Once in the fifth grade, I got pissed off at something or other and tried to jump out of a third-floor window at school, hoping to kill myself. Somebody pulled me back before I could leap, though.
I was constantly getting in trouble for reading at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I had one of those lamps that clipped to the headboard and somehow decided that it would be a great idea to melt crayons by pressing them against the hot lightbulb. This would serve two purposes: to make the bulb look pretty like stained glass and to block out some of the light so that my mom couldn’t tell I was up late.
A few months later, when my mom was enforcing a mandatory room-cleaning, I got a loooong lecture about how crayon wax dripping down the lightbulb into the socket constituted a fire hazard and I could have burned down the house…
DarrenS you obviously didn’t read the one directly above you. Diving in the low end of the swimming pool from the roof is positively suicidal and very scarey.
However, among my many stupid things, the one I am currently thinking of happened when I was 4. We lived in a pleasant little housing community in a neighboring development from my cousin who was near my age. One day I asked my parents if I could go visit him and they told me not now. I showed them though. I got on my Green Machine big wheel and started riding out that way. I had to ride all the way out of the neighborhood, over a major city road, and about 6 more blocks to get to his house. I got there, my parents didn’t even know I was gone (my aunt and uncle were very confused when they saw I was alone) and played with my cousin until they came and picked me up. Obviously very angry. To this day, I have no idea how I knew how to get there. I guess I became cognizant of my surroundings early. To make it more confusing, I couldn’t tell right from left until I was 14 so I didn’t follow directions that way. I wouldn’t expect a 4 year old now to be able to find their way out of a neighborhood and into another without being able to read.
Hmmm, how about this young, dumb American smuggling an illegal alien across the Italian-French border?
This was in the early 1980’s. 20 years old, my buddy and I were travelling through Yurp, when we got into a train car with just us and an older French couple - all going from Italy to Monte Carlo, Monaco. Then, a vaguely non-descript Middle-eastern kid our age got in our car - didn’t speak English or French but made it clear he had no visa and wanted to hide. The four of us were like “sure - why not?” I mean, we were roughing it in our own way, why not help a fellow traveler? (what the heck the French couple was thinking, I have no idea).
So the guy gets under our seat - couldn’t be seen unless someone took off the cushions.
Then we stopped at the border - and the uniformed Italian police with machine guns got on. They check papers and left - ooooo, isn’t this fun? Aren’t we daring? We fed the guy a cookie or two through the seat cushion - he is a little freaked at us, going “no! no!” wanting to remain hidden.
Then the French police get on - barking orders and really scary.
Then we realize that the compartment next door, which had a non-French, non-U.S. family in it (I think they were Lebanese) was getting trashed - taken apart from head to foot.
Then another set of Italian police came through. We, by this time are freaked and imagining what it will be like to call our parents from jail.
Then another set of French police come through. Like the others, they check our papers, exchange pleasantries with the French couple and leave.
There is more time waiting as the police finish destroying the next compartment and then the train is authorized to leave. Were they looking for our guy? Probably…
We stop in Monte Carlo, the guy gets out, and we go our separate ways. Within 2 hours, we are walking past the famous Casino and see the guy in handcuffs up against a police car.
Can you say really, really stupid, or what? I don’t know if they specifically wanted that guy, or stopped him because they were doing a form of profiling, but they got somebody they wanted, that’s for sure. I am just glad they didn’t get me and my buddy in the process.
I was obsessed with recreating the climax of “Back to the Future” as a kid by running a paper clip into the motor of an R/C racer, then shooting it at a wire I had running into the prongs of an electrical socket. My theory was that the electrical charge should have been sufficient to shoot the R/C car somewhere into the future, because, as we all knew, there’d be 1.21 jigawatts of power in an electic socket.
I blew out the power in my house several times, actually. Typically, I was obsessed with dropping pennies onto loose electrical prongs.
I also burned a lot of stuff when I discovered that plastic action figures didn’t hold up too well on lamps.
Oh, and once I invented my own flamethrower by running a lighter in front of a can of spray paint. It’s a wonder I don’t have weird burn scars today. :smack:
I was walking home from junior high one day and arranged for my neighbor to call my house at a certain time. Just before he called, I filled the earpiece with shaving cream. I made sure my mother answered the phone.
Of course, since I was in school during the day, I didn’t know that my mother had her hair done that afternoon.
She was not a happy person.
I musta been about 14 or 15, riding around with some older friends in his 66 Chevelle. Darrell & I were sitting in the back, as we’re flying down these back country roads at night, (did I mention pot may have been involved) and we decided to change seats. From the outside. We crawled out the windows, still running down the road, and crawled over the top, and back inside. Sheesh. My kids ain’t never leaving the house.
Stunt One. My brother and I used to turn our bunkbeds into a fort. We could tuck blankets into the springs on the bottom of the upper bunk to make “rooms” in the lower bunk area, and we’d tie stuff to the rails and posts of the upper bunk for extra fun. Then we’d run around like maniacs. This game ended when I took a flying leap off the upper bunk, caught my foot on a bathrobe cord we were using as a “swinging vine,” and fell face-first into the floor, my body perfectly vertical at impact. Age: 7.
Stunt Two. We used to try to freak out neighborhood folks in a variety of ways. One of these involved perfecting the stunt of pretending to get knocked off a bicycle by a passing forearm. So we waited for somebody to drive into the neighborhood; then, as I rode my bike along a lawn, a friend dashed up to me and swatted me hard off the bike, sending me sprawling. All fake, but evidently convincing enough to make the driver screech to a halt and come running after us. He didn’t catch us. Age: 12.
Stunt Three. We had one of those plastic army figures with parachute pack – y’know, wad up the chute and cords, and fling the guy up into the air as hard as possible. The game turned into “hit the guy with rocks as he floats down.” And, of course, being stupid kids, we gathered in a circle surrounding the figure’s downward trajectory. You can see this coming, I know; when the first few kids threw their rocks at the guy, they continued past and over the heads of the kids on the other side of the circle. Me, I waited for a better angle, so basically the upshot is that I threw a fist-sized rock as hard as I could right into my brother’s face six or seven feet away on the opposite side of the circle. Six or seven stitches on the cheekbone.
Oops on that last one: Age 12.
A friend of mine lived on a farm with a big wheatfield. We were about age 6 and we had seen her father ‘burning the stubble’ - (I don’t know if it is called that in the US, but it is the practice of burning the stalks of the wheat once the wheat has been harvested). Unfortunately we didn’t notice that he did it AFTER the wheat was harvested, and we wanted to be helpful. We set fire to his unharvested wheatfield. The fire brigade had to be called, it took quite some time to control the fire, and we both felt the sting of a wooden spoon on our butts.
My brother and I convinced a friend of ours to jump off of a two story house onto a mound of dirt when we were ten. We told him it would break his fall, no big deal, and that he was a scaredy cat if he didn’t.
He broke his leg in two places. We’re probably lucky it wasn’t worse.
That and spray painting cows. We used to go sneaking into the cow fields at night and spray such witticisms as Fuck you! and Yummy, Steak! onto the cows sides. Until the owner burst out of the door with a shotgun and chased us through the woods.
When I was about 12, my friends and I snuck out of our houses and went on a jag of turning off people’s electricity in our neighborhood (a lot of houses had their main breaker on the outside). A few days later, the local weekly paper reported a “brownout” or somesuch…
I’m not sure why I did it, but when I was about 4 or 5 I ran right through a storm door - a door made of one sheet of glass. Through amazing luck I emerged with only a little cut on my hand.
I also locked myself in my toybox playing “Underdog”. The toybox was an old army footlocker. I climbed in it and the lid fell and the plate of the lock flipped over the thing that the lock goes through (hard to describe, but hopefully you know what I mean).
There was no danger as there were plenty of holes to breathe through, but it scared the hell out of me.
Had a science project that was an electromagnet; you know, wire wrapped around a wooden spool (I just realized how well that dates me–there are no wooden spools now) hooked up to a lantern battery. Well, if a 6V battery picks up paperclips, then house current should pull stuff from across the room, right?
Nah, it just sparks, blackens the wall, and trips the breaker.
Can’t remember how old we were - probably around 10 or so. We decided it would be funny to pretend that we were holding either end of a rope while crouching between cars on either side of our street. Cars would slow waaaaaay down as they came by. But somebody’s mother yelled at us, so we had to quit.
yeah, we were wild…
Oh geez, how did I forget this one?
As a teenager my friend and I used to hide behind cars and shoot paperclips off of rubber bands at cars that drove by. It was great to watch them put on the brakes and try and figure out where that SPANG came from.
We stopped when we hit another teenager’s car and he and his friends got out, chased us, and beat us up.
Yeah, buddy, we were almost as wild as FCM.
We would wait til dark and then fill black garbage bags with water and place them across the street.
We would also hide behind bushes and jump up and scream at cars passing by until one slammed on their brakes and came back after us.
I just got off the phone with my brother, and he reminded me of another. My grandparents lived at the top of a big hill and we used to fill garbage cans with crab apples from thier trees and the neighbors. At night, when we saw a car coming, we’d empty a couple of garbage cans full down the road and watch thier lights as they would dodge the crab apples on thier way up the hill. Pretty funny.
Hehe, I know exactly what you mean as I did the same thing with my Dad’s old army footlocker. Scary as hell for the five or so minutes that it took for someone to hear me yelling for help.
At the age of three I decided to check out the medicine cabinet while my Mom was vacuuming. I climbed into the bathroom sink and found my Dad’s razor refills…some 30 years later I still have a lovely “L” shaped scar on my finger.
Anyone remember those good old metal Tonka trucks? Boy those were fun. Especially the crane because it had that long string that you could hold on to and spin around in a circle while your 3 year old brother walks directly into its path. oops.
Probably the dumbest was when a friend and I had some smoke pots left over from Independance Day and we decided it would be fun to light them and roll them out into the road under oncomming traffic. We lit the first one and rolled it out there…it went right under the car and into a nice dry field across the street. Luckily the neighbor had a hose long enough to get over there and put it out before the fire got out of hand. The firefighters that showed up a bit later did a good job of scaring the hell out of us with a loooooong lecture.
When I was in kindergarten, the teachers had a hotplate set up in the room to heat their coffee on.
One of my little friends told me that when the eye of the hotplate was red that meant it was off. So, he dared me to go touch it. (did I mention that I was a bit gullible as a kid?)
Well, I did and needless to say burned a good part of skin off of my palm.
Also when I was in kindergarten…I lived way out in the country and rode the bus home from school. One day, we had a snowstorm and school let out a few hours early. The bus driver pulled up at the end of my driveway and noticed that my mom’s car was not there. He wanted to be sure she was there and I said, Oh yes, she’s home, knowing good and well that if her car wasn’t there, SHE wasn’t there. SO, the busdriver let me off in about 6 inches of snow and heavy snowfall.
My mom wasn’t home, of course, and I couldn’t get into the house. Our neighbor lived about 500 YARDS from our house but I didn’t like that neighbor. So what did I do? Walk a mile and a half across frozen fields in a near-blizzard to get to the other neighbor’s house because she always had Oreos in her kitchen.
sigh
It’s a miracle I got out of kindergarten alive and with all my limbs still intact.