Note they were both fenale. Thus proving that girls shouldn’t attempt dumbass things that boys do.
In junior high my friends and I came up with a game called “Silent Castle”. The local playground had one of those climbing structures with the parallel bar thing in between two towers, with various slides and poles and platforms attached. The game was essentially Tag, except that:
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If you were not It, you couldn’t touch the ground. All dodging and hiding had to be on the structure somewhere; and
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If you were It, you could touch the ground - but you were blindfolded.
Since it’s easy to get cornered on these structures, we had several amazing leaps from one section to the other over the groping arms of the person who was It. The ground below was dirt, so if you fell off and managed to avoid braining yourself on the structure it would still hurt a lot.
We also had a game in which we each had a stick and we would throw frisbees at one another and attempt to bat it away before it hit us in the head. This would be played in darkness, when the frisbee was essentially invisible until right before it hit you.
And then there was the night-time boomerang throwing. That one stopped after we each got whacked in the neck a few times…
Okay, while I truly believe most of what separates little boys and girls is socialization (I swear, even little babies– tell someone it’s a boy and you get ‘Ooh he’s so tough’ and girls ‘What a flirt!’), there was one major difference between most of my little boyfriends and girlfriends as a kid. No girls I know tortured animals. If anything, we tried to bring sick and wounded birds back to health and held funerals when they didn’t make it (which some of the more interesting and sensitive boys attended).
We used to throw footballs over the street lights in the dark to each other. You’d see the ball come up, and then just happen t see it the split second before it beaned you.
I’m a guy and never tortured an animal either. However, it was always open season on bugs. Not torturing them, we didn’t pull the wings off of flies or anything (but we did make fly kites), but more along the lines of setting wasp nests on fire. My sister and I hung out with her friend (girl) and her friend’s brother. The girls were willing participants in wanton bug destruction. Fire was always the weapon of choice.
I do believe that we inadvertently killed small toads while unsuccessfully trying to create homemade aquarium habitats in pickle jars, but usually if the toads started looking distressed we released them and they survived.
Snails don’t count, right? Caterpillars either? And I swear what I did to my hamster was totally an accident. It did stink ever so.
backs slowly away from the thread
What you are is the fifth sex, the heterosexual-without-portfolio. You might have been generally accepted as straight in the '70s and '80s, but in today’s gender climate - where gay-tending people have a lot more freedom to go against type than straight-tending people - your orientation is open to question.
Before you go saying I’m just dealing out stereotypes, let me add that I’m a heterosexual-without-portfolio myself. It ain’t no tea party. As false as stereotypes are, people live by them, and they’re often very, very subtle.
My friend and I one time got an empty milk jug, filled it half full with gasoline, stuck a rag in the top, lit the rag, then flung it with a huge ass sling shot that was originally meant for flinging water balloons.
We shot it out in a big empty field with lots of dried out grass. Obviously, we didn’t exactly think this thing through. We practically shat our pants when the field began to catch on fire. Luckily we were able to stomp it out, but still.
The OP gave me a good chuckle. Kind of makes me think kids sitting all day in front of the TV playing video games may not be such a bad thing after all.
All of this puts a smile on the face before the last final.
Let’s see.
I remember in the old neighborhood we had a gigantic hill with, like, a 30 degree incline. So, lets take our skate boards up there and ride down it. We’ll go really fast! Well, that was correct in my case. My friends skateboard had “brakes” on it. Mine didn’t. So, I end up blazing down this freakin hill at thirty miles an hour while my friend coasts down. I’m thinking “Oh shit! Oh shit! (My friend taught me this one)” So, I bail out and tuck and roll. All I ended up doing was skinning my knee. Pure luck.
I remember in high school me and some friends digging up a bunch of Axe canisters. We took a look at the ingredients. Hey, look, alcohol and butane…YES! We proceeded to set my friends concrete patio on fire. That was actually kinda neat. You could just barely see a blue flame and could feel the heat. Other then that you couldn’t see it. At that point, we found a cardboard box…So…let’s…fill it up with axe spray and some pressurized canisters and set it on fire. Long and short, after waiting ten or so minutes behind a wall watching it burn. Just as we considered going out there and putting it out or poking it with a stick, a boom that could be heard a mile away goes off. Sets off car alarms down the street. We recorded it too if I remember. Awesome
I remember convincing a friend to eat a concoction of go-gurt, M&M’s (with peanuts in them), apple and orange juice, a pepperoni, some mashed potatoes, smarties, a pixie stick, chocolate milk, regular milk, skittles, a piece of cheese, and damn something else. I went around the lunch room and collecting money from people to pay him to eat this shit. It worked. Took two bites. He spent the next two periods puking. Poor guy.
Yeah, but how much money did he make that day?
Not saying I’d do it, but I do admire his priorities. 
Please elaborate.
Required materials:
- strand of hair - preferably girl’s (needs to be long)
- fly - too stunned to flee
- tape
Sometimes thread can be substituted for hair, but that takes forethought which we rarely had.
With great effort, you need to tie one end of the hair around the fly. My buddy had a really good knack for creating a kind of lasso that worked well, for me it was just trial and error. The other end of the hair, you taped to the corner of your desk. When the fly recovered, it would try to fly away, but was tethered to the desk like a little wee buzzing fly balloon or kite.
We mostly did this in grade nine science class. We also once used the bunsen burner valves to fill balloons with gas then light their strings on fire. Wasn’t as cool as we’d hoped.
ETA: Note: if you use thread, be careful how tight you make it or you risk… er… halving your kite.
I have to say I laughed my ass off watching Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil because there was an “eccentric” character who had fly kites attached to his suit jacket.
Swallowed My Cellphone, that is SO completely awesome, I’m impressed. I simply MUST try this.
What?!? We all have inner children that must be indulged.
My mother told me a great story of when she was a kid she’d go to the State Fair and they had chameleon lizards they’d sell you. They had a thread tied around their necks and the other end of the thread tied to a safety pin. You’d pin this chameleon to your shirt and it would crawl around on your shoulder, eventually turning the color of your shirt. It sounded so cool we started doing it. There are a lot of small chameleon-like lizards at my mom’s house and the kids always try to catch them and make pets.
Enjoy,
Steven
June bugs. Or maybe yellow jackets, for the bold.
Gyrate, you’re my kind of guy (I’m guessing). Whenever we had more than 4 people roving the neighborhood, it usually ended in some sort of war, wherein the group split into factions and laid siege to each other from 30-40 yards with anything vaguely round and apt to cause permanent ocular damage. Green walnuts were perfect.
And there were the hide-and-seek games in a friend’s unfinished but furnished basement. No windows, all lights turned off, absolute darkness. The game usually ended when someone panicked and made a dash- you heard the rapid sh-sh-sh of socks on concrete followed by a ringing DING! as someone took a header on one of the metal posts that loomed in the darkness like unwelcome truths.
The hardest part, IMHO, is the fly capture and getting it to be still enough without killing it. We’d try to get them in cylindrical beakers (remeber this was a grade nine science class boredom activity). You shake the beaker to bounce the fly around until he was knocked out enough to slip your mostly pre-tied hair around. But shake the beaker too hard, and your fly would stop moving permanently. Or its wings would be damaged, so rather than a “fly kite” you’d have a “fly on a leash” which, while still having some amusement value, just wasn’t the same.
One of my college roommates was childhood best friends with a kid whose family ran, and lived in, a funeral home. Apparently the games of hide and seek there were legendary!
When I was 16, me and a couple of friends drove up north to shoot a “movie” we had in mind. Of course this meant lots of fire. I think every girl I ever knew would have interjected about the point where we were dousing a hill of dry grass and shrubs full of gasoline in the middle of a huge field (surrounded by woods). Why gasoline you ask? Because we couldn’t find enough black powder. I’m surprised I still have my fingers. Anyway, we had all experimented with fire before, and felt confident in our abilities to control it. Needless to say, the resultant fireball that went up with a WHOOMP of heat, once we threw the first match, could’ve been seen from the moon. Then it was about 10 minutes of us frantically trying to put the blaze out with our jackets and sand, before it could get severely and truly out of control and set the entire forest on fire. It was a close call, and you think we would’ve learned our lesson. Surely any girl would have. We were out the next day setting more shit on fire with the camera rolling with a (5 gallon!) bucket of water nearby.
Thankfully, I’m still here to testify. Can’t say much for the scorched earth we left behind.
And to this day, UFO enthusiasts make a yearly pilgrimage to your “landing site”.
I was over Bob’s house, playing video games one day, when Craig comes in and proclaims “I know how to make napalm!”
“The fuck you do”, I said.
“No, really, get some gas and some petroleum jelly, maybe some styrofoam peanuts. They’ll dissolve into the gas and we’ll have napalm!”
“Well, shit, I’m sold”
So we go over to the gas station. We knew the guy that ran and worked there We had all worked there for some length of time in our past as well. When we go to get 15 cents in gas in a Pepsi bottle, the clerk paused a moment.
“Listen, you little fuckers. I don’t know what you’re doing, or why you want 15 cents of gas to be put in a Pepsi bottle, but I know nothing about this, understand?”
So we go to the church parking lot a couple blocks away. It’s dark by now and we had whipped up a half-fist-sized glop of this stuff on the concrete. Craig and I were huddled over this thing with matches, trying to get it to catch fire, which it didn’t seem to want to do. Bob, who was filling up a Zippo lighter, figured he’d add to the mix. He squirted the glop with fluid and we put a match to it. The fluid caught fire instantly and burned. It caught the glop on fire as well, and the fire started to grow. It was at this point that we realized that none of us accounted for…you know…a fire. So we did what any kids would have done with a steadily-growing fire. We ran.
We ran to Bob’s house, less than a block away, past the baseball field and a couple of doors down. I distinctly remember looking back after getting past the baseball diamond and seeing a pillar of flames up over the hedges.
We went back the next day and saw this nifty scorch mark in the cement.