Flocked up.

Yep, neighbors getting all flocked up again. 

I was kind of surprised to see the pink flamingos around here in winter. Usually you'd expect to see them closer to June, to like, graduation time.

Of course these flamingos are fund-raising flamingos, used to extort money from innocent civilians.

If you're not familiar with how it works, this site gives you a good idea. And is happy to sell you a passel of pink flamingos, too. The idea is that a person can hire the kids who want to raise money to plant plastic flamingos on someone's lawn in the dead of night, along with a sign explaining how they can pay the kids to get de-flamingoed. So the kids make money on both ends.

Unless the victim has no sense of humor and just takes all the flamingos and calls the cops. You have to pick your mark carefully.

Another site notes that the fund-raisers can also sell flamingo insurance to people who want to avoid the humiliation of waking up and seeing a plethora of the pink plastic punks all over the place. So that's great; the kids can make money doing nothing more than keeping a record of who paid the insurance. They wouldn't want to accidentally flamingo someone who'd already paid up.

Around here the high school seniors are using this to raise money for the senior sleepover, a big all-night (presumably drug- and liquor-free) party held at the school. I guess they need a lot of money to throw a good party for the whole graduating class, so they've started early.

I think this is a pretty good idea. The plastic flamingo is not a typical lawn decoration in the Hudson Valley, maybe because you just don't expect to see actual flamingos here. And unlike in Florida, virtually no one has a pink house, or a house in any kind of pastel color. Flamingos clash with everything here. When you see someone's lawn all a-sprouting with these things, you know they didn't do it themselves. So it's effective. And compared to the shenanigans kids this age can get up to, this is pretty harmless.

And it's just good, stupid fun.

I also like it because I don't have a kid in the school and I don't work there, and I don't know any kids in the school really well, so I'm very unlikely to be a target. Which is good, because I'm cheap.

As for the rest of you.... Well, nice place ya got here.... Be a shame if anything pink and plasticky were to happen to it....