Ooh, ooh, Mr. Kotter! Mr. Kotter!
I’d forgotten - I’ve flown on the Gimli Glider (but not on 23 July 1983).
I played a round of golf with the then-current Malawian golf champion.
He wasn’t very good.
Malawian golf courses don’t have greens, 'cos the grass won’t grow, so they have browns instead. If you draw a line in the dust you can make your ball travel in all sorts of curves and still drop perfectly into the hole.
I’ve excavated a skeleton. While taking a Human Identification via Forensics class my prof received a call from the State Law Enforcement Division to investigate a potential crime scene uncovered by a some digging equiptment. A few of the class members were able to tag along. One of the tasks I was given was to excavate around a partially exposed skull. Turns out that this particular site was an old (1905 was the date of the pennys in the skull) cemetary. I was able to find the outline of the coffin and a few nails as well on the site. One of the other interesting things was a femor ravaged by syphillus was found at another site.
PS - this event has nothing to do with my user name…go figure.
When I was in graduate school in neuroscience, I had a large bucket of human brains next to my desk. I used to pick them up and play with them whenever I wanted. We used them for demonstration purposes often for undergraduate psychology classes. A little known fact is that real human brains will attract more enthusiastic people, male and female, than cute puppies will. Almost all students love to hold them and stare at them well after class is over.
I watched doctors do two C-sections up close and personal on my wife. They put a screen up but I really wanted to see everything and they let me. My wife has never seen most of her major organs exposed but I have.
I didn’t know you knew Henry Kissinger. 
For me, out of a couple of choices, the most esoteric would probably be playing elephant polo.
I hung out with Aerosmith while they were visiting my neighbor.
I’ve handled 60,000 year old stone tools at Isimila in Tanzania. I just about had a heart attack when the guide told me to go ahead and take one home. Errr, thanks but no thanks. I’ll leave it for another 60,000 years please. Since then, I hear that security has been stepped up a bit.
Not so rare but still amazing. I sat in the premium seats at the stadium at Delphi, in Greece. Coming from a land where 200 year old houses are old, sitting there and trying to imagine who else might have was mind-blowing.
I have:
-talked briefly with David Sanborn while our saxophones were being repaired
-had lunch with James “Dano” MacArthur at (his adoptive mom’s) Helen Hayes’ house, Pretty Penny, and swum in his pool
-petted a ray at the Monterey Aquarium
-played two carillons without ever taking a lesson
-played a contrabass saxophone, 6’6" tall
I should have known that here on the Dope someone else would beat me to this. I’ve held 4 live American Bald Eagles (not all at once). One of them was handled a lot due to health issues needing frequent treatment. At this sanctuary this was unusual since volunteers were not allowed to handle raptors, let alone large raptors, but I was an exception since I had been there a while. We did not have enough staff to have 3 people per eagle so it was either just me or me and one other person holding the bird. Fortunately we all managed to remain intact.
I was also chased by a booby, Blue-footed that is. Very unusual since he was way off course and we rarely see them around here. He was uninjured and just exhausted but not too tired to chase me around the room. He had no fear of humans since he rarely encountered them.
I own a couple of books of which there are no copies listed in WorldCat (mostly esoteric tailoring and sewing books in foreign languages).
When I was about 13 my mother and I walked from Puerto Vallarta to Talpa de Allende (about 30 miles as the crow flies, a bit longer winding through the mountain passes) with a neighbor’s family to see the statue of the Virgin Mary made of chicle (this was back in the late 80’s and Talpa was a minute flyspeck of a town with no real roads; judging from the Google Maps image it’s grown a lot since). It took five days; we had several small children in the group and didn’t make very good time. We mostly slept on people’s porches (the family had been doing this every year, so they knew the families along the route). Mom and I cheated and hitchhiked back (very unpious).
I can perform brain surgery on mice (and have them survive).
JRB
It’s because they look so cute doing tricks.
I smoked a joint with the Blues Brothers.
Well, they smoked, I just watched and chatted with them. It was just the 3 of us in an alley. They were very polite.
There’s a good chance you knew my great uncle who was in the Old Guard at that time.
Sorry- it was a Nobel in chemistry… just as icky as Kissinger would have been, though!
Well, that eliminates my second guess: Desmond Tutu.
[ul][]I worked with Dr. Lou Herman and graduate students at Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory performing intelligence testing on the dolphins Akeakamai, Phoenix, Elele, and Hiapo. They were very smart, fun, and lively.[]Swapped seats on a plane with Jean-Claude van Damme, talked with him, and got to introduce him to my fiancé when we landed. She didn’t believe it was him at first.[]I toured a Concorde. It’s smaller than you’d think.[]I walked around a DC-10 being reoutfitted from being a cattle carrier. It’s huge without the walls and floor.[/ul]
Ok, in 1974 I took a walk from Carson City, Nv. heading to Lake Havasu, Az. with a cantankerous (sp?) donkey named Henry and two Washoe/Paiute indians who showed me some cool ways of living off the land.
In 1976 went with a girl friend who sold some weed to the Kingston Trio when they were playing in Reno.
My band opened for the Temptations, the Shirelles, the Diamonds, Freddie Fender ( who used my brother’s trailer for a dressing room ) and the Surfaris, who needed to use my Fender Twin Reverb and never thanked me for it. Actually, all the members of the Surfaris were kinda egotistical jerks.
The only one I can think of, that I can speak of, is being called in by police officers to pick a lock after rapelling down the side of a building. (I’ve worked under a lock-smith as an assistant for two months and one of the police officers knew me by name and knew that I lockpicked at a hobby level. He had my phone number and knew I lived close by. The lock was an old-styled one at a outside door facing a dock three floors above the sea, where there had once been a balcony. They had reason to suspect a shipment of drugs was being stored there and were having problems with the front door.)
OK, I have a fresh-hatched new one: I just watched a movie with R. Lee Ermey (he’s local). OK, not with, exactly, but we were in the same movie theater watching a matinee of Hellboy 2.
Of course there was some jerk in there texting in the middle of the movie; I think I’d have given my eyeteeth if Mr. Ermey barked any old standard from *Full Metal Jacket *to the little maggot. Then that would win the thread, I think. But alas it’s only in my fantasies…
I’ve flown a B-17.
