Wow!
I really need this in my city!
There are versions of this in the US. I know that one is in Dallas, TX.
Similar stress-relief therapies have been around Japan for a while now, too:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3909595/Stressed-Japanese-workers-smash-plates-to-ease-recession-blues.html (circa 2008)
The only problem is that you have to ultimately pay for what you break, so if you’re stressed about money…
Sounds exactly like the “Rage Cage” from Delocated. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIDNBpjkdzw
I was under the impression that the current thought in psychology was that “venting” therapies are generally ineffective - they just make people more prone to acts of anger and aggression in general. Primal Scream is one I remember reading about in particular that was shown to just make people more angry more of the time (though the “release” felt good at the moment they did it).
That said, I’ve gleefully smashed up all sorts of things, not because I was angry, just for fun.
The Lost Horizons Night Market had a truck like this a few years ago in NYC.
not to denigrate psychology but that’s a precept of (zazen) meditation practice too.
Any impetus toward anger is ultimately counter productive.
It seems like you should still be able to get away with zeal and the like but… no.
At my School’s fete we used to get hold of an old car and sell swings at it with a sledge hammer. Made a lot of money.
One of the reasons I joined a volunteer group as a student was that it gave me a chance to indulge in strenuous physical work toward productive ends. Disassemble a small building, carefully enough that useful parts can be reused or resold. Put together 80 tent platforms in a weekend – you learn not to be timid about driving nails. Reduce pile of “retired” furniture to parts small enough to fit in a single dumpster load.
Pure venting may or may not be useful. Turning that energy into something productive definitely helps.
Karl Pilkington visited one in the US on the last “Moaning of Life”. He managed to work up a lacklustre anger over PPI recovery calls to his mobile phone.
In the late-70’s that was a common thing except the cars were Japanese models which were starting to compete strongly with Detroit. Occasionally people “volunteered” their vehicle for similar abuse by parking it in the factory employee lot of a Big 3 auto manufacturer at the time…
I’ve seen similar things, but I still think that Kirby was first. He had a lot of ideas like this; one of the 2001: A Space Odyssey comics that he did for Marvel (not the movie adaptation, which he also did, but the ongoing series; yes, kids, for a while Marvel had a comic that was an SF anthology written and drawn by Kirby, with the Monolith as a sort of mute Rod Serling) had a guy in what was basically a commercial superhero LARP game, which ended in disappointment when the beautiful space princess that he was rescuing turned out to be the middle-aged secretary of the firm that had to fill in at the last minute.
This is one of those things I love, because it seems like the kind of thing that would exist in the world of Transmetropolitan, and I adore living in a world that more and more seems to resemble Transmetropolitan.
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