My apologies. I tend to get a little carried away sometimes. I was also a little prickly at someone asking if 5th graders were too old for such things, to which the answer is “no”, at least in this case. But you’re right, I’m sorry, and I’ll shut up now.
I think it’s possible that what y’all are missing is that this kid may have expected that when he put his head down into the hole in the sand, it would be like putting your head into a box. He wouldn’t expect that the first enthusiastic scoops of sand would suddenly fill up your nose and mouth and you’d be unable to breathe, but your friends keep scooping sand on top of your head because they don’t know any better, either (and it was a big group of kids, all happily scooping sand as fast as they could, so that’s a lot of sand to pile up, “up to his chest” the article says, no matter that the sandbox itself was only a foot deep), and because they think your thrashing around is just playing.
And by the time they realized he wasn’t just screwing around, he had already stopped breathing. It doesn’t take much to suffocate a 10-year-old.
Maybe it’s all an elaborate ruse, and he actually used the Arts of Substitution and Transformation to fake his own death. Won’t his parents be shocked when his coffin contains nothing but a tree stump!
I read a lot of Naruto.
Yeah. Good for beginners, but not much of a challenge once you get the hang of it.
How many did it take to get the hang of it?
never mind
It’s possible that this happened by accident. I guess I can construct a mental scenario involving enough incompetence, poor understanding, stupidity, and panic to envision this happening as described.
Still, my experiences with bullying as a child, and my observations of adult complicity in covering up uncomfortable truths (“There’s been enough damage…no one has to know the sordid details…more than one life is at stake here”…etc.), leave me unable to picture this event without hearing, in the back of my mind, the sonorous voice of coroner from The Silence of the Lambs intoning, “Wrongful death.”
Sailboat
I know that there is “anime” for adults out there, but given Speed Racer and Pokemon and Avatar etc–heck, given even the more adult themed anime, I still don’t see how a 10-11 year old kid would not know the difference between Ninja warlord kicks butt and I’m going to make like a Japanese ostrich and die because of it. Something is rotten in the sand box here.
If anyone comes in here to correct that there is no such thing as a Japanese ostrich, I will bury them in sand-my own special Chunin exam! Haw! <assumes some type of Asian kick fighting stance>
How sad.
And yet, when I was 5 it never occured to me to roll a boulder down a hill onto some pygmies, in imitation of Race Bannon.
Nice try, Perry Mason!
We should ban sandboxes.
That’s just because you couldn’t find pygmies.
I substituted plastic army men.
Someone will try.
Wait. No. Someone will try to ban Naruto.
Believe it!
When sandboxes are banned, only boxes will have sand. Wait…
One thing about manga, especially shonen, is that it’s far more nuanced in degrees of potentially objectionable material, e.g. violence, nudity, suggestive dialogue, smoking/drinking, than what we normally call cartoons. And they’re geared to multiple age/sophistication levels; not just “kid safe” and “not kid safe”. There are, in fact, a plethora of titles that fall somewhere between those two extremes, and attempting to shoehorn any of them into one or the other is generally a waste of energy (witness how Sailor Moon turned out). (I know it’s the anime adaptation that’s at issue, but it’s surprisingly faithful to the original manga that the point is still valid.)
Take Ranma 1/2. There’s lots of brief nudity, but it never goes beyond breasts (and even that only occasionally), and almost never in a situation where a person wouldn’t normally have his/her clothes off. There’s lots of fighting, complete with walls getting smashed, doors ripped of their hinges, and boulders shattered, but it never results in worse than bruises, scraps, and the occasional comical lump on the head; never blood. This is a modest, baseline level of “not kid safe-ness” (I think the actual term is “young teenager”), just a cut above completely family-friendly. The next step up would be your typical serious martial arts or softcore samurai tale; full-body shots here and there, some blood (mostly little cuts and nosebleeds), an occasional broken toe or wrist. Then comes Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure territory (which includes Naruto). People smoke, drive recklessly, swear, fight, and die. Some have ugly scars, some have ugly lives. But the deaths are still fairly clean for the most part…decapitation, strangulation, stab through the stomach, immolation, sliced in half, etc., and not too graphic. (As a JBA reviewer said, “There’s blood, but no more than you’d expect to find in a human body.”) The highest “normal” level (i.e. something you could find in a Japanese bookstore) is occupied by titles like Fist of the North Star. Here it gets vicious, chaotic, and messy. And offensive as well; child abuse, slavery, tyrrany, rape, and mutilation are common occurrences in these titles. This is the usual “M” rated story in American markets. Finally, there’s the most extreme titles, the rare books you can’t even find at all in most places, one of the most famous examples being Battle Royale. Pools of blood, brains and intestines splattered all over the place, and crimes against humanity. (It’s an amazing story, go check it out sometime. 
)
My point is, I can see why kids would attempt stuff out of Ranma 1/2, because it looks cool and it never gives the impression that it can cause serious tragedy. I can also understand reenacting, say, a Legend of Success Joe slugfest or a M.U.S.C.L.E. 4-star slobberknocker. Boys do this junk all the time, and if something goes wrong, hey, it’s just a couple of arm bones, it’ll heal. But Naruto…about ninjas, professional killers, who constantly put their lives on the line, and no attempt is made to sugarcoat this…no, it really doesn’t make any sense.
Things must be a hell of a lot more liberated in Hawaii than here, if Ranma is acceptable for “young teenagers” and you have to get as far as Fist of the North Star to reach M.
Based on my impression of far too many Internet anime fans, I’m not entirely convinved that this is a bad idea. 
Nah, Hawaii’s just more open about it. I saw Ranma and an episode of Geobreeders at like 13 in Arizona, we just didn’t let people (read: parents) know (or… see it, not that they would’ve known what we were watching).
This is the internet. Even quantum physics and temporal mechanics have annoying kiddy-sounding idiots who ruin every good moment. Blame /b/ not Naruto.
I’m just wondering if Cartoon Network will continue to air Naruto after this. I think one of the episodes that was going to air this weekend shows Hinata, one of the ninja girls, practicing her moves in a waterfall in the middle of the night. It is implied that she is nude because her clothes are folded on a rock, but she is shown only in silhouette. (Of course, Naruto gets to peek, but can’t see well enough to realize it’s Hinata.) I was wondering whether CN was going to cut the scene entirely or just draw a bathing suit on her.
Oh, yeah, I was also going to mention how an earlier episode shows Rock Lee, the guy in green who was nearly crippled for life by Gaara’s sand coffin jutsu, accidentally getting drunk on sake he has mistaken for the medicine he was prescribed after he had surgery - he grabbed the wrong bottle on his way out the door. It turns out Lee is a natural-born master of drunken-style fighting, which means he goes into berserker mode when he consumes so much as a drop of alcohol. CN changed all the alcohol to “elixir” (which is supposed to contain alcohol, if I’m not mistaken), and “drunken fist” became “Loopy Fist”. They also removed the telltale redness from Lee’s cheeks. As it turns out, the booze only goes so far - Lee eventually sobers up and finds himself overmatched against the guy he is fighting, which is where Gaara comes in and helps him, thereby redeeming himself.
Sorry for the overlong post. This is one of my favorite anime shows, and I’d hate to see it canceled. Besides, incidents like this are nothing new. I remember my mom telling my little brother, who loved playing Superman, about a boy she’d heard about who jumped out a second-story window in an attempt to fly and ended up killing himself. BTW we lived on the second story of a duplex at the time.