Wow I kind of forgot about the beltway sniper. It happened really close to where I lived and it scared the crap out of us. They canceled field trips at my son’s school and we started going to obscure neighborhood gas stations and so on instead of the one we usually went to (which was right off of I-66, a couple of exits away from where one of the shootings was). It was a freaky time. I tagged a bunch of my LJ entries about it at the time.
Somebody once said that if you were at Woodstock, you don’t remember it. Not only was I NOT there, I didn’t even know what the hell it was until the album came out.
I did meet this one guy, Forest somethingorother, claimed he’d been part of every historic moment in the 1960s. Wotta’ bullshitter!
My grade school class did watch the Challenger explosion live. I remember being very confused about it, and my teacher rushing out of the room to talk to the principal. I had no idea that it had actually exploded, I thought the two white smoke trails were meant to happen. I’d never seen a takeoff before. My teacher came back in and explained things to us. I remember not really understanding even then, but knowing something Bad had happened.
My Grandmother saw the Challenger disaster live, and has the photographs to prove it. The photo was taken a little after the explosion, and shows the two smoke trails going off in different directions. She was in Apopka, FL (just north of Orlando), which is quite a distance from the launch site.
Until the day she died, she always teared up whenever it was mentioned.
I don’t have a first printing of TMNT #1. I do, however, have first printings of #4 and #7, plus a first printing of Raphael’s one-shot (the first ninja turtle solo comic), which includes the first appearance of Casey Jones. How’s that? (The turtles were very different back then. In Raphael’s book, the first three pages include Raph nearly killing Mike with a monkey wrench after sparring.)
I saw the second plane hit live on TV. The strange thing is, there was no reason why I should have. I was getting ready to go to class, and watching some morning TV, probably a “Saved By The Bell” rerun or some crap like that, and for some reason I turned to NBC, which I never did. They were showing the World Trade Center, and one tower was smoking, and they were speculating about an air traffic control problem. Right then, 8:03 AM local time, a second plane flew in from the right side of the screen, looking quite large. And it didn’t fly off the left side. It vanished behind the tower that was already burning, and a fireball came out to the left. Jesus, I thought, this is no air traffic control problem. So, I grabbed the little portable TV I’d bought a few years previous, plus some batteries, and got my ass to my 8:30 class. That little TV came in mighty handy that day.
Great point- I wonder the same thing myself.
Springsteen toured extensively in the early days, so it’s not big deal seeing him. I saw him at Union College in Schenectady (seating about 1000) in 1974 or so. Left before the encore because my date hated him. I soon broke up with her.
I did buy a Swamp Thing #1 when it came out and have some fairly valuable baseball cards. I also was in the stands when Roger Maris hit home run number 61*.
Funny! Did the Five Americans ever have a phase where they would be on the same bill as Led Zeppelin?
Sadly, I believer that thread is lost. 
Well, Jane’s Addiction had their big moment in 1990/91 when Ritual de lo Habitual (or whatever it was) his the mainstream charts. They were still touring then, although they finished off by headlining the first Lollapalooza. A good number of people would have seen them during what I would call the height of their popularity.
I don’t think seeing the challenger live is really that rare, particulary for people who were in school that day. They ushered us all into the gym, and had us watching live. I wouldn;t be surprised if about 1/3 of kids actually saw it.
My closest claim to infamy. I drove by Columbine(well not actually by it, I was on Bowles) in the early minutes of it, but didn’t know till later. It was a slow work day, so me and a couple guys decided to take an early lunch, ditch out and play golf. Ofter we got back, we were all prepared with excuses, but the whole office had basically shut down as a madhouse, since several people had kids there, and nobody even noticed we had been gone.
:eek:
You mean the guys who sang “Western Union”? 
Yes. Perhaps his most famous thread.
I think at last word he was a school principal somewhere.
I never saw the Challenger, as it happened two years before I was born. I did, however, see the towers burning on TV as I walked into 3rd(?) period shop; I did not understand what was going on, and I don’t really remember anything else about that day.
Heh, the DC Sniper. Going to HS in Fairfax, Va. at the time, I hardly could have avoided every possible story about it. I even got shot at several times (wait, wait, this is a thread about OTHER people who make dubious claims)… As to 9/11, I believe I missed the entire live part of the event, but remember quite vividly everything from when I first started hearing about it and the confusion about it up until we were watching the news for the rest of the day.
I met some salesman jerk one time who was trying to impress me for some reason. He saw I was weaning an Omega Speedmaster, like the Apollo watch. He claimed to have a large collection of watches and his best one that he kept in a bank box was the one Neil Armstrong actually wore to the moon.
Keep in mind that it would be MUCH harder to acquire Neil’s watch than you are probably thinking. Neil left his Omega in the lunar module which was crashed into the lunar surface. I’d bet it’s still there, not in the salesjerks bank box.
Ironically, the game wasn’t even shown in Buffalo, because it wasn’t a sell-out.
I saw the Challenger on TV because for some reason, I didn’t have school that day. I wasn’t sick, maybe it was one of those in-service days or something. I remember being surprised the next day when people had Space Shuttle jokes. I later learned people all over the country (I lived in NJ) knew those jokes in the same timeframe.
I missed 9/11. The plane hit at 4am or something Hawaii time. I didn’t want to wake up to see another car bomb. I did wake up when someone called and said a second plane hit, though!!
A friend of mine asked me to register here just to post in this thread, because he knew I had a story to share. 
I even had it all written out, because I knew I’d find a good place to tell it someday. So here we go!
Dan The Liar
I once knew a dude who I believe was an honest-to-gosh pathological liar.
Story’s like this. I worked in IT in Texas, and this guy named Dan had been hired as our DBA a few months before I arrived. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy, very gregarious and friendly. We hung out a couple of times after work, and he always had… stories to tell. Now taken one at a time, some of them were funny, some were strange, some seemed almost unbelievable, but hey, everyone’s had weird stuff happen to them, right?
But a couple of months in, it really started to hit me that it was just too much. In every conversation, he consistently had a story that topped whatever anyone else had just said, no matter the subject or situation. There were rarely obvious lies/contradictions in his stories, but they were often ridiculous to the point of incredibility, and sometimes you could almost see the gears turning in his head as he worked some of them out. And it never seemed like he could stop, even when he was talking about something small or we were expressing skepticism.
Eventually, I started keeping a log of the things he said to me or to other coworkers that sounded the most implausible. Here’s what’s in that log of about a year of conversations with the legendary Dan The Liar.
DAN THE LIAR LOVES ENTERTAINMENT
-On Kris Kross: When he was young, the two kids from Kris Kross used to ride bikes through his neighborhood.
-On Guns ‘n’ Roses: He saw them when they were a local band no one knew in California.
-On Mark Wahlberg: “The Wahlberg family is the reason MY family isn’t rich, and that’s all I’m gonna say.”
-On Garth Brooks: He performed at some bars as a Garth Brooks impersonator. (Now granted, he does share some similar physical features.)
-On Metallica: He was invited on Metallica’s tour bus and heard or was given demo CDs for their album before it was released (this was shared to trump my story about interviewing one of the guys from They Might Be Giants on their tour bus).
-On Star Wars toys: He had the infamous rocket-firing Boba Fett action figure when he was a kid. You know, the one that never made it past prototype stage.
-On James Cameron: He dated a girl whose mother worked for a movie studio. As such, he got to see special extended versions of Aliens and T2.
-On Dune: He was privileged enough to see a pre-release test screening of David Lynch’s Dune, a version that ran 6 hours PLUS an intermission. 6 hours, I asked? Absolutely. No question. I looked it up on the IMDB, and read aloud verbatim the Trivia point that says “the 6-hour version is an urban legend. In fact, only less than four hours of usable footage was actually shot.” Over the chuckles of my co-workers, Dan acknowledged that it might have been “more like four hours.”
DAN THE LIAR IS A GODDAMN GENIUS
-On Mathematics: He was reading at one and a half, multiplying at 3. He knew binary before regular numbers.
-On Calculus: One of his long-ago ancestors was a co-inventor of calculus.
-On NASA: He used to work for NASA. This was on his resume, and I’m sure there was some vetting process, so it may be true.
-On NASA II: Someone at NASA hooked a bunch of computer batteries together, and blew up a whole floor.
On NASA III: They were moving stuff, and a guy bent down and touched a live capacitor with his butt… he was blasted into the air and over a desk.
-On Biology: Here’s a big one. For his high school science project, he experimented on using microwaves to mutate fruit flies. Eventually, he was able to cross-breed the mutated flies enough that he created what consulting professors agreed was a new species. This was around the time of the first Gulf War, and apparently the government had been testing the use of microwaves as an offensive weapon at the time. As a result, government agents accosted him at the state science fair (he had, of course, won at his school and local competitions) and told him to immediately stop exhibiting and talking about the project, and he was subjected to a long interrogation about “what he knew.” He bowed out of the competitions, but continued to receive threats from the government for months. Eventually, the KGB got involved, since they monitored anything the US government was interested in. For the next five years, in fact, he was constantly shadowed by agents from both countries. Finally, the US lost interest, as he stayed away from scientific experimentation. However, the KGB still followed him, until he went on a camping trip in the woods, and was confronted by a KGB agent waving a gun, and…
DAN THE LIAR IS A KUNG-FU MASTER BADASS
-On Happy Endings: He killed the KGB agent with his bare hands.
-On Karate: He studied with a Shaolin master. That’s how he learned all his sweet moves.
-On Being Cool, And By Cool I Mean Totally Sweet: During the post-Rodney King LA Riots, three or four guys jumped him. He totally flipped out and killed them.
-On Gunplay: He shot up his ex-girlfriend’s car with a 9MM.
-On Family Trees: His last name marks him as a descendent of Danish royalty. Okay, that could be possible.
-On Swordplay: A carful of teens tried to run him off the road. He forced them over, got out of his car, drew a two-handed sword he’d purchased for use at a Renaissance Faire, and stabbed straight through the car’s engine block.
L.L. DAN T.L.
-On Nuns: He chatted with a girl online and “caused her to leave the convent,” and she would have moved here except she wanted to go to law school.
-On Speeding Tickets: He got into a high-speed chase with his ex-girlfriend on the interstate. A cop pulled him over. He told the officer he was being chased by his armed ex-girlfriend, and the cop told him to “floor it!”
-On Strippers: He’s dated too many strippers to count.
-On Bastards: While working for us, he found out he has a bastard son, from some ex-girlfriend or something.
-On Prostitution: He was PAID to have sex with some married chick, because she and her husband couldn’t conceive.
On Star-Crossed Love: He was dating a smokin’ hot model. While she was on assignment in Venice, she was murdered. The cops believe it to have been the work of a serial killer. It’s true—Dan even showed me an inkjet printout of a photograph of a girl in a swimsuit.
DAN THE LIAR APPARENTLY INSPIRED COMMON JOKES & HACKNEYED SITCOM PLOTS
-On Horses: “Never ride a mare in season,” he said. It seems a male horse tried to mount his mare while he was on it, ignoring him and making him hang by one stirrup and dragging him while they mated with wild abandon.
-On Gays: He was blocked from entering a Cracker Barrel by a bunch of gay protestors chanting “We Want Change,” so he reached into his pocket and chucked a bunch of coins at them. (My notes indicate that he and I had discussed the same issue of gays protesting the Cracker Barrel a week or so prior to this statement, which he made for the benefit of a group of people)
-On Gays II: “Never say, ‘Chill out, baby!’ to a militant black lesbian, take it from me!” This was more-or-less apropos of nothing, to a group of IT people, and we did NOT ask for clarification.
-On Transvestite Hookers: Two friends of his went to Tijuana, and ended up in separate rooms in a brothel with two prostitutes. One of them realized his “girl” was a dude, and bolted out of the room to warn his friend. He banged on the door furiously, but his friend’s response was, “just give me five more minutes…”
-(As Seen) On The Money Pit?: He stayed in a really seedy motel this one time. When he tried to turn on the shower, he heard loud gurgling noises, the head trembled so much it had chipped away at the tile, and eventually it spat out putrid, murky brown water. (Then Tom Hanks and Shelley Long bought the place)
-(As Seen) On Soul Man?: His distant cousin from South Africa applied for an African-American scholarship, and made it to the finals of the selection process. When he showed up for the interview, and revealed himself as an obviously white guy, he was summarily rejected.
-(As Seen) On Saved By The Bell?: In high school, he and his friends made a program that looked like a virus, but wasn’t. They put it on the computer of a teacher who was famous for never giving As. But, upon realizing his computer was infected, the teacher proclaimed he’d give an A to whoever could remove the virus! At that point, I expressed profound complete disbelief in the whole story. I was told that the reason we “don’t hang out anymore” was because I’m “too judgemental.” I did not disagree.
SOMETIMES JUST PLAIN WEIRD STUFF HAPPENS TO DAN THE LIAR
-On Boating: He and his friends were enjoying a ride out on the water, when they got too close to a drug-running speedboat and were shot at.
-On Being A Sharp-Dressed Man: He went to a local club/bar wearing a suit, and got mostly quizzical looks… except for one guy, who asked him if he had any cocaine.
-On Parties: Despite having no discernible friends, he had plans to go to a party on December 11. (No, that wouldn’t usually be cause for suspicion, but after everything else…)
-On Pizza: He worked with the inventor of the stuffed crust pizza.
-On His Brief Career As A Carpenter: A guy got his finger cut off while they were making cabinets. Dan found it in the pile of sawdust, they put it in a Coke to preserve it and tied a string around the guy’s stump to make sure he made it to the hospital. He did, and he’s better now.
-On Shop Class: A guy was chainsawing a board, and the saw hit a knot, bounced up and nearly split his face in half. He had to have major plastic surgery. Dan’s yearbook has a photo showing the damage! Sadly, he doesn’t know if the book’s at his house, or his parents’ house, or in storage, but either way he can’t show it to me.
DAN THE LIAR SOMETIMES MAKES MISTAKES
-On Cars: At one point, he told a story about his beloved Chevy Blazer dying because it began spewing water out of its exhaust pipe. At another, he sank it in a 20-foot puddle. Another time, he said he’d never destroyed a car, they’ve all just stopped running. Shouldn’t spewing water, or sinking one into a puddle, count?
-On Apartments: He almost lived in my apartment complex. Yet he never mentioned that when I first told him where I lived. It just sort of popped out one day, after I’d known him for months.
-On Parks: The first real confirmation in my mind that he was a Liar came when we were walking through a park near work. He told me about a friend of his, who’d been roller-blading down a trail. Unbeknownst to her, the park service had put up invisible trip-wires on the trail to discourage skaters, but hadn’t put up warning signs. She was knocked down and injured. I asked many questions about this story as it was being told, because I’d recently begun becoming suspicious of him. In the beginning, he was emphatic that she hadn’t sued as a result of her injuries. A few minutes later, it was revealed that she HAD. When I pointed out the changed story, he said I hadn’t been listening closely enough.
That’s all I wrote down. Now like I said, I’m sure some of this is true. Some of it’s not even that weird without the context of the rest, and everyone’s got some amazing-but-true stories in their life. But when you line it all up like this… man, it sure does look like Dan The Liar earned his nickname, doesn’t it?
I saw it live as a school child. It was very very upsetting to me. At that point, it was my ambition to become an astronaut (I was already a space nerd) and I was completely devastated. I had to be send t home for the day because I couldn’t stop crying.