that I bought a 100-light strand of all-blue christmas lights for $2.50 to use as moonlighting on my aquarium
$100 savings, and it looks ghettotastic! and it’s really nice
word
One time I used a gatorade bottle as a coolant overflow container for my 1979 mercury cougar… it worked so well I left it there for 6 months
how ghetto have you gotten?
For halloween I bought a plastic curtain that looks like an iron gate to hang on our porch in front of the door. It even had grommets with strings on the top. But nailing it to the fascia would have been too high and I was too lazy to find more string.
sigh
Then I remembered the handy dandy reel of clear duct tape. One long piece from column to column just above my head, slap the top edge to the exposed duct tape and we were good to go. Even walking through it all night long didn’t make it fall down.
Is there anything duct tape won’t do? And does it get more ghetto than duct tape?
When I was a freshman in college (1996-97), I only wore Converse All-Stars shoes. All I could afford, really. And when I eventually wore my shoes out and the thin canvas started to tear, I’d use duct tape to hold them together. Back then, this was thought of as being “very punk rock,” which is similar to being “very ghetto.”
When my first car, a 1977 Toyota Corolla that I had probably been conceived in, was rusting apart, I used band stickers and duct tape to try to hold it together as long as possible. (This was also around 1996).
Living in Baltimore City, I normally don’t use the term, because it could be somewhat offensive, and you’d also find yourself using it A LOT if you don’t have a high standard of “ghetto”.
HOWEVER, last fourth of July, I was downtown enjoying a beer outside before the fireworks started, and there were two guys who were quintessential ghetto.
They were pushing a shopping cart down the street with a trash can in it. The trash can was half-filled with ice and they were selling bottled water that was in the ice.
I’d have to say that – no matter the reason – pushing around a trash-can in a shopping cart is pretty dang ghetto.
I live in Baltimore and I use the term ghetto ALL THE TIME.
Sometimes, I’ll hear people who I think are quite ghetto speak derisively about another person who they think is ghetto. I always think to myself if they think they’re not ghetto, boy, I’d hate to see that other person!
In my old 77 chevy caprice, when the headliner came down I went to Walmart and bought crushed purple velvet and some cotton material that had planets and stars on it from the scraps bin.
I then proceeded to staple the velvet in the middle of the interior roof, with the planet material running down either side and covering the back side panels.
In my current car, the only working speakers are the 10" subs in the speaker box in the very back.
My 86 Blazer still has the original speakers in the front dash - they are now dust. 
Our last apartment was lit with Christmas lights we bought on sale at k-mart.
We went through 2 strands of blue, one red, and at least 3 white ones. When they burnt out enough, instead of just throwing out the $1.50 strand, I actually fixed them.
You’re not a honky like me.
I worry that a black person might take it offensively.
Or that a cracker would take it like I’m racist.
I know a black guy who knew a guy with the nickname “Big Bowl of Cereal.” I think that’s a ghetto nickname, like “Boo” or “Ray Ray”.
Ah.
UrbanChic, planning to skip through East Baltimore tonight singing ‘ghetto, ghetto, ghetto, ghetto, tra, la, la, la, la’ to see how long it takes for her to get punched in the mouth.
As an aside, how come you ain’t gots no email address, Trunk? I wanted to send you an email (obviously) and couldn’t.
I put “no email” as the default when I signed up.
I didn’t know what kind of trash might hang around this joint.
But that mailbox is kind of a “dump” that I use for internet stuff, posting to usenet or something where I’d rather not provide a real name. I sometimes go weeks without checking it.
Anyway, I changed it.
According to my kids, taping aluminum foil to the windows to cool the house in summer is ghetto. Between that and the oak trees, though, I almost don’t have to use the AC. Their bills are much higher.
Once, I used string to tie a broken car grille back in place. The darn thing was plastic and paint and they wanted nearly $200 for a new one. I did a thorough enough tie job that it never came off again. And it was fairly inconspicuous. The kids were young enough then to thing it was cool. Now they’re grown and have opinions.
My '85 Chevy Sprint was so rusty by 1998 that the front bumper (fender?) was falling off. It was just plastic, nice & light, so I figured that tying it up with a black shoelace was a GREAT solution. How ghetto is that?!?!? 
Too many to mention, but…
In keeping with the “Duct” tape theme, when (as a teenager) my parents moved from Dallas to East Texas, they purchased a home that had windows that looked paned. Unfortunately, this was only on the front side of the house and my room, covered both it and part of the side. So, I had two different kinds and there was no way my mother would have wasted the money to replace them for purely aesthetic reasons.
Being the industrious child that I was, I then cut said Duct tape into thinner strips and lined them up vertically on the ones that didn’t look the same. Sadly, I believe I left those in place until after I moved out at 20.
Another…
Not me, but my mother. When I was really small, our house backed up to my Grandparents so that our yards were shared. In them, our whole entire family could collect various junk. One of which was a clunker old car (I know, I know) that there’s no telling where it came from. I’m sure it didn’t run and mom was of the variety of folks who believed that “If it doesn’t move, PAINT IT!” and she therefore did. With flames and polka dots. In regular household paint and a brush!! :eek: :smack:
Ah, good times.
My husband broke off the passenger side rear view mirror. It was still dangling by it’s very thick wire (more like tubing that held a number of wires.) The shop wanted multiple hundreds to replace it. So it dangled for a while until we got a ticket. Finally, he went out with duct tape and tapped the sucker back in place.
“Erm, honey?” I say in my sweetest-I’m-not-trying-to-start-a-fight-or-impugn-your-manhood voice. “Why’d you use clear duct tape?”
He thought it would be less noticable on our BLACK car to wrap “clear” (read: white) duct tape around and around the mirror like a patient with a headwound. Never mind that there’s BLACK DUCT TAPE in the same drawer.
I’m not sure I should talk though. Instead of taking off all the clear/white duct tape, I just put a layer of black over it to cover it up.
I once canoed about 5 miles in a canoe held together with duct tape… is that ghetto enough?
I’m not sure you can use “canoe” and “ghetto” in the same sentence!
Now…if it had been a rowboat…
My last car also had the duct taped side mirror.
I worked with a girl who, instead of sewing up the fallen-out hem of her pants, stapled the hem up then colored the staples with a black magic marker. It looked as classy as it sounds!
I’m so ghetto…
I bet I think this thread is about me.
When we moved into our current apartment, we was po’. Livin’ hand-to-mouth on beans-and-rice po’.
By way of furnishing our apartment, we got a $40 couch at a garage sale. Now, I do not want to give you the impression that this couch is ghetto. It is a solid couch and it is big. It’s more than long enough to stretch out on, and if you take the back cushions off, it’s wide as all outdoors and sleeps one in supreme comfort. The reason it was $40 was that it has extremely daggy yellowish green and orange upholstry. So we threw an old blanket over it, and called it good.
Last week, I decided that the blanket was starting to look pretty ratty.
Now, we are Moving Up in the World and have the, how do you say, income disposiblé? I had no intention of replacing the couch, because it is an f-i-n-e piece of furniture, but I did think about getting some slipcovers for it. I shopped around online and discovered that for a couch this size, I was looking at several hundred bucks.
I thought about it. I thought about it long and hard.
And I went to K-mart and spent $20 on a new blanket.
Awww yeah.
You actually paid money for a couch?
All right, big baller!
What’s wrong with the perfectly good ones people leave on the side of the road? 
In my old apartment the furnishing was like this:
Couch - found
End tables - gift from people moving
night stands - got them for walking a German Shepard
bed - my parents gave to me after it was left behind in a house they were renting
table, Christmas tree, 3 tiered corner shelf, bookcase, 4 chairs - $70 bucks to someone going into ROTC
Coffee table - $10 Goodwill
Bookcase #2 - $10 Goodwill
Bookcase #3 - gift from ex
Yeah, this should probably be my last post to this thread. :o
I removed a resonator along the air intake path in my old Sentra. This left a hole that I couldn’t find a suitable cap for. Until I noticed the cap off my Powerade bottle. Perfect fit! Cost me $1.19. It held (and is still holding) for over 5 years, so I can’t complain.
I also didn’t have a washer when I needed something grounded in a different car, but I did have a penny. And a drill. Do you see where this is going? I replaced the penny in a couple days with a real washer, but still – 2 days worth of ghetto.