My dad is constantly dieting and looking for new ways to eat while maintaining his weight. My grandma had given my mom some dried potatoes one day and my dad decided they would make a great low cal snack. According to my mom he ate about a pound of them and then drank some water. He never considered that the water would make the potatoes expand. Needless to say he was very sick. We’ll never let him live it down.
Omni, yep 10=2, I did computing a-level, and found one of the worst things was doing arithmetic with floating point binary.
SJSB I’m only at uni here, originally from Yorkshire, but yeah, I do think the Small World description applies.
Anyway, call it stupidity or misfortune, I’ve just managed an expensive mishap.
As i got up from my desk, my glasses slid onto the floor, just where my foot was going to land. Obviously I saw it happening, but I was powerless to stop my foot, encased in steel-toecapped boot, from continuing it’s decent to crush one lens and the frames beneath it. :smack: I sit here now, contemplating how to find the £150ish I will need for a new pair, whils I attempt to remove shards of glass from my finger, which got there as I cleaned up. 
I thought the one about the baked beans was rather hilarious. Though my first thought was, why not just empty the can into the pot? Seems safer that way.
Anyway, a coworker of mine related this to me one day: He was making a batch of beer in his basement using mini-kegs (~5 gallons each). Apparently the kegs have stoppers that you put in them in such a way as they can only be removed one way. I guess the idea is that when you’re ready, you push the tap into the same hole where the stopper is and the stopper just slides all the way into the keg to be retrieved later when the keg is empty. The design of the stopper makes it so that it will go in but not pop out. Well, this coworker managed to put the stoppers in backwards, so they wouldn’t go in like they were supposed to. Having no other recourse (or so it seemed) he proceeded to pry the stopper out of one keg not anticipating the pressure that builds up in a keg. The keg is on the floor, the coworker is bent over it and suddenly the stopper comes loose…
The stopper shoots out of the hole, hitting my coworker in the forehead. This is immediately followed by a fountain of highly pressurized beer spaying every surface of the basement in which he is working.
Needless to say, the rest of us in the office all lost it whe he told the story.
SDMB Memorandum
To: 13-year-old boys everywhere
From: Spiff
Re: Choosing football goal lines
If you are ever faced with choosing goal lines for a game of pick-up touch football in the front yard, and the choices are between “driveway” and “chest-high cyclone fence topped with those twisted sharp wires sticking up” – pick “driveway.”
Everytime.
Trust me on this one.
One from the Hanza family archives, freaturing my Dad.
Known by most as a man of great common sense, who tends to sneer at people who do stupid things in his area of specialty ( clay pigeon shooting) he can do tremenduously stupid things himself when he enters the deadly realm of D.I.Y. Several stories involving him compete for top spot, but at the end of the day, there can be only won winner.
So, one day he is up doing some work on our balcony, hammering down this waterproof cover stuff we have on it, plus filling in a few gaps round the edges with HOT TAR to waterproof that as well. So next to him is a small bucket of nails, and next to that a bucket of HOT TAR with a little gas burner under it to keep it boiling away. I’m sure you can see where this is headed, but the things that elevates this story above yer average run-of -the-mill stupid story and into the pantheon of jaw droppingly stupid things, is that he was actually wearing thick workmens gloves, so it was only the SECOND time that he did it, sans glove, that necessitated a trip to the emergency room.
(Try to avoid getting bubbling tar on your hands if you can folks. He was lucky in that he managed to avoid-just- having to have a skin graft, and instead just had to wear a plastic glove pumped full of some weird cream that slooowly disolved the tar, for about a month)
Thank you, Tansu, you’re a peach.
Now I know it’s not just me.
[Nic Cage]
You know, uh… I could eat a peach for hours.
[/nc]
Then there was the time I tripped over a toilet and split my head open.
Tonight I reached into the drawer where we keep the knives and I ran a fork tine right into my finger. OUCH!!
Once my husband set a copper kettle to boil, then shut the kitchen door. It was charred and the spout had fallen off by the time he remembered.
Dumb thing my friend and I used to do, always her idea: hold a lit match with some tweezers and spray cologne at it. It really was pretty cool, but you know the cologne bottle could have caught on fire. She is now a dentist. Scary.
When I was fourteen, I was working out with a barbell, but it didn’t have those little screw on things on the end to keep the weights from falling off. I get the bar up to around chin-height, but I’m not keeping the bar level. The weight on the left starts to slide off. I try to straighten it out, over correct, and the weight on the right suddenly drops off. The sudden weight differential whips the bar over and cracks me right across the face. Knocked me right on my ass and popped both lenses out of my glasses. I suppose I’m just lucky I kept my teeth.
I once touched an electric fence. On purpose.
I had a 10,000 volt transformer that I used to like to play with.
It you held onto one lead, you could zap people pretty good with it.
One time I was playing with it, not realizing that the surface it was sitting on was not enamel as I thought, but actually painted metal.
I leaned against that, grounded nicely, and found myself some distance away. Luckily.
It was only after an improvised Jacob’s ladder collapsed in my general direction that I decided to leave it alone.
The stupidest thing I ever did was when I was about 11. I was playing scientist with my friend at his house. We mix up this liquid concoction with all these things that we’ve found in their house. It’s in this fairly thick plastic bottle which we seal and put in the microwave to heat.
Whoo-boy. That thing ex-plo-ded. The door blew open and thankfully didn’t break. We were both deafened. And the whole room got peppered with our little concoction. We spent the next hour furiously cleaning the room. Even so I was still banned from their house.
I can top the OP.
You know those El Cheapo pencils that aren’t made of real wood, but instead are made of wood colored plasticcy stuff? Well if you boil them, you can bend the pencils into neato shapes and they harden again when they cool. I was boiling five pencils and went downstairs to play video games. Fast forward an hour or two when black sooty ash is floating through the entire house. The water boiled away, then the pencils caught fire. Every surface in the house had to be cleaned.
But this one almost killed me:
In my tenth summer, my cousin and I begged enough and finally got our wish. Bows and arrows.
We were in the back yard, shooting a target on two stacked bales of hay when we decided to see how high we could shoot an arrow straight up. My dad came out just in time to see us staring up into the sky, having lost an arrow in the sun, when THWOP! an arrow buries itself halfway in the ground two feet behind me.
We never saw the bows and arrows again.
I decided to make a shake one day in the blender. I added milk, ice and other incredients and blended them till smooth.
As I picked the blender up off the base to move over by my glass, the entire contents of the blender spilled all over my counter and floor.
It was then that I recalled having recently washed the blender and hadn’t screwed the bottom (where the blad is) on tightly so it could completely dry.
MTRAHEY,
I also grew up in Calgary. Burrrr.. I sure don't miss those cold,cold winters. When I was a teen a couple of friends and I decided to go camping on may long weekend (it always ends up snowing on may long weekend). So it starts snowing, I am freezing. We were able to make a great camp fire. It was so nice and warm. My feet were numb so I decided that I would take off my shoes and lay next to the fire to warm my feet up. I fell asleep and awoke to an awful smell...wool burning. I looked down and both of my feet were on fire. hehe
I also stuck my tongue on the metal handrailing on front of the house when I was a kid. I ended up pulling it off my self loosing nearly the whole top layer of skin on my tongue. I couldn't eat for weeks.
My first time skiing was when I was three. My father told me not to go "hot-doggin'". He turned around to look for my sister and I started down the hill unable to stop. At the bottom of the hill was a man bent over taking a picture of a nice looking couple. I ran smack into this ass face first. I was crying so hard. It turns out the man taking the picture was a photographer for the Calgary Sun. Next day I was on the front page of the news paper balling my eyes out. I still have the front page of the paper.My first time on a 10-speed bike was educational.
I was ony 8, and had only had kids’ bikes before, with the “pedal backwards to brake, stand on the pedal to skid out” type of brake, and this bike was so big, I could barely touch the pedals with my toes at the bottom of the stroke. And the brakes were on the handlebars, I was supposed to
I’m doing pretty good on the grown-up bike, until I get to the top of this big long hill. At the bottom was a stop sign, and a busy cross street making a “T” intersection. Across the intersection was a house with a four-car garage, the driveway lined up with the street across the way.
So we start down the hill, and I start going faster than I’m comfortable with… faster and faster and faster. And so I start pedalling backwards to slow down. “Whirrrrr” the ratchet makes noise but that’s about all that happens.
“Use your hands! Your hands!” my friend hollers, but I don’t understand. I’m panicking and don’t understand why the brakes don’t work.
All of a sudden, I see the bottom of the hill coming up. It becomes obvious that the only way I’m going to stop is by hitting something… so since there are cars in the driveway across the street, I aim for the brick wall between the two garage doors.
Amazingly, I make it across the street to impact the wall. Seeing the wall approach at high speed is the last thing I remember before waking up briefly in the back of someone’s car… in agony… and I pass out again.
The next thing I remember is waking up at home, laying on the couch, with an ice pack on my crotch. It seems my little nads had borne the brunt of the impact with the gooseneck on the bike. They then decided that they were going to retreat from the harsh cruel world for a couple days. They descended eventually.
Geez - the bike. It was totaled. It looked like a giant had taken hold of it and twisted…
Anyway, there was no lasting damage… I believe I can still father children, and the hair on my back continues to thicken, so at least one of the boys is still in working order.
Now, at the age of 38, I’m taking up downhill skiing…
Gee, I also posted this big long story, with lots of misspelled words and aborted sentances, and I didn’t preview it.
Geez, bughunter. I thought you were gonna give us a long story about hunting a rhinocerous beetle, or something… 
I stopped a spinning disco ball with my bare hands… 100’s of sharp glass squares against my soft pink fingers.
You know, this whole thread makes me feel a little bit better about myself. See, I know that some of you are smart people - at least ordinarily. It’s good to know that we all have our really dumb moments.
And yet civilization keeps on marching…