Tantovelt

Received in the mail today a letter from an old school chum who, exhumed from his home by visiting kin, was gobsmacked by a touring art installation.

According to my chum, on the ebbing side of the middle part of the last century, a Greek playground designer named Antithenes Tantopolis believed that "life lessons will be designed into the playscapes of children whilst they are at their play lessons." (Chum's wording? The Greek's? The letter is unclear.) Accordingly, an early prototype of the "Tantovelt slide" featured a 90-degree turn and a hole a foot wide immediately preceding the end of the slide.

Another Tantovelt piece was a set of monkey bars with "false grasps", or, hinged rubber "falling bars"--interspersed with the solid regular sort--that caused children to drop perilously close to the ground.

Not a horrible idea in a platonic sense, but perhaps the boardroom might've benefited from a lawyer's presence?

Reasonable people might marvel that such a patently dangerous concept could find expression in a world helmed by adults. Happily, I come bearing explanation: a relative of Tantopolis, who served as the headmaster of a private school in rural England, positively raved about his relation's forward-thinkingness and ingenuity; he gave the Greek designer his first and only contract, and was in the fullness of time found to be criminally insane. While the schoolmaster vanished from the human record, the so-called "Tantovelt slide" exists today as a traveling art installation upon which children are not, alas, permitted to play.