I am amazed that the male members of my family have survived to adulthood.
When my father was 11 years old, he decided to recharge a disposable battery by attaching a wire to it and sticking it into an electrical socket. The house caught on fire.
When my husband was nine, he was left alone in the car, got bored and pushed the cigarette lighter button in. When it popped out, he looked at it and thought it was a nice shiney red and decided to taste it. Burned his tounge real good.
On another day, as a child, my husband was in a beauty salon waiting for his mother and decided to play “driving a car”, he took the keys and stuck one into the plug. There was no electricity on the street for some time.
Inspired by The Silent Drill Team, last night my son decided to try and twirl his toy rifle in his room. He hit the celing fan and shattered the light. He was hit by a small piece of glass, luckily there was no serious harm.
My dad also once “borrowed” a horse when he was a teenager. He didn’t know how to ride a horse or control it, but managed to get it to the road. When he tried to get the horse to turn, it just started walking around in circles. Dad stayed on the circling horse for hours, and started to panic, until the farmer who owned the horse came home and found him and the horse, and couldn’t believe how stupid the whole thing was.
Hey! I did this too! But I wasn’t nine I was a little older. It DID look good.
Let’s see, I didn’t witness this one, but some of the stories my wife has related about our kids:
The boy decided to eat every dead fly in the window sills of the house one day.
He also ate rocks.
It took him no less than four tries to figure out that when the flame was coming out of the burner on the stove it was hot.
From my childhood:
My brother tried to jump his bike over a huge patch of thorns and briars. He made it about halfway, flipped over the handle bars, and did a face plant in the thorns.
My brother ran full speed into a guide wire for a telephone pole. He hit it flat on and had a bruise from his forehead to his crotch.
I breakdanced when I was a kid. Not necessarily dangerous, but definitely stupid.
Jumped off of the rooves of so many houses I’ve lost count. It became even cooler to do after we had a friend break his leg.
I used to pour gasoline in a circle on the sidewalk in front of my house, light it, and then a friend of mine would run through it, leaving flaming footprints all down the street.
My brother and his friend got a Butane gas canister, a tripod stolen from the chemistry lab, and a blowtorch, and set the blowtorch under the tripod, directly onto the canister in the middle of a field. It went WHOP! and disappeared into the sky, never to be seen again.
Me and a friend used to shoot at each other around his house with air rifles, using blu-tac instead of pellets. Used to leave big bruises until it jammed up his gun.
Inspired by a James Bond movie, I strung a wire from my friend’s house to a tree and tried to slide down it using an umbrella. Needless to say, the thing turned on its side and dropped me two storeys.
When my dad was a kid, he dug a hole under a builder’s yard ‘train track’ for carts carrying bricks. He sat in it while a friend wheeled the cart over the hole. Except he stuck his head up too soon and lost his front teeth to the axle.
A friend and I climbed a nearby telephone relay tower, about 300’ high. Then I demonstrated just how stupid I was by climbing down the OUTSIDE of the tower. I was 15, I think…
The bow & arrow game was always good fun. The only time to play is late at night when it’s dark. One kid shoots and arrow straight up into the air. Now everyone runs around and waits for the arrow to fall back down.
Of course just about every kid has jumped off the roof of a house.
2nd grade - Hitch-hiked home from the principal’s office to avoid being spanked with a ping-pong paddle for spitting on a kid (twice).
4th grade - In a construction zone in my neigborhood, I was playing with army men in a supply trailer full of cans of rubber cement. Seeing an opportunity, I started napalming my army men with flaming gobs of rubber cement. When the fire got out of control, I ran home and swithced on the TV like nothing happened. I could hear the sound of the tires exploding from my house several blocks away.
5th grade - Broke into the local highschool with my best friend, not to steal, but to ride our bikes around inside the school. We thought it would be neat.
5th grade - Ran away with the friend mentioned above on 10 speeds to upstate NY. Made it to Baltimore, broke into a ship on the harbor and then was robbed in broad daylight, one block from a police station, for my 10 speed. (The culprit was caught and subsequently sent to prison for 18 months).
Wow, now that I’m thinking about it, memmories just keep popping up. My stupidity apparently knows no bounds.
My daughter hurt (bruised) her knee when she fell from the tree in our front yard. She likes to grab the branches and swing from them, sometimes will standing atop the white slat fence (about 2 feet high) that runs beneath this maple tree. So she limps and complains that her leg/knee hurts. All the damned time. But whenever I go out front, there she is again, doing the same thing that she hurt herself doing.
When I was about 10, they were building an extension to the subway system through our neighbourhood. Work on the stations and tunnels didn’t occur on the weekends, which was the time my friends and I used to head into the site and inspect how construction was coming for ourselves. Yes, we were down in the unfinished station and tunnel, without hard hats, safety shoes, or knowledgeable adult supervision, not just poking around on the surface.
Supposedly, one kid took his bike in, and rode through the tunnel to the next station once. But I wasn’t there that day, so I can’t confirm it.
As children, there was a great rivalry between two of my uncles. So one day my uncle Mike decided to loosen all the screws of Charlie’s bunk bed. Well, that worked just dandy so that when Charlie got into bed it fell straight down. . . On top of Mike, who seemed to have forgotten he slept on the bottom bunk underneath Charlie.
Me too. When filling Molotav cocktails, some spillage will occur. Don’t light any matches.
Bottle rocket fights.
Roman candle fights.
Suicide Lawn Jarts. We’d stand in the opposite rings. 2 points for in landing in your circle and not flinching. One went through my shoe, between my toes, and into the ground. We decided to adjust the scoring system, and I was awarded three points.
Standing on thin ice, trying to break through.
Climb a radio tower.
driving a 1963 Chrysler 120 mph accross the ice, slamming on the brakes, and turning the wheel.
Making little plugs out of foil gum wrappers. They would pop when inserted.
As it turns out, the most dangerous thing I ever did was caddy. At least it was the most injurious.
With enough serching of the board, I could link to threads in which I tell stories about the time I short circuited the electrical power of my junior high school, ran through a fence, played a version of tag with trucks, raced a bull to save a volleyball, dug a rock out of my knee with scissors, and any number of other idiotic childhood acts.
I am so lame. The only thing I can remember doing that even remotely falls into this category is playing catch with a light bulb.
It shattered real good.
The neighborhood that I lived in was still being developed when I was a kid and there were a lot of construction zones. My friends and I used to go down to these when nobody was around and cause total havoc.
For some reason, we found it absolutely hysterical to take small buckets with strings tied to them and lower them into port-o-johns to scoop up the contents. We would then pretty much splatter it all over the inside of semi-built houses. I think the worst thing we did was take a stack of drywall, lay out each panel, and dump a bucketful of liquid poo on each one, then stack them back up as neatly as we could.
The next day I see the construction workers picking up the drywall panels then swearing and getting all mad when they see these enormous brown stains on every single one.
It does seem typical that incidents involving fire and blowing shit up are more often done by boys.
My brother lit his waste paper basket on fire when he was about 10.
I am compelled to point out, however, that in my Beauty Culture class in high school it was a teenaged girl that stuck the bobby pins into the electrical outlet.
