I was out for a walk around the local lake today and noticed a guy with one of those remote-control boats making it go round and round and round in the water, while he sat glassy-eyed on the shore watching it. Roooouuuuuunnnd and rooouuuuuunnnnd.
I thought “Wow, a Homer Simpson Activity!” This ranks up there with watching NASCAR reruns (or current races, for that matter), remote control cars (zooooom down the parking lot (teeheehee), zoooooom back up the parking lot (teeheehee), zooooom down the parking lot…you get the picture), and collecting the numbers from the tails of airplanes (mmmm…airplane fooood).
Any other HSAs that you can think of that you just don’t get?
I can think of a couple of MMORPGs that made me go Homer for a while.
Wife: “what have you been doing all day?”
Me (steadily clicking on the exact same point on the screen): “fishing for lobsters.”
W: “Why?”
Me: “If I catch 4000 of them, my level will be high enough to start catching swordfish.”
W: “Then what happens?”
Me: “Then I only have to catch 6000 of those and I’ll be able to start catching sharks!”
My Dad’s friend had a Homer Simpson moment the other day. He pulled up to his garage to load something it the back of his truck, got out and lowered the tailgate when the truck started moving toward him. He’d either fogotten to put it into park or it had slipped out of gear. As it picked up speed, he ran to the door and held on for dear life trying to stop it. Guess what? He couldn’t. He wound up kind of doing the splits in the middle of the road. The truck’s front tire missed one leg (and his jewels) and ran up and along the side of his other leg.
The truck continued without him, mowing down a row of mailboxes before the tailgate came to rest against a telephone pole. Dad’s friend was laying in the middle of the street, in pain, with no one around to help him. No one had noticed what had happened. He got out his cell phone and dialed 911 and fairly soon firemen showed up. First thing he did was ask one of them to go to his truck, put out the cigarette sitting in the ashtray and hide it somewhere. Though we’re pretty sure his wife know he sneaks a smoke now and then, he’s convinced she will divorce him if she catches him.
The fireman fullfilled his request and Dad’s friend got packaged up and ambulanced to the hospital which, fortunately, is only a few blocks away. The ER doctor looked at him and said, “There’s going to be broken bones.” He was shipped off to X-ray where lo and behold! all bones are intact! The truck’s tire had rolled along the fleshy part of the leg without touching a single one! He has bruses all up and down his leg and he’s in pain still but, like Homer Simpson, he came out of the experience less injured than he had a right to be. Plus, there’s the Simpsonesque humor him of telling the fireman, regarding the cigarette, “If my wife sees it, it’ll be grounds for divorce.”
The truck’s tailgate and bumper are a bit bent but will work just fine. The mailboxes came away undamaged. Someone was able to reinstert the pole supporting them back into the ground with no problem at all and I gather everything is just fine on that front. (Except for the fact that one person took their mailbox off for the time being in fear of a repeat performance by their nutty neighbor.
Though this might be more extreme than some of his other Homer Simpson moments, I can pretty much bet that by the end of the summer, there will be another story of his to share.
He’s a sweet guy and can laugh at himself about this, by the way.
Tikki’s post reminded me of something that happened to a former coworker. For the sake of convenience, let’s call him Homer. Homer and I worked the midnight to 8am shift at the nuclear power plant and often had a lot a free time on our hands. Homer, Marge and the kids were leaving on a roadtrip in a couple of days, so Homer decided to give his car a tune-up out in the parking lot during one of his slow periods at work.
After changing spark plugs, rotor, points, condensor, etc. (did I mention this happened about 25 years ago) Homer decided to adjust the engine idle speed, which needed to be done with the car in gear. So, he put the car in drive, set the parking brake and went around to the front of the car.
He started to make the adjustment while standing between the front bumper of his car and the rear bumper of the car in the adjoining parking space. Unfortunately, the parking brake didn’t hold, Homer’s car crept forward and pinned him between the two cars.
At this point, the situation wasn’t too bad. Homer was trapped between the cars, but he wasn’t hurt and the pressure holding him is place was tolerable. If he could just get someone’s attention, he’d be OK. So, he started calling for help. Unfortunately, it was 3am and there was no one around to hear him.
Pinned between the two cars and with no hope of rescue, Homer realized that he needed to kill the car engine. In a moment of inspired thinking he decided that this could best be accomplished by flooding the carburator. So, he grabbed the throttle linkage and pulled it with all his might. Much to his surprise, this didn’t kill the engine. In fact, it had the opposite effect and pinned him even more firmly in place and things got a lot more painful.
Apparently the pain was inspirational, and Homer finally had the presence of mind to disconnect the coil wire on his car, which killed the engine, but left him trapped. He spent the next hour or so calling for help before someone finally found him. Fortunately, no lasting damage was done to him or either of the cars.
On friday this weekend, a friend came over with his kid. He brought a remote controlled car. we were drinking and trying to make it jump stuff in the alley behind my house. finally, I thought it would be funny if we threw it up on this flat garage roof and controlled it from my back porch like 50 feet away (it goes : garage – alley – back porch)
So, we threw the car up and my buddy starts driving it. The point is to run it around the roof and then make it jump off so I can catch it. It gets stuck on a rock.
He came down off the porch, boosted me up, and I climbed up (*) onto this rubber roof to free the car. I cleaned off all the stones, and climbed back down. He goes back up on the porch and runs the car up this mini-slope and the car gets stuck. I climb back up, free the car, get back down.
The car doesn’t move. he comes down off the porch, and boosts me back up, where I realize I had turned the car off by mistake, so I turned it back on and climbed back down.
Now it’s my turn. I take the remote, go to the porch, and get the car stuck on a different mini-slope. I come down, get boosted back up and this time, just point the car right towards the edge. I climb back down.
He makes it jump right off at me and I caught it.
Then on Saturday, I watched the NASCAR race and even sat through 2 hours of rain delay.
Then on Sunday I oohed and aaahed as things blew up real good.
Then on Monday, I pretty much got lost in the woods.
(*) I climbed instead of him because he’s a little fatter and less athletic than I. The garage just has a flat edge, so I need a boost from him just to get up to it, then I flop myself onto it like a whale. To get down, I kind of have to scootch over the edge, until I can dangle myself and drop like 2 feet to the ground. I got completely dirty, cut my arm a little, and tore a hole in my house slippers.
Once I have instead highlithing lines in very interesting book with orange marker, used black permanent marker.Only after ruining 29 pages I realised that there is something wrong. :smack:
I did this just 2 days ago, with less disastrous results. Got out of my car with the manual transmission not in gear and emergency break not engaged. I started to walk to my house and glanced behind me to see my car rolling backwards towards the cars on the other side of the parking lot. Luckily, I was able to run behind it and stop it before it hit the other cars. My neighbor had a great laugh. :smack:
This reminds me of a type I see fairly often at the laundromat–and it is usually middle-aged guys for some unknown reason–who drag a chair up to the bank of dryers and sit there watching their clothes for the whole cycle.
“It’s flat. It’s got a glass screen in front. There are objects moving inside. MUUUUUUUSSST WAAAATCH!”
