs are feet first, deep water isn’t a requirement.
P.S., Are all the stamps going to be destroyed, or just the “objectionable” ones?
If someone gets ahold of any undestroyed stamps, and actually mails something with one, can that person be charged with child endangerment?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Because we all know that parents and children make decisions about important things like safety equipment based on the stamps that are on our birthday card from grandma.
Please tell me it’s just because the art sucks!?
Sigh. If we could be so lucky. Obviously, some of these kids are at risk of hurting themselves because they aren’t wearing safety equipment in padded rooms. 😛
Sure.. make the one black kid play basketball.
No golf. No tennis. No cycling.
But rock-balancing is there. And basketball is there twice.
Well, I have an idea from the comments that have been posted.
But my first thought was, maybe because they are not “diverse” enough. Nobody is fat or in a wheelchair. Oh, and the basketball player appears to be stereotypically AA and the soccer player stereotypically brown.
they’re obviously racist…
Cannot. Speak.
I’m goin’ with the lack of helmets. That, and maybe the risk of concussion from the upside-downers…
My boys are pretty sure that the only way that one can enter a pool is by doing a cannonball. Not sure why that is so objectionable. It is not as though the kid is diving head first into a pool marked 3 feet deep.
It does also look like all the kids are from the upper portions of Montana too (but not a reservation!) – and not representative of our nation as a whole.
“Because we all know that parents and children make decisions about important things like safety equipment based on the stamps that are on our birthday card from grandma.”
This. Actually, if you believe that all communication is (or should be) either good or bad propaganda, you probably DO think people think that way.
My initial reaction was because it was a girl jumping rope, rather than a boy, but I thought that probably wasn’t it. I’m not surprised by the answer, just thoroughly disgusted.
Well this makes is official. The citizens of the United States are screwed.
Right from the top.
Someone has written a book, in which she proposes a merger between Canada and the US. There are many reasons not to, but the most glaring is we still have hope in Canada to stem this uber safety movement. The States on the other hand has just had the Federal Gov’t declare that being a normal kid is to dangerous.
Good luck to you all. I give it ten years before parents in the states need to get permits from the gov’t to allow their kids to do anything.
http://i.imgur.com/1eps6MY.png
I cheated and read the other blog so I know the answer. All I can say is, “Gurrrlll, please!!” I really have nothing to say about people turning their children into special snowflakes.
Two kids are playing basketball but only one is slam-dunking, and he’s darker. You know, because “White Men Can’t Jump.” I cry foul!
Oh, and no one in the USA cares about soccer. REAL football is played with an oval pigskinned leather ball with trick plays and touchdown dances.
BTW, the Slippery Rock University Alumni Association intends to file suit for defamation. There is nothing wrong with slippery rocks.
(There actually is a Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. It’s a state university, named after the town where it is located. I don’t know how the town got its name.)
“REAL football is played with an oval pigskinned leather ball with trick plays and touchdown dances.”
Not anymore it isn’t…
I’m with Kate. The art is… *shudders*
Think of what a boon this will be to all the philatelists, though. Anytime a stamp is destroyed, the price of the surviving stamps in that series goes way up!
As an illustrator, I can’t quite imagine how these stamps “got through” the approval process in the first place. Like, there are about 40,000 hoops you have to jump through, drafts, proofs, committees, boards, SO MANY PEOPLE MUST APPROVE THESE BEFORE THEY GO TO PRESS.
And then, after they are produced, they suddenly realize, “Hey! These barely-anatomically-representative images lack every imaginable piece of protective safety equipment”?
Wow.
Spin because it is an evil cartwheel.
Stand because he is standing on his hands and he might fall and break his neck.
Climb because she might fall and break her neck.
Runner up – swim because there is no life jacket.
Obviously “Skip” is objectionable because that child is not skipping. She is levitating above the rope, which insinuates either sorcery or demonic possession.
Actually, this whole project is objectionable because no man will be able to purchase these stamps without being suspected of having an unhealthy interest in children.
I just looked all over the place trying to find something to tell me that this is a hoax but I had no luck. I’m still hoping it’s a hoax and tomorrow it will be on snopes. I really, really hope this information is wrong.
I’m not sure how a headstand can be done while wearing a helmet. The helmet would cause your head to slip and you’d break your neck. Wearing a helmet while doing a headstand would be dangerous!
Unsupervised Cartwheels.
Juggling Choking Hazards.
Faceless Zombie Children.
I need more coffee for this…
I give up. Seriously. That is the most ridiculous rationale I’ve ever heard.
Oh yes, these stamps would certainly cause an uproar!! Yup I can hear it now! “But Mooommm! Why do I have to wear my helmet?? That kid on the stamp on the letter you got last week from Aunt Martha didn’t have a helmet on!!” Because we all know that stamps are where everyone goes for up to date advice. Release this stamp and next thing you know, billboards will be proclaiming helmets are no longer necessary because the stamp told us so!!
I miss cycling! Isn’t that considered children’s play as well?
“Oh, and no one in the USA cares about soccer. REAL football is played with an oval pigskinned leather ball with trick plays and touchdown dances.”
I was surprised to read that what you call ‘soccer’ is something for brown kids in America, since it’s pretty much the default sport here in Europe (where we don’t care about baseball and basketball – quite funny when the Dutch won some world match and no-one even knew NL was in that competition…). All you need is a ball to play with your foot > foot-ball. So to be honest, if this is about the origine, I doubt the phrase ‘REAL football’ should refer to the American sport 🙂 All other Germanic languages use that word for ‘soccer’.
Btw, German has Fußball, but Americans now use that word for something else as well………
@Rob: Or she is a Buddhist?
“I was surprised to read that what you call ‘soccer’ is something for brown kids in America, since it’s pretty much the default sport here in Europe ”
In reality, it’s the other way around. Soccer is for the white and Asian kids. Latino kids play it on their own, but until fairly recently organized soccer was a much more yuppie, suburban thing so it was more closely associated with white kids.
American-style football’s pretty mixed — in heavily white areas, the teams are white, in areas with large numbers of blacks, blacks dominate, in more evenly mixed areas, the teams are pretty evenly mixed. I dunno, maybe there are some parts of the country where black kids are still discouraged from participating in the high school varsity teams, but I rather doubt it. The universities certainly don’t reflect that.
Well, there’s some obvious outrages here that the government simply couldn’t allow. For one thing, the diver is not wearing a life jacket! As you told us recently, unsupervised cartwheeling is deadly dangerou — where’s her gymnastics instructor? That poor child on the Stretch stamp is standing on a rock at least 14 inches tall—she could fall and get a concussion! No, we can’t encourage kids to engage in such dangerous activities. And to top it off, there are no inclusive activities for the Differently Abled depicted! Do you want to crush their spirits by excluding them? No, this won’t do at all.
@pentamon “American-style football’s pretty mixed — in heavily white areas, the teams are white, in areas with large numbers of blacks, blacks dominate, in more evenly mixed areas, the teams are pretty evenly mixed.”
So, basically, it is what soccer is here, meaning that everyone plays it and it is the most popular sport. Right?
After reviewing these again in a more caffeinated state I can’t believe we waste energy and money nitpicking cartoons (really bad faceless ones) because we imagine someone getting hurt after learning bad stamp behavior.
And I want to start a band called “Supervised Cartwheels & Helmeted Headstands”.
My first guess was because of too much skin showing on the cartoon images. Because there is always the danger that .00000000000000001% of the population might get aroused from seeing these images of cartoon kids wearing shorts and bathing suits which would put ALL kids in danger.
The association is probably because soccer moved to the US from the south — from Mexico, Central America, and South America. (Pentamom, whether soccer is more a suburban kid sport than it is an immigrant sport probably depends on where you live. Around here, close to the Mexican border, it was definitely the “brown kids” playing it first.)
As for the word itself, “football” is actually the name for a whole range of sports, including Canadian Football, Gaelic Football, and Rugby. American Football is just our variation, and actually DOES involve kicking for a goal (the common factor among different types of football). The word “soccer” was actually coined by the British as a shortening of the name Association Football. We didn’t make the word up; we just kept using it to distinguish from a different form of football that was more popular here.
Mostly. It is the most popular sport, but it’s not quite AS ubiquitous as association football is in many other countries because it competes with baseball as our “national sport.”
“So, basically, it is what soccer is here, meaning that everyone plays it and it is the most popular sport. Right?”
Playing? On official teams, no. I would guess that, in terms of total US population, Little League (baseball) has more players. However, in certain areas football beats baseball and in others basketball is king. As pentamom said, suburban yuppy-land is all about soccer (and to a lesser extent baseball) with football being too dangerous. But, football is probably the most common pick up sport for guys since it requires nothing other than a football.
Watching? Probably the most popular but definitely not the single-minded obsession that soccer is in Europe. Baseball and basketball each have their own dedicated fans that prefer them.
I cheated and read the article, although now I wish I hadn’t. I hate it when people water down a perfectly good observation with unrelated political proselytizing.
Is it in the wording…
1. Kick
2. Shoot hoops
3. Cannonball
@Donna I meant official teams, but also non-official hobby playing. Kids in backyard playing together or group of adult friends meeting every weekend to kick the ball. Something like that.
Soccer probably the most unofficial hobby sport here.
ALL OF THEM!
That girl is going to hang herself with the jumprope
the juggler is going to choke on one of the balls whenit lands in his mouth
The dribbler is going to hit someone with his right hand
The cartwheeler is OBVIOUSLY going to break his/her neck
Kick! We can’t let that happen. What if they kick someone?
Jump shot? He’s going to land wrong and break something
Skateboard: clearly an accident waiting to happen
Twist? OMG the back problems that child will have!
Bat? No helmet! And she’s HITTING something! The aggressive impulses that unleashes!
Stretch … gonna fall offa the rock and end up dead from a skull fracture.
Run … definitely harmful. Shin splints, a lifetime of bad knees.
Headstand: A broken neck in the immediate future, with wheelchairs and a lifetime of sadness.
Swim? Not without a lifeguard, a lifejaclet and an adult withint three feet at all times!
Climb? If she doesn’t hang herself like the jumprope girls, she’sgoing to fall off the rope and kill herself. She needs a full OSHA-approved high work safety harness and three spotters.
Swing? If those uninspected ropes don’t break and send her plunging to her death, she’ll decide to bail out and break BOTH her arms.
I totally guessed wrong. Thought it was maybe something to do with the skin tones or some kind of imagined sexualization of the images. Nope!
Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute…
This is a joke. Right…??????
Re soccer, this might be regional (within the US), but where I live, it’s like this. Soccer is a preschool sport for yuppies’ kids. Once the kids get old enough for “real sports” (baseball, football [the oval kind], basketball), they abandon soccer. Beyond that age, the only people serious about sports like soccer, cricket, etc., are people who come from countries where those sports are big. So there are some options out there for these people, but they are not interesting to most Americans.
Most of what we see here in terms of pro soccer is what’s going on in Latin America, where most folks have brown skin tones.
And if it weren’t for FRK, I would never have known that headstands are done with helmets. I have never in my life seen or heard of such a thing.
no helmets, elbow and knee, wrist guards on the skate-boarder, no life-guard visible on the cannonballer?
Because the kid on the skateboard is not wearing a helmet, something that is strongly recommended by most safety “authorities.”
I assumed the blue thing on the skateboarder’s head was a helmet. I guess it could have been some sort of gang paraphernalia, with all the racist messages in those stamps . . ..
um… i’m going to say the girl on the rock, the cannonball and the soccer without shin guards. oh! and skateboarding without knee/elbow pads. wait… that’s 4. :/
So this is the opinion of your federal gov’t. Just wait until you neighbour calls CPS, on you because your kids are doing unsupervised cartwheels, no helmet for headstand, and on.
The federal gov’t would not show images of these actions because they deem them to be too dangerous.
I like a comment over on Reason’s website:
“I don’t have any idea what they were worried about, though. It’s not as if any kid today has even seen a postage stamp or even know what they’re used for.”
that would be shoot hoops because of the US non common sense approach to any word even hinting a gun use
cannonball for the same reason, and pump high as it looks like pump action firearm.
@SKL – I would agree that soccer for boys is largely a preschool thing in my area (girls play for longer), although there are teams beyond that so some kids are playing, but in So. Cal, soccer was quite popular well beyond the preschool years.
@Andy – It would be a hard call on hobby sports. Basketball and football are both very common hobby sports. Baseball isn’t as frequently played casually (you need space and people) but softball is very popular as a hobby sport in adulthood with many people playing in local adult leagues. It is common for companies, bars and the like to have teams that play against each other. In the mountains, you will probably find that skiing, snowboarding, and hockey are the dominant sports. Hockey is also very popular in New England and the northeast, but unheard of in the rest of the country.
I really think it just boils down to personal preference and the availability of resources with no one sport dominating the hobby scene like you have with soccer.
I don’t know why soccer’s not bigger in America, seeing as how soccer’s best known these days for “flopping,” which is a bit more in line with our cupcake culture.
Unfortunately, American football is starting to be wimpified as well because of “butthurt,” both from a wicked hit and from whining over touchdown dances. It wasn’t that long ago that when you scored a TD in the Madden games you hit a button to do a signature TD dance. Ickey shuffle, anyone?
I hope those of you in the States are all rushing out to buy these stamps before the bulk of them get destroyed – what a marvelous investment opportunity!
I think ‘cartwheel girl’ is going to catch her long hair and either scalp herself or learn that it might be a good idea to tie your hair up before you cartwheel – take your pick.
Re. the comments on ‘American football’ – isn’t that gridiron, where you wear all that crazy back-busting gear and spend your whole time crashing into each other? How do you play that in the backyard? Do you tie pillows to each shoulder or something? Frankly it already looks like a wussy sport – ‘real’ men play proper ‘football’ otherwise known as rugby, where you run around and crash into each other without all that safety gear :-).
Not that I have any kind of cultural bias or anything, LOL!
Hineata – Backyard football is more like rugby. No pads. Or just touch football rather than full tackle. Or just throwing the ball around. Age plays a part in what you choose as all that tackling can be rough on older bodies.
I honestly thought this was a joke, but it seems to be real. The whole faceless thing is a little strange, but I like the general concept, highlighting all the awesome ways kids can move, which is good for their bodies and their confidence. I can personally attest that riding ramps in shorts is a bad idea if you are an adult lacking coordination, but the kid is wearing jeans, and my knees recovered anyway. My kids spent most of the summer cannonballing into the local pool with all the other kids. It’s not the same thing as diving headfirst into shallow water. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of anyone wearing a helmet for headstands, and the baseball player without a helmet looks like every kid playing backyard baseball in our neighborhood.
@Donna – you’re not kidding, about the age thing! :-). And even worse than rugby is rugby league. My soccer-loving husband got persuaded to play a ‘friendly’ game with our church mates, and lasted ten minutes! Body was too old to adapt to all that bruising – plus in fairness to him, the ‘boys’ he was playing were all Samoans, Tokelauans and Tongans who outweighed him two-to-one, and he’s not tiny for a Chinese. He still gets teased about it, but he considers the fact that he lived through the experience reward enough :-).
There’re very sensible reasons for soccer being so popular in Asia :-).
… the government is shut down….
I was going to go with the fact that the captions for girls said “hike up” and “pump high” (thinking along the predator route)….
How sad is that…although what is sadder is that i was able to pick the reasons why!
To avoid law suits …. if the kids try and copy the actions on the stamps (as they should be doing in normal play activities) and get hurt – the government can be liable!!
Happens in OZ all the time – sad to say!
Because of the bare feet?
“I hope those of you in the States are all rushing out to buy these stamps before the bulk of them get destroyed — what a marvelous investment opportunity! ”
I don’t believe they’ve been released for sale yet — they’re being destroyed beforehand.
The whole idea of destroying them is the most absurd thing about it. Okay, I can see saying you don’t want those images out there, so they’re canceling the series or canceling it pending redesign. I think the reasons are silly, but that’s not such an unreasonable position to take — entity contracts for a graphic image on their product, entity doesn’t like the result, entity decides change is needed.
The fact that the ones already printed must be destroyed, though, rather than sold, suggests that the images are actively DANGEROUS and must not be allowed to circulate publicly. Really?
My guesses: Shoot hoops and Skateboard because the child is African American which is a stereotype, especially since there are no African Americans doing anything else (well, maybe the Walk & Jog is); Pump high because of the words “pump” (sexual connotations) and “high” (drug connotations).
Okay, I just looked up the answers. Seriously?? Kids don’t even BUY stamps!
@donna People here spend time with whole range of sports too. However, if you would count participants, football is the most popular. Virtually every school has football field, virtually every village has one. Boys are taught how to play by their fathers (girls not so much), but other sports do not have such tradition/continuity.
It is also a go to sport for groups of men that do not know each other much, but want to do some sport together – mostly because you can count on other men knowing how to play too.
I’m saying men, because it is gendered thing. Women do not play football that much.
When I was a kid (girl), I played tackle football with my older brothers all the time. It was fun and quite safe, especially in the snow. 🙂 After a certain age it wasn’t fun any more, of course.
@Michelle: that would explain how the same word is used for totally different games. I totally see it happen: some people want to play (European) football, and then some joker catches/picks up the ball and runs off so the others have to stop him/her… Which was exactly what happened this summer on the campsite when the 4yo daughter of my cousin decided she didn’t want to play the same games as her (distant) relatives…….. 😀
@Andy (& Donna): I was thinking of the ‘single-minded obsession’, but I have the impression that while soccer-football might be the common loved sport, most countries might have different ‘seconds and thirds’, depending on traditions, geography (like mountains), etc.
Here, iceskating (think speed, not pirouettes) is popular in winter, and if you only knew just how obsessed the entire country gets once the temperature drops below 0 C and stays there for a while…!! Many of the top iceskaters are willing to miss the Olympics in Sotchi in case there’s an Elfstedentocht in NL – this competition is the, absolute THE winter event here, extra epic since most winters are too soft to get decent enough ice over the 200km route to carry the thousands of people that participate.
Wow! Wow! Really? Talk about stupidity. Cannonball, headstand without a helmet, slippery rock (looks like a pile of dirt to me). This is the kind of unnecessary, over thinking, paranoia mentality that is changing the mindset of may parents FOR THE WORSE. But then again, I’m beginning to think, it’s the powers that be’s way of conditioning future generations to be more complacent to authorities. Authorities are breeding drones for the future. Subservient to their every whim. It’s been going on since the 50s. But more prevalent now with the advancement of technology. ie. interent and social media.
hineata – And your husband has now discovered why the place in the US most likely to produce a professional football player is — American Samoa. I think you have something like 30 times more likelihood of becoming a professional football player if you are Samoan than any other single place in the US. And the island is only 76 square miles big.
I did enjoy watching rugby while I was there.
@Papilio I like ice skating, but I can do it only on small lakes, no other tracks are possible here. 200km of ice skating sounds like sci-fi. Must be great.
Btw, for tough players, ruby vs football ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WARgx1V1R8
What? Since when do kids use helmets for headstands? I was a gymnast for 12 years of my childhood and to my knowledge, gymnasts still do not use headgear. How stupid! Also, since when did cannonballs become considered a dangerous dive? And I may make my kids wear helmets for skateboarding, but I’ve never made them wear kneepads. I see kneepads as optional.
Personally, I think doing anything in a blue void is dangerous. Children should play in close proximity to the surface of a planet.
…”Children should play in close proximity to the surface of a planet.”
I love that guess!
I figured out two out of the three – but geesh, what a waste!
I’m looking at lobbying the Government to have breathing stopped for all children due to the high level of pollutants in the air so they don’t get sick and die.