Stupid and Dangerous Things that Boys Do.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Hmmm. When I was a boy of perhaps 3-5, I used to bodysurf down the basement steps. They were wooden, and painted and very smooth. I would get laying down in the hallway, grasp the stairs and yank forwards in what can only be described as the perfect Olympic Luge Team Launch posture.

I’d slip down on my belly, hands in front of me till I got to the cement floor, then I’d slide off the stairs. Just fine. Till one day I didn’t reach properly and slammed my head into the cement floor, cutting into my head and taking a dozen stitches.

This did not cure me of this hobby, of course. :smiley:

In elementary school, I would climb the apple trees during the height of season and throw bee-infested apples at my pals.

Pern ( his real name…) and I used to climb jungle gyms a lot. We were swinging from our knees upside down and he slipped, falling straight down onto a curved section. He hit top of head first. He awoke with absolute amnesia…

…which lasted months. He and I weren’t allowed to play together again. I still swung upside down a lot, needless to say. :rolleyes:
Ran fast off the end of a diving board at the age of 12 or so. Slammed into the pool edging, tearing open my scalp and gaining a concussion in the process. I was pulled out of the pool.

Cartooniverse

42

Things I remember as a youth…hmm…

1)Shooting one of my brothers in the back of the head with a lever-action pellet rifle from about 10 yards. He was wearing one of those floppy leather hats that were prelevant in the 70’s. Said it didn’t hurt, do it again. I pumped it up twice as much, moved a little closer and shot him. It must have been enough because he dropped screaming. Once Mom found out we never saw that pellet rifle again.

2)While working on a model airplane I had made a mistake in the glue up of the wings. I tried to cut it apart by grabing it in the middle and pulling the razor knife towards me. It slipped and hit my wrist so hard that I still have the point in one of the small bones in my wrist.

And just to prove that boys grow up to be men that do stupid things:

Less than a year ago I got a wild hair and rode my motorcycle from Temple to Waco on I35 at about 110-120mph…in heavy traffic. I remember switching lanes at so high a speed that I had to counter-steer to make the slot and almost scraping my knuckles on the trailer doors of more than one truck.

43

Just out of curiosity, is your son a member of the “jackass” group? :slight_smile:

44

I grew up in rural New Jersey and being a small 50-house community in the woods, by a lake, there was lots of opportunity to avoid adult supervision. Here is a sampling:

Age 5 - While pretending to drive mom’s car knocked it out of gear and it rolled back down the driveway across the street and hit the fence on the other side. No casualties.
Age 6 – Attempted to jump a sled off an 8-foot high retaining wall to the next lower level, face plant.
Age 8 – Neighborhood Wars - wooden spears, home made bows and arrows, rocks, trip wires. No one lost an eye, but lots of small injuries.
Age 9 – Attempt to use the rope swing at the lake during the winter to jump while wearing ice skates. Ice is really hard.
Age 7-10 Evil Knievel – A group of 6 of us would jump anything anytime from almost any height. Too many face plants and road rashes to list.

Moved to the City
Age 10 – Riding bike in the rain and not obeying traffic laws – Hit by car, bike trashed, lucky there were no major injuries or broken bones.
Age 11 – Discovered lighter fluid – Burning hands look really cool, until you use too much lighter fluid. Then they look and feel pretty HOT.

Moved to Colorado
Age 13 – 19: Experimented burning and blowing up things with various flammable liquids and powders. Made cannons, bombs, etc… Luckily none of us were hurt.
Age 19-24: Fireworks Wars – Shooting Bottle rockets and roman candles are each other at a distance of 30-40 feet. Bottle rocket wars while driving down the highway.
Age 20 Ski Jumping – Tried a back flip and only made it half way. Did an unintentional half twist in the air and did a face plant that gave me a bloody nose and left red on the slopes. I got 9s and 10s from the people on the lift.

I won’t even go near the stupidity that occurred while under the influence of chemicals. It still amazes me that I survived. It is interesting how aging, marriage and children can change you. I now tell my kids to be careful, don’t do this because it’s dangerous, etc… I sound a lot like my parents did.

45

My brother:

Our house had two stories. Jeremy and his friend Michael took every pillow in the house, piled them all in the entry hall and jumped off the second-floor landing. Repeatedly. Many times. It was dangerous because jumping from the second floor onto the first isn’t the world’s safest thing to do, but I’m not sure it qualifies as stupid because they did have the pillows to cushion the fall.

Jeremy is a baseball fan, and played in the youth league. He used to practice by throwing the ball to himself. In the house. Suffice it to say, the ball found a large plate-glass picture window, and went through it. He had a hell of a time explaining THAT one to Mom and Dad. Now, if you tell him not to play ball in the house, he gets this LOOK on his face.

My brother is now 29 and a lawyer.

Aaron is showing signs of this kind of behavior. I am trembling in fear.

Robin

46

Personal favorites…

  1. discovered that the butane bottle which my mother used to refill her lighter could be manipulated to spray when not connected to the lighter. Sprayed butane all over our stainless steel sink, and then lit it to see the flames. Except once, I sprayed too much butane, which had the interesting result of exploding in a giant blue flash and burning off my eyebrows.

  2. the ever popular tennis ball cannon- more lighter fluid, and several beer cans duct taped together, all with the ends cut out save the bottom one. Poke a hole in the side of the bottom one, fill with an inch or two of lighter fluid, drop tennis ball into the top, light lighter fluid, and send tennis ball away. Far, far away. Usually, on fire.

  3. draino bombs… I’m not gonna describe these, except to say that lye burns when it splashes on you.

  4. sledding off the roof of a friend’s house, onto the garage whump and then onto the ground whump.

It’s amazing I am alive.

47

I have 3 small boys and ya’ll are gonna give me nightmares!

48

Those lawsuits against Jackass always entertain me. Yeah, I understand, your kid would never have done something stupid to himself if he hadn’t seen an idea for how to do something stupid to himself on TV. :rolleyes:

49

I got incredibly wasted last spring at a Tool concert. On the way home I decided it would be a good idea to take off all my clothes and climb on top of my car. (I wasn’t driving) I ended up face down with my twig and berries right in front of the driver. He turned on the windshield wipers. :eek:

50

Gravity?

51

Styrofoam you say? We always used Petrolium Jelly. We MUST get together sometime and swap recipes over tea. :smiley:

Heck, I forgot to include chemical reactions. I guess my brain filed them under “constructive experimentation”

Vinegar and baking soda anyone? Best in tightly closed babyfood jars.

Just like Blanx, I too experimented with a form of lye bomb, although it sound that ours was slightly more planned out. This one is a recipe I wish I could remember, but I think it was lye, vinegar, and something else. The reaction was done in a glass gallon vinegar bottle, so the gas it created came out in a low pressure out of a narrow opening. Just low enough to say, fill a plastic garbage bag. The resulting zepplin had an only slightly positive bouyancy. So on a calm day, with a long enough wick…

The last time we did it was a windy day. I still remember staring, transfixed, trying to will the zepplin off that man’s roof. Judging by how fast he ran out of his house, he thought a plane had crashed. It was more of a WOOF than a BOOM. But as far as woofs go, it was more a sheppard than a schnauzer. :smiley:

When I was cleaning my room out in my early teens, I found my long neglected chemistry set. Why just throw it out, when you can add all the chemicals together first? The resulting fire left such a toxic cloud I had to leave my window open for the rest of the day, in the middle of winter. The spot where it landed when I threw it out the window did not grow grass for years.

52

tinfoil, methinks…

53

Tinfoil and drano bombs, Tennis balls full of match heads, Live rounds of 22LR thrown into various fires, broken finger from trying to ride my bike up a tree, broken femur from falling out of a dead tree, numerous stitches, bruises, broken fingers and toes from all sorts of ignorant activity and disagreements with gravity…

I had a full childhood :slight_smile:

54

oh my, where to begin. Pyromania? Suuure. We had our very own covered burn-pit back in the woods. About 10x10x6 feet deep, covered with plywood and dirt. We’d fill it completely with wadded up newspaper and light it on fire. Then fun with gasoline and road flares. Nothing like writing your name in gas, lighting it with a road flare and having your wussy friend get scared, run away, kicking over the 5 gallon gas can. Homemade napalm was huuge fun! Especially when we mixed bits of cut up magnesium tape in with it. Boiling parafin? done that. I don’t think I had fingerprints for a couple of years when I was in middle school. Bottle rocket wars and assaults on neighbor’s houses were a staple of our summers. And the home made bazooka for firing estes rocket engines was very, very good.
when we tired of these sports there were always the wrist rocket slingshot wars (there’s still a penny imbedded in my brother’s room at my parent’s house), and jumping out of pine trees (if you do it right the branches slow your fall so you don’t kill yourself).
Aaaah youth. If my son tries any of these he’ll be grounded until he’s 18, however.

55

You don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, do you? :wink:

Robin

56

AWW MAN! It’s exam week at NMU and what do good ROTC cadets do instead of studying? Fight with homemade pugil sitcks in the hallways and repel out the dorm windows. Unfortunately, our dorms are only three stories high. Also, people can hear you when you run across the roof. We were going to repel off a five story parking structure but we noticed the security cameras too late and the guy was already calling for backup.

We snuck out one night and went sledding on the local ski hill. Not all that dangerous, but appearantly its illegal.

We took some letters off one of those gas station signs. The police informed us that that was grand larceny.

We took a canoe with a hole in the bottom out on Lake Superior to paint the rock…we made it back okay but again, illegal.

Threw apples at cars driving on the highway down the hill from my house. The POPO came and paid us a visit after we nailed a pickup truck.

We chased a porcupine while drunk…jumping through fires…shooting at each other with potato cannons…bottle rocket wars…molotovs…jumping off the roof…whipping shitties…compression bombs

we’d race to and from football practice. my friend nearly took out a stop sign and a tree and 90 in a residencial area isnt all that smart.

Used to slid down the stairs on matresses with my brother

I nearly killed my brother while throwing an ice pick like a spear…he only got stiches and lost a few baby teeth.

My suitemate borrowed my kevlar helmet and ran head first into the metal door. He was sober at the time.

we got drunk and ran naked the first night of snow as part of a house tradition… lots of people wiht cameras, and it was icy. I hope those pictures dont turn up whe i make a run at the presidency.:smiley:

I went down the steepest hill in my neighborhood on one of those bike you have to pedal backwards to stop…face plant on the asphalt.

we used to have slam dunk contests by jumping off stacked milk crates.

We lost heat at the dorm a while back, so my roomie and i set out floor and garbage cans on fire with gel hand disinfectant. We picked up the fire and played catch…also if you put lighter fluid in a pop can, shake it around, then hold a lighter to the mouth of the can you get a cool jet of flame…not good propelant though, if you invert the can and light the residue it just shakes.

we used to get our big wheels goin really fast then whip shitties… first one to roll over lost. i also practiced bailing off of my bike at high speeds. i remember throwing crab apples at each other while riding bikes.

i stuck a baseball card in ths disk drive of a computer back in the day

all out shoe fights!

my dad used to light spiders on fire and drop them into cups of gasoline.

I backed into the Major one time…dangerous cuz his wife is a bitch, and stupid because i didnt wipe the snow off my windows.

And the Army lets me play with guns and explosives every now and again.

57

Hmm, let’s see…

sturm the tyke:
I once walked back and forth along a brick wall, running my finger along the mortar lines. It felt kinda weird and funny until I noticed my finger was a bloody mess. Then it hurt.

My mom made me a Superman costume, so I put it on and contemplated jumping out a 2nd story window. Good sense prevailed however - well, mostly my mom saw me standing there mulling it over and yanked me away.

I put a staple through my finger once.

sturm in elementary school:
jumped out of a tree with an umbrella after watching Mary Poppins
climbed on the school roof to throw water balloons and scavenge stuff
tried to pull a piece of string off my bike wheel while I was riding it (I have a nice scar from that one)
tried to start a fire by putting two paper clips in an extension cord with a piece of paper between, then plugging it in
rode my bike down the front stairs at the school, that let out onto the street
tried flying a kite while riding my bike
played bike tag; involves throwing a tennis ball while pedaling and manuvering at full speed
jumped off a dresser onto a bed. My dad wasn’t too pleased when I bent the frame.

sturm in junior high:
I was too busy avoiding getting my ass kicked at or around school to get into trouble on my own.

sturm in high school:
walked across a partially completed freeway overpass
played tag on the school roof, jumping between buildings
climbed between cars on a stopped train, sometimes while carrying my bike
explored an abandoned, crumbling factory
blew the fuses at school by plugging in a cord with exposed, crossed wires; got suspended for a couple days
cut my wrist while screwing around with my mom’s rotary cutting wheel
aerosol can + lighter = flamethrower
burned the hair off my arm by putting white gas on a campfire