Not sure of the gender ratio on this site, but I can only imagine that its mostly guys.
With that being said, what are some of the stupidest things you’ve done as a guy? You know, the kind of stuff that only a guy would think of because its super reckless and probably a good way to lower the male population.
I’ll go first.
When I was about 11 years old, my older brother and I, along with his friends decided to make our own high dive in our above ground pool. We took a wooden picnic table and its benches and stacked them up on the pool deck. On top of that we placed a 5ft stepladder. We then proceeded to jump into the 4ft deep water.
[As a poster]
And we actually have about an equal amount of female posters to male ones, so you might want to consider just making this a “what stupid thing have you done?” for anyone thread.
To get the thread on track: I once opened a screen door because I thought the person could hear me better with the door being opened. A screen door.
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I once (when I was about 5 or 6, I guess) tried to swap the beverages in two different cups by pouring both cups into each other at the same time. Mom let me go through with the experiment, but insisted that I at least do it over the kitchen sink.
I tried to build a Jacobs Ladder (The Frankenstein electrical zappy device) when I was a kid. My contraption involved an extension cord and a couple of wire hangers.
Thankfully, my mom came into my room right as I was about to plug the thing in. Talk about good timing!
I was living in Fort Walton Beach, FL. I lived within blocks of the beach on the Gulf of Mexico. There was a tropical storm rolling in and the waves were just beginning to get big and *fun - or so I thought. Being a bit of a thrill-seeker I decided to head for the beach. I was able to body-surf the first few waves without a problem. I was having a blast when suddenly I realized that the one coming next was much much larger and I knew instantly that I was in trouble. I ducked and tried to go under it as it approached me. It engulfed me and threw me around like a ragdoll. I must’ve done five or six involuntary somersaults under water. When the wave was done with me, it dumped me on the shore in knee deep water with a tweaked neck, coughing saltwater and sand burns on my extremities. Also with a new found respect for the sea. I could’ve died I tell ya!! :eek:
Back in college, a group of us were walking home one night after some heavy drinking, and I decided I’d climb the ladder running up a billboard post. I got about 2/3 up, realized what a knot head thing I was doing, and very nervously headed back down.
When I was a kid I lived in the area where outside of the city in the forests you could find a lot of ammo left over from WWII.
So - throwing a bunch of gun cartridges, including pretty big ones, in fires and watching the fire “dance” as they exploded. And, once, finding an unexploded mortar round and doing the same. That explosion was a lot more satisfying, with shrapnel whizzing around.
Doing some homemade explosives experiments - cleaning off a box-full-of match-heads into a big nut with a bolt half-way screwed into it, then screwing in another bolt from the other side, tightening it as much as I could, then throwing the combo against the wall. It had to hit just right to explode, but when it did, it was a loud bang with the bolt flying off at high speed.
Running around on Neva river’s ice when it was about 5 Celsius - with the ice way too thin, and falling through, then having to break through the ice all the way to the embankment, maybe 200 feet or so, then running home a km or so all wet and in freezing wind.
Jumping on freight trains as they were slowing on curves, then jumping off at next curve.
Back in my younger days I had this really cool trick for starting my Harley; I would run it a couple paces, pop the clutch while jumping on sidesaddle, swing my foot over and wrap the throttle and speed off. Did it a hundred times at least with no issue – until I was at this big event out Harrisburg. Ran a couple paces, popped the clutch, jumped on sidesaddle and fell right off the other side while the bike went on to t-bone a tree. :smack:
Playing flashlight tag and just generally monkeying around in abandoned slate and coal mines even after part of the roof collapsed right where we had been standing the day before.
Walking along train tracks. To this day I can walk for miles just on the rail without touching the ground (it’s not that hard, those rails aren’t that narrow, but longer distances require a bit of practice) and I can hop from rail to rail without touching the ground (a bit harder).
Being in the middle of a train trestle when a train was coming, and having to run full speed to the end of the trestle and dive down into the thickets to avoid getting smushed by the train. Not once, but twice. And we still kept walking across that trestle.
Climbing out to the edge of said train trestle, which meant standing on about a 4 inch lip of steel on the trestle’s side with roughly a thirty foot drop onto mostly solid rock below. Out of our little gang, I was the only one that did that one.
Hopping up onto one of the boxcar ladders and riding the train to school. We didn’t think about it much at the time, but one slip and one of us could have been nicknamed Stumpy for the rest of our life. One other kid and I did this. The rest thought (correctly) that it was too dangerous.
Walking on a frozen creek (about 50 feet across and probably 8 foot deep or so in the middle, so a fairly big creek - this was where two creeks came together to form one big one) even though the weather was warming up. We could see bubbles move under the ice as we walked, and the ice kept moving, cracking and threatening to break. Going through the ice out in the middle meant that you could potentially be swept under the ice, and you can drown before you manage to find a thin enough piece of ice to punch through again to breathe. Close to shore, the worst that would happen is that you would get soaked with ice cold water and would have to walk the mile or so distance home while dripping wet. You maybe get a mild case of hypothermia, but no risk of death. Still, not very smart.
You can detonate all five rolls in a box by dropping a big piece of wood on 'em real hard. Makes a whale of a bang!
My paw and I came close to blowing ourselves to hades with dynamite, but some small lingering shred of common sense led us to double-check the wiring before we clipped on to the detonator. Inches from being a big red smear.
I went cross-country once in a car that wasn’t made for it. Got hung up on a rock, which twisted the emergency-brake cable, so I could only drive really slowly, stopping regularly to let the e-b cool off.
Fired a model rocket at another kid’s kite. Seriously illegal, and darn rude. Didn’t hit the kite, but came close.
Tried to jump from one rock to another on Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. Missed, landed on my shins, hurt like hell.
Didn’t read all the requirements at college, missed getting my degree by one damn class. One effing damn class. Still cheesed, but it was my own dumbth.
Friends and were arguing about the result of having your foot run over. Some insisted it would be crushed and mangled like roadkill, I said it would be no problem. To prove my point I stuck my foot under the tire of a car rounding the corner where we were standing. It didn’t cause any problems at all.
Only later did I think, “What if they had been right?” I was just arrogantly assuming that I was correct. And if I had missed the timing by a split second and not had my foot flat it could have been pretty messy anyway.
I recall thinking soon afterwards how incredibly stupid it was to risk injury to prove some minor, inconsequential point but I didn’t really learn anything from it. I remained pretty reckless and impulsive.
Funny guess I would wager there are a lot more males than females who post to this site. Ive been reading and posting (just a little) for years and I can identify many more members as definitively male than the ones who are surely female. And the ones in between seem to be heavily slanted male.