Story here.
Okay, is it just me, or is the idea of encouraging mental patients to play with imaginary jump ropes, um, not the best possible therapeutic strategy?
… like jumping with a real rope accomplishes some concrete task?
If the goal is for them to get some exercise, build up their coordination, not commit suicide, and not fall flat on their faces, it looks like a win-win situation to me…
Nah, I was thinking more in terms of encouraging a more direct connection to reality.
You big dope! Just because somebody thinks they’re being strangled by an imaginary rope doesn’t mean they’ll actually die. Sheeesh!
I have been shamed in public by tripping over the rope and falling on my face when the girls in my neighborhood where playing Double Dutch. The mocking laughter drove me indoors, and I swore to never show my face again until this tragedy could be forever avoided.
This, at long last, will let me rejoin society. If I buy each child one of these, I guess.
In case you run out of batteries for your cordless jump rope, there’s a 110 volt adapter with an eight foot cord. 
Now I can finally Cordless Double Dutch.
Ok, so there is no rope, but there are still handles for the mental patients to use as weapons.
I’ll wait for the solar powered cordless jump rope.
Perhaps I could interest you in my patent-pending solar powered flashlight? It never needs batteries!
An old joke:
Two mental patients living in this urban institution decide that they don’t like living there anymore. It’s too confining and they don’t get enough cigarettes.
So listen: they know the nighttime observer takes a smokebreak at 11:15 every night. When that observer left the room they were up like a bolt and heading out. They grabbed the smokes he left to his paperwork, some matches from a drawer and a flashlight from the cabinet. They book it for the roof.
Well, they get up to that roof and look out at the city lights and it kind of stuns them. They each light one of that night observer’s cigarettes and look around to figure out where to go from here. One fellow walks to the gap between the institution roof and the next building. He takes a few steps back, gets a good start and jumps all the way across and lands without even dropping his cig. He turns back to his partner, but he’s to scared to jump.
“Tell ya what,” he says, “just toss me the flashlight and I’ll turn it on. That way you can walk across the beam to this here roof!”
But the other patient just laughs at him. “What do you think I am, crazy?” he says, still chuckling. “You’d turn it off before I was half-way across!”
The plan is to prosicute the Mime population for copyright infringement. Anything that gets them out of the public spaces gets my ok.
But where will you find a willing partner?
You’ll all be happy to know that I’ve applied to the US Patent Office for Cordless Hopscotch™. Look for it this fall in popular stores.