I stopped a spinning disco ball with my bare hands. A globe made from hundreds of glass squares spinning like a beach ball sized dentist drill… The skin on my fingers and palms were no match.
I plead youth and stupidity.
When I was a young teen, my friend and I started putting small puddles of gasoline on the driveway and lighting them on fire. That’s bad idea #1.
Bad Idea #2 was leaving the plastic gas can too close to the fire. (betchya can’t see where this is going…)
Bad Idea #3 was pouring water on the flaming gas can instead of running inside for the fire extinguisher.
It ended well, with a parent running out with a fire extinguisher and saving our asses, the car and likely the house as well. The can was just starting to melt, with a finger sized hole above the gas line. How or why that thing didn’t blow I still don’t know.
Touching a cast iron pan on the stove to see if it’s hot–bad idea. Very bad idea.
Worse idea–cooking up a batch of cornbread in a 12-inch cast iron skillet, taking the skillet out of the oven, removing the hot cornbread, and then, a minute or two later, picking up the pan without using a hot mit.
After all, it’s been sitting out for…oh…at least 60 seconds or so, so it must be safe to pick it up now. And it doesn’t * look* hot. And when, on sheer reflex, you yelp and drop the skillet, it won’t hurt when it hits your foot. No, no–certainly not.
Going into the kitchen to track down the whole banana-chocolate-brown sugar cake and cut myself a piece.
Letting my DH convince me that its easier to stop in rollerblades if you take the brake thingie off and just drag one foot behind you… yeah… right.
Cleaning a rodent cage, not washing my hands then reaching into the cage of a 12’ snake that hadn’t been fed yet to retrieve a water bowl… very not smart.
Deciding to walk both dogs at the same time by myself… especially when said dogs are bullmastiffs that outweigh me… even more stupid to attempt this on icy sidewalks.
1/Light up some fireworks in the garden
2/Notice how close the thing is to Daddys’ car
3/Wait until it’ s about to go off
3/Grab it full-hand in order to move it.
4/…
5/Explain where a 6-year-old like you got hold of the fireworks…
6/…while running around your Mom and yelling something about your hand being on fire.
7/Profit!
BTW, I noticed you have two #3s in there? 
- Being a 7-year-old in a small room where a hot iron is on an unstable table
- Doing a cartwheel in that small room with the iron on an unstable table
- Knocking over the table with the hot iron to the floor while finishing cartwheel
- Picking up the HOT iron by grabbing the METAL SIDE so my mom wouldn’t find out and get mad
Boy was that painful. My entire palm was burnt, though not too bad. I slept on the floor with an icepack on my hand the entire night. My palm hurts just thinking about it.
Another bad idea:
Telling my brother there was a good drum player at my school, near his age. Now that he has a band i get no peace what so ever.
Now where did I put my earplugs…
OUCH!! :eek: That hurts just to read about!
“It’s OK. I can pay off all the charges I’m going to make to this credit card before the higher interest rate kicks in.”
Hoo boy…
Couple of food-related incidents, well, there have been many, but these stick in my mind:
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The Manchester Airport Holiday Inn ‘all you can eat’ buffet - I wanted to make sure they really meant it - the waiter kept trying to clear away my plate, but I kept telling him I was going back up for more - it was like Mr Creosote, but without the explosion.
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A very large bag of dried apple rings - they are supposed to be for baking, but I just love the chamois-leather texture and sour twang of them - it must have been a couple of pounds of dried fruit. This time there was an explosion.
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Somewhere more than three 800g bars of Cote D’or dark chocolate (Just another bite won’t hurt), washed down with two pints of strong, black filter coffee - it was like having your brain levered out by a warm, black, bitter crowbar.
Playing catch with an inattentive brother and a pysanky egg.
We didn’t know they weren’t hard boiled…
The icing to this particular cake of wisdom is: Don’t do it on ice when the neighbor is walking twin Yorkies. And the “Bigger Than Human” Dog is an asshole.
Eating Greek food after having been out drinking all day. Bloated doesn’t even come close.
Age 16: Stopping flying the plane because I think that Pops Mercotan has started flying it again while we were practicing a forced landing with the engine throttled down while over an oat field at about 250 feet of altitude, which was an insufficient height to recover from the subsequent stall.
People still ask me about the scars, 30 years later. The oat field is pretty much back to normal appearance now, though. A lot of time at the hospital was spent flushing oats out of my wounds.
Hoo-boy! The list includes:
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Slicing an onion for a sandwich while chemically altered (left index finger scar #1)
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Holding a project while using a hacksaw on a piece of very soft aluminum (left index finger scar #2 - the one that goes 3/4 of the way around)
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Lab Rule #1 - Hot Pyrex looks just like cold Pyrex (left palm scar #1)
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Failing to pay attention when sliding a tray of hamburger buns onto a hot grill (left palm scars #2, 3 and 4)
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Glacier hiking without crampons…it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Crampons let you climb back up flues that you easily climbed down.
When the boss tells you to come in and work over the weekend, don’t respond by sighing and saying, “You know, there’s only so much solitaire one person can play in a week.” He won’t think it’s funny.
Ben-Gay is not, repeat NOT, a lubricant.
More simple steps to pain and profit (me, age 14) :
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Convince father to carry bike in back of pickup, so I can ride home and not have to wait for him to finish.
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Get on bike while it’s in the pickup bed (note that in this case the truck wasn’t in motion).
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Open the tailgate.
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Decide to ride bike off the back of the truck onto the ground.
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Worry about ever having children.
But in the dark it sure feels like a tube of KY doesn’t it…very hot stuff
Don’t do what dad did to me when I was five years old. He left a huge pile of fiberglass insulation piled up under my favorite tree. Try jumping into and rolling around in that all afternoon.
Also he once told me that a good place to keep your chewing gum instead of spitting it out was to stick it behind your ear. mm-hmm…yep. So that night when I went to bed I naturally didn’t want to waste a good wad of bubble gum. Needless to say, I got a crew cut the next day.
More recent bad ideas, never hand a loaded pistol to anybody. Even if they claim to be an expert. I got a scar from a .45 cal. long colt semi-wadcutter hollowpoint went (in) just above my navel and (out) the back just right of my spine. Bad idea very bad.