I made a potato canon out of PVC pipe. It had a threaded cover over the end that you had to remove to spray more starter fluid into between shots. I wanted to be able to reload faster, so I drilled a 1/4 inch hole in the side of the chamber. I’d load up the potato, spray in some fluid, cover the hole with my thumb, and touch it off. No problem, except that opening the end also allowed oxygen in, which is kind of necessary if you want to fire more than one shot. The first shot went off with no problem. After that it wouldn’t light. I kept cranking the igniter, but didn’t have my thumb over the hole. Unfortunately my palm was about an inch above the hole when it finally lit off. The blister it left on my palm was about 2 inches across.
Did you know there are panic buttons in the Judge’s desk in courtrooms? I didn’t either. I do now.
Enjoy,
Steven
:D:D:D:D:D Damn you! The mental image I have right now is easily the funniest thing I’ve thought of in a while 
I was playing with a lighter when I was about 14. My friend and I were curling our hands into loose fists, and making a slight opening by the thumb and forefinger, so we could trap the gas in our closed hands. Quick spark and if you timed in juuuuuust right, you’d have a fireball in your hand for a split second! 
So I had the idea of trapping the gas in my mouth for a similar effect. For some reason, I thought thoguht it would be kind of dragon-like. I held the Bic to my lips, held down the button, and after a few seconds, sparked it. It kind of worked, but it was too fast, so rather than dragon-like, a little fireball just went “FOOP!” in my mouth and suddenly it felt like I’d snorted sawdust. I’d singed all my nose hairs.
We’re still not sure if it was gas in my sinuses that ignited, or if the flames in my mouth got the nose hairs coming out of my mouth. But it was all just hot enough for me not to want to try it ever again.
Scrotum can never be trusted.
I’ve mentioned this before…
I was working on an electrical outlet in my brother’s dining room. Pulling the old outlet out (it had been painted over) shook the wall enough to dislodge the cuckoo clock above the outlet from the nail. The cuckoo clock, obeying the law of gravity, plummeted straight down and hit me on the head. Cuckoo clocks also obey the equally powerful law of comedy, which meant that, as soon as it hit my head, the little bird came out of the door and went "cuckoo!"
My neice was laughing her head off at this. Can’t say I blame her. Gandhi would probably have laughed.
So here’s an embarrassing but hilarious thing that happened to me during my high school years. A since it was during my high school years, I was more than likely high when it happened. So anyway, I’m home alone, sitting on the toilet taking a shit and playing with matches and random flammable liquids that can be found within arm’s length of the toilet. After running out of different surfaces to light the strike-anywhere matches, I open up a bottle of nail polish remover, pour some into the cap and light it. It has a shiny blue flame and manages to entertain me for a few seconds. Once I get bored of it, I decide to dispose of it by dumping it into the toilet I’m still sitting on. Oh boy… Once it got dumped into the shit water it just exploded and singed my any and all hair in its way. This is also the first time I’m telling this story to anyone.
Reading this thread just completely reaffirms my belief that young boys are the luckiest damn creatures on this earth. I can’t imagine how ANY male makes it to adulthood with all the crap they pull.
Just this morning I took my usual trip to the office restroom for my 15 minute break with my newspaper in hand. I sat down and got to the business of reading on the toilet. I heard several people come in and out to use the urinals while I was there. I heard them wash their hands and then leave.
As I was finishing, I put the newspaper to the side and looked up. My stall door was open the whole time. I didn’t realize that the lock wasn’t closed correctly. I have no idea how many people must have seen me sitting there reading while taking care of business. It could have been members of senior management that also sit on my floor. I’m pretty sure my CFO would have informed me, but I’m not sure about the others.
So when you’re twelve and making blowguns out of straws, needles, and feathers, you eventually figure out that a longer blowgun pipe or a heavier projectile are two excellent ways to get better range and/or penetration power on your dart. So you upgrade to ~8 foot lengths of PVC pipe and nails with scotch-tape fletching. And you find out you can drive those at least an inch into plywood from twenty feet away. Hoo, boy, fun afternoon.
Nah, here’s a better story. I’m quite bored in the lighting booth (fairly soundproof) during the movie portion of the night’s gig, which meant I was being paid overtime to keep the lights off and let the projector run for two and a half hours. Yawn. And there are sheets of 3 inch thick styrofoam that is normally carved into molding, or textured walls, or props, or that kind of thing. Just, lying around, you know? So we get out our knives and start carving them. And then, me never being one to overcompensate by carrying a big knife, I realize that the two-inch blade on my knife can be stabbed straight into the foam, right up to the hilt, without the tip of the knife getting through the other side of the heavy foam. So we start tossing the foam up in the air, then stabbing it and pressing it to the wall in one move. You can probably see where this is going.
So, just for kicks, my friend tosses the foam up, towards me, and stabs the foam straight into my chest.
And it totally works! We do that for another twenty minutes, switching for new foam when it starts looking raggedy. Then we get another idea. We have two short knives, and several people- could we toss it up between us, and pin it between our two knives?
Nope, we can’t, and I get a deep, nasty, raggedy cut right across the back of my hand. It’s bleeding everywhere, and my friend, to his credit, pulls his shirt off and we keep pressure on it until we get to the first-aid kit. Told my boss I’d done it reaching into a box of gobos (notoriously sharp thin metal bits that you stick into a light to give it a different pattern). Still have a nasty scar there today.
This story’s way too long, but it’s one of my favorites. I laugh till I cry when I tell it in person…the day everything went wrong.
In 1980, we were working on a project to relocate all the telephone cables that ran through a ridge near Lambert-St.Louis Airport. They were lengthening the main runway, and the ridge was being removed, a pretty neat thing to watch in itself. Since the ridge was going, the cables in it had to get moved and buried under lower ground. With the money I’d saved previously and the overtime pay from this project, I was quitting my job as a cable splicer and going to college. This was Monday of my last week at work; I’d be in a classroom the next Monday.
My splicing partner and I get our work assignment for the day, but we can’t find his truck. Our foreman checks around and finds out a loaner crew had used it and left it at the jobsite over the weekend. We go to the designate manhole, but his truck isn’t there. We check with the splicers in the hole; they check around on the talk pair for a cutaround and tell us the truck is at the top of the hill from the Harley hole. (There’s a story with cocaine and gunfire at the Harley hole, so everyone knew it by name.) So we’re trying to back my truck out along this narrow spit of blacktop that extends into a sea of mud (it had been raining daily for about a week and there were already a half-dozen Bell trucks stuck in different spots). I accidentally hit another company truck and tore a 4-foot long hole along the utility box, along with ripping one of the bin doors off my truck. We called our foreman and reported it; he told us not to worry about it.
We find the missing truck (remember the missing truck?) at the top of the hill from the Harley hole, but they hadn’t know it was stuck in the mud up to its bumpers. We call our foreman and reported it; he told us he’d add us to the list for the line crew that was coming around with a huge truck and a winch. We head to the manhole we’re working in that day and set up the jobsite and start purging the air in the hole when we notice the blower on the underground unit doesn’t appear to be working. A few checks confirm this; we can’t even enter the hole without replenishing the air prior to entry and on an ongoing basis. We called our foreman and reported it; he told us the guys from the garage had just returned an underground unit they’d repaired…bring this one in and get the repaired one. We break down the jobsite and load up the unit. Just then the line crew shows up to get my partner’s truck out of the mud, so he heads down the road with them.
I finish loading up and start to hook the unit up to my truck’s tow hitch, and damn, it’s in a small bit of mud on the blacktop. So I just start rocking it to get it free of the mud, with great success. Therein lay my failure: my right thumb was hanging over the front of the unit’s hitch when it ran into the back of my truck. These units weighed about a ton, so it was bad to have my thumb getting crushed between a rolling unit and a parked 18,000 pound truck. I yanked my hand back, quickly enough to avoid severing my thumb. It really hurt, though. I looked down at it; there were two gouges about a quarter inch deep across the back of my thumb, but they weren’t bleeding. Weird. It smarted a lot though, so I kind of wrapped my shirttail around it and compressed it as I walked up the block to where the line crew was extracting my partner’s truck.
He saw me coming in his mirror and stuck his head out the window to ask me what was up. I was maybe 20 feet away and I held up my hand with my thumb up, and yelled “I just hurt the fuck out of my thumb. Do you think I need stitches?”. I’m still looking at the back of my thumb and there’s still no blood there. He can see the inside of my thumb and the rest of me. Turns out my thumb was laid open to the bone across the inside of the first joint and into my palm. And I was drenched with blood from the bottom of my ribcage to my knees. My buddy just went white for a moment, then yelled (in response to my question about stitches), “Fuck yes!! Get in the truck, get in the truck!”. I started getting in his truck, when he decided better: “Get in Mooney’s truck; the steering on this truck’s fucked, and we’re doomed today!”. So I got in Moon’s truck and we headed to the hospital.
Moon contacts the control center on the radio - he was the only one of us three with a radio - and lets them know what happened. Somehow, there was a misunderstanding on which hospital we were going to, but that’s another story… Moon asks me how I’m feeling and I tell him I’m a little woozy. He says yeah, I’m probably in shock. I tell him it’s a little wierd seeing my own bone like this but I’m not really shocked: he explains he means the blood loss kind of shock. We get to the hospital and ambulate on in to the emergency room. The admitting nurse was a guy I’d talked to several times the previous month when we’d recabled the hospital and he recognized me. He started to tell me everything was fine with their phones when I started explaining that I was the problem this time. He saw the blood and I got whisked ahead of everyone else in the waiting room. It helps the schmooze the gatekeepers.
The doctor sticks a probe down into my thumb - that was…uncomfortable…and asks me if I can move it. I whined something about “Gosh, it hurts”. He says if I can’t move it, he has to slit my forearm open to reattach some tendon or something, and I have my thumb doing fucking gymnastics for him. He gets the novocaine and starts numbing my thumb and accidentally breaks the needle off as he’s moving it around. Half a hypo of novocaine spills all over. Two more hypo’s of novocaine and he’s sewing away. A layer of stitches kind of inside, another at the surface and he’s ready to do the back of my thumb. He starts and I mention that the novocaine has worn off. He asks me if I want more, so I ask him how many more stitches. “No more than 7 or 8.” Let’s just do it then, it can’t be any worse than giving me a shot. He laughs and finishes up.
I spent my last four days at work on light duty and started school with my right thumb in a huge splint. I had the final checkups done at the local medical school.
For some reason when i was about 4 or 5 I let my brother talk me into an April Fools trick on my dad. He would tell him that I got hit by a car and I would wait for him to run out of the hose ,then I would jump out of the bushes and yell April Fool. It sounded good to me.
I waited and then when he came out I yelled "April Fool’. The look on my dad’s face told me it had gone horribly wrong. We got in large trouble for having too good a sense of humor.
Back in high school my friends and I loved to make these little gas bombs. I don’t remember how exactly we made them, but it was something like a 20 ox. bottle, some form of hydrochloric acid or something, boiling chips, a little tin foil. SHake it up, cap the bottle, and the gas expands to the point where the bottle makes a good, loud BOOM!.
So we’re wandering around a field near my friend’s house and we spot a pipe in the grass. this pipe goes down a good 20-30ft or so, and we think “what a great amplifaction chamber this would make for our gas bomb!” (do I have to tell the rest of the story? :o )
Anyway, We toss one down there, and huddle back a bit. Time passes. Nothing. Crap, was it a dud? I stick my head over the pipe and shine a flash light down there, and see the bottle start expanding. “OH SHIT!” I yell as I dive away from the pipe. My friend, gods bless his soul, says “what?” and stick his head over the hole just as the bomb goes. He couldn’t hear anything for a good hour
Oooh, I’ve got a nut injury story. It happened when I was about 8 (thankfully pre-puberty). I was trying to climb up onto the kitchen counter to get a granola bar from the cupboard. I used my usual stepping stool - the edge of the cupboard door located below the counter.
The lower door was still open when I was standing on the counter poking through Mom’s snack stash. It was still open a moment later when I started to loose my balance. And, regrettably, it was still open a second after that, when I fell down and landed, crotch-first, on the top edge of the open door. :o
I went through about a dozen pairs of underwear that day, but luckily the doctors in the emergency room were satisfied that my nuts were not seriously or permanently injured.
About 10 days ago I broke a 12 inch mirror tile by dropping it from about 5 feet up onto the basement floor. I repeated this action 3 more times within a minute. My brain isn’t working quickly and my coordination is not good. I have to work on slowing down again and not trying to catch stuff, or I’m going to to do some major damage.
Last Saturday night I opened the screen door after spying the moon. I wanted to see if Venus was visible. The temperature had reached well above freezing after temperatures around zero for a long time. The roof snow had been melting and water was freezing on the super cold sidewalk. I put my foot on the ice covered in water I didn’t suspect and slipped instantly onto my ass and then back. I didn’t crack open my head, but I did stop at the railing thanks to my ankle not fitting under it. I couldn’t get up because of absolutely no traction and I hurt something fierce all over for a couple days.
Yesterday I was working on waterproofing the basement. I decided to use a putty knife behind the shower to remove some of the semidetached paint from the wall. This is an old shower with bolts sticking out. I put put my hand against the side of the shower with a lot of weight and force behind it. I punctured my hand part way and bruised it badly on a bolt.
I should really start a poll thread linked to this thread. How far can you get before you’re laughing so hard that you’re crying.
I got as far as #10, hotflungwok and the bitten ballsack.
Not as impressive as the OP but in the same vein:
In college, my buddies and I played with fire. Things like spraying a can of lysol and lighting the spray until the flame got really close to the can (luckily we never had a can explode, and as an added benefit, the room would be warmed up (did I mention this was inside?)), and removing a match from a book, pressing it against the flint strip with a finger, and trying to get it to land on someone else. One night, a buddy showed me a trick where he’d light a match, hold it under his chin, take it away, then exhale smoke (very impressive, as the beer was flowing). I decided to try it. Light match, hold under chin. What’s that smell? And that crackling noise? I’d forgotten about my full beard. Luckily, no permanent damage.
I still have trouble getting to grips with just how stupid this story proves I am.
We have a low light fitting that comprises three separate glass globes. I was carrying something (a steel serving tray I think). I was excitedly telling Mrs P about something and waved the tray up and smashed one of the globes, which rained down on me without cutting me. No great harm done, only moderately stupid so far, right?
Then as I’m still standing there my mother in law walks in and asks how the hell I just smashed a globe in the light fitting. I’m still holding the tray. I say, “well I was holding this tray and I just kind of went like this.”
Smashed the other two globes didn’t I? :smack:
I took chemistry in high school. We had lab partners. Well, they had lab partners. If you partnered with me, the water didn’t boil at 212. The stuff that was supposed to happen just didn’t happen. Very, very soon I was a lab bachelor. Spinster. Alone.
Anyway, the experiment had to do with distilled water and hydrochloric acid. The teacher pre-measured the appropriate amounts in marked beakers for all of us, so all were expected to do was empty them both into the big beaker and add something in a brown powder, which would turn the liquid brown, then red, then clear again. Mine stayed brown. Everybody around me was talking about how look! its as clear as water again! and mine was brown.
Not enough acid, I figured. I took the small, empty beaker to the central table, where supplies of acid and distilled water were available. But unmarked. No problem, I thought, just give it the old smell test, distilled water doesn’t smell, but acid probably…
Tears ran down my cheeks fleeing from my eyes. My sinuses felt as if they had been augured out with a Black and Decker and then cleared with nitro.
Mr. Clarke stood before me, stunned. “Did you really, honest-to-God really smell it to see if it was hydrochloric acid! You smelled it?”
He took it from my hand and carefully turned it before me, so that I could see the opposite side of the beaker. The side with the label. That read “Hydrochloric Acid”.
“You pass. You get a C minus, and Thursday, 10 a.m. you report to Study Hall. Don’t come back here. Ever.”
Shit, we’re flattered that the SDMB has all the Aussies sober enough to type.