Circumstances.

Some of the darkest strips are also some of my favorites.

He's carving with a spoon...oh Beef...

His parents taught him that from their numerous stints in the can.

I used to be in the pinewood derby, It would always piss me off when ever someone cheated and didn't get penalized. Hang in there beef, my car was just as lame.

The one year I participated in the Pinewood Derby, I had a very lame car, but I actually won. As far as I could tell, the secret was the vegetable oil I used lubricate the wheels/axles, so that ugly hunk of wood got off to a really fast start, and its extra weight/mass (it was barely carved) gave my mutt a lot more momentum than the sleek, well-designed purebreds.

I held on to that trophy for a long time...

I made a Ford Taurus for a Pinewood Derby car that won second place. The guess was that it worked because the graphite we had used to lubricate the wheels had been blown all over it by me repeatedly blowing all over it.

I was such a little shit as a kid. I cried that I got second place and wanted to make the third-place kid have it. Ungrateful little shit!

You ASSHOLE VEGETABLE OIL ON THE WHEELS WAS ILLEGAL
I LOST TO A CREW FULL OF CUBSCOUT MOTHERFUCKERS LIKE YOU
THIS MAKES ME SO MAD I COULD JUST
Do you want some frittata?!?!?!?

what pissed me off about the pinewood derby is that the retarded kid who just stuck some wheels on a block of wood with no further detail always won.

Looking back on it, a lot of my cars were purple with stripes. I thought purple was the coolest.

No wonder my dad made me go out for football.

my childhood carpet was purple.

football was awful.

This is almost exactly my life as a kid. My car always sucked balls, I mean, how is a damn kid supposed to get a good one? And everyone else had one that had all kinds of fancy shit.

i once helped my little brother make a sweet monorail-style pinewood derby car. but some punk with a perfect little porsche made fun of it and he ran to the car crying. he threw his bolo at me.

Fuck that punk! Monorails are awesome!

In the words of Mel Brooks: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die."

Roast Beef! You didn't make a car! How come??

aw beef. you just need to drill straight axle holes and use a little graphite. you can win

Poor Beefie only had a spoon to make his car with...it's sooooo sad! :*(

Achewood is not a comic for well-adjusted self-confident persons. You may go read Hi and Lois. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

I succeeded in two separate egg-dropping contests.
One project was a basket filled with cotton balls with plastic grocery bags stretched over the handle and a wire frame I taped to the bottom of the basket. It was hideous, but the plastic wings made it flutter very gently to the ground from two stories.
The other (wherein we actually had to drop the egg into the contraption) was made all out of computer paper. A cone connected to a long shaft with cube-ish base full of crumpled up pieces of paper.

This is what happens when moderately intuitive kids with no scientific skill attempt engineering.

Also in third grade, I made a kickass diorama of the forest but kept forgetting to bring in animal figurines for it. I failed.

I wrapped my egg in a box with a bunch of deflated balloons as padding. The egg survived but I failed because we weren't supposed to use padding. (To my Machiavellian thrid-grade mind felt that it was a success).

I bought a giant peanut-shaped sponge, carved out an egg-shaped hole in the middle, put the egg in, then taped it shut. I then surrounded that with packing peanuts in a shoebox (we had to use a shoebox). I won. I was so proud I took it home and set it on my dresser.

I didn't know eggs could rot.

When my mom cleaned my room a couple of months later, she opened the box and picked up the sponge, confused. The egg fell out and broke. She promptly began vomiting in her 8 year-old's Breakfast Club trash can.