stupid things you do when you're young . . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Out of a druken haze, I can vaguely remember something involving a 40ft tall inflatable King Kong and the roof of a two storey house.

I was visiting friends at Queens for the weekend. We were going from house party to house party drinking pint sized Dr. Peppers (basically a boiler maker with coke, beer and Amerato (sp)). Someone in the one of the houses in the student Ghetto had stolen this 40ft tall inflatable gorilla from a movie rental place in Toronto and had it laying on its back in his backyard. We showed up and proceeded to climb up on the roof of his house and launch ourselves onto its stomach. Gawd, it had to be about 30ft from the roof to the King Kong. We were doing backflips and other extremely stupid things.

The scary part was that I didn’t even think twice about it - just did it. I am so surprised I made it 32 years old.
Don’t even get me started about car-surfing - shudder

22

This will probably cost me my WWF membership, but ChiefWahoo, you rock!

Sure, not something to be REALLY proud of, and not something one would do whilst sober. Well, I wouldn’t…

But WHAT a great story. It reminds me of a story related to me by a friend of mine. It involves a bunch of young guys and gals, huge amounts of beer, a holiday chalet, a strangled duck and a broken window.

I’ll post it if people are up for more useless animal torture. FWIW: the duck was alive when it all started… well, I guess the “strangled” bit gave that away :wink:

23

Took the gunpowder from a dozen shotgun shells, the blasting powder from nearly 100 firecrackers, 6" of galvanized pile and proceeded to make one whopper of a bang. The really stupid part was having no piece of fuse longer than what came out of the firecrackers.
Here’s a winner – when I was 15, my parents moved into a house on a small canal. Rick, (a school buddy) lived over on the next canal. Well as it turned out, the first weekend we were in the new house was Mother’s Day. Rick came over in his 16’ aluminum boat to welcome us to the neighborhood. We grabbed my kid brother and the three of us took off to “bring Mom an alligator for Mother’s Day”. Two hours later, we had just gotten a 3 footer into the boat when my dad drove up in his boat.

Needless to say, we didn’t get to bring it home.
Can I mention my first marriage as a really impressive score on the “Exactly what were you using those brain cells for?”-o-meter.

SouthernStyle

24

Coldy I can’t wait to hear it!

Not that I condone animal cruelty, I really am against it.

25

Let’s see…

I got kicked out of The Girl Scouts, does that count?

A tattoo.

A pierced belly-button.

My first husband.

Becoming a dancer (topless) because same husband told me I had saggy tits and a droopy ass. I rose to the challenge and learned I wasn’t so droopy. :smiley:

I could go on and on.

26

The only one I care to talk about on an archived, fully searchable board is pretty pallid. (Except for getting married; got that one right, SouthernStyle; what was I thinking when I looked at the guy?!)

Very broke, needed money for grad school, so applied at a local amusement park for any work they had. They asked me if I could work plainclothes security.

I said yes! thinking I’d figure it out somehow!

For five months of the next four years I:

  • caught shoplifters–after only about 2 months of myopic confusion. (Note: some ran; some fought.)
  • staked out the bathroom in “Kiddie Kingdom” for the pervert with a diaper fetish.
  • chased “signal 11’s” through the woods; (translation: illegal entry, or folks who got carried away by lust and fornicated in the forest–in clear view of the log flume ride.)
  • helped bag the body of an employee killed by a lion.
  • served as "ride tester: i.e. they send employees through before they open. The Loopers are fun.
  • walked through the deserted amusement park looking for an escaped lion. (Yes–lion. Big kitty. Claws. Teeth.)

And did it all armed to the teeth with a radio that never worked and a whistle that could possibly have knocked someone out from the Brasso fumes.

Damn if it wasn’t fun, but I was insane to do it. BTW, some of my cohorts are now: a PhD in linguistics, a judge, 2 police lieutenants, a respected attorney and a music teacher.

And I ended up a librarian. No wonder.

Veb

27

Dirty trick. Very dirty trick.

Posting something like this and not even have your own picture on your home page…

:smiley:
SouthernStyle

28

But I’m gonna do it quickly, because it’s almost 5 am over here and I need to get up at about 9 am :smiley:

A friend of mine is from a very small village (say, 1000 people) in the east of the Netherlands. In this village, there is a group of guys (slightly younger than us) who all hang out together. They have done so since they were kids, and are a tight bunch. Every year, they go on holiday with all their respective girlfriends, making up a group of about 20 people or so. This particular year, they rented a holiday chalet in a CenterParks Park. This is basically a camp of holiday bungalows in the woods.

So, there they are, in the bungalow, saturday afternoon. There’s some serious drinking going on, the stereo’s at full volume, etcetera. One of the guys, who’s sitting in a chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling sliding terrace door, asks the guy next to the refriderator for a beer. Not being a sissy, this guy decides to THROW the beer at him. Since alcohol was involved, the hand-eye coordination may have been off a bit.

You guessed it, the bottle of beer never went near the guy asking for it, and sailed clear into the huge glass door, shattering it into thousands of pieces.

Ten seconds of complete silence ensued.

Then, one of the guys gets up and gets a broom. He sweeps up all the glass from the terrace, and throws it IN THE LIVINGROOM. Ignoring all the obvious “WTF are you doing?” questions, he walks out to the pond that lies behind the chalet. He picks up one of the (very tame) ducks that’s walking around, STRANGLES it ON THE SPOT and brings it back to the chalet. He leaves it in the broken window frame, and walks to the phone.

“Hello? Yeah, this is John of bungalow #12 here. One of them fucking ducks just went berserk and flew right into our window! It’s a miracle noone got injured, there’s glass all over the damn place! I want someone to come over and repair the damage AT ONCE!”

Not only was the window repaired, they also didn’t have to pay for the rent of the chalet. This, my children, has been a true lesson in “How to BullShit your Way Through Life” :smiley:

29

Please do, but next time provide photographic evidence (I’m a real skeptic! :D)

In my own case, I and several “friends” staged a realistic kidnapping of another of our friends. He and an accomplice were left blindfolded in a location fairly close to where we nabbed them. Fortunately our accomplice talked him out of calling the police.

I’ve felt guilty over that one ever since. What scared me was that it was so easy!

~~Baloo

30

OH MY GOD COLDFIRE!!!
That is one of the best stories I’ve ever heard. It sounds like a rendition of ‘Very Bad Things.’ If you haven’t seen it, rent it. It is definitly worth the few bucks.

31

Glad you liked it, tubagirl. Although it seems you and me are the only ones with a sense of humour here :wink:

32

I think it was a very noble thing that duck did.

This is why you should not be cruel to animals:

You will want them to be around when you need to kill them to get out of trouble.

33

And that’s a lesson I think we should all start teaching our children:

Drugs are bad
Don’t take candy from strangers
Be nice to animals, you may need to kill one later.

34

Boli:

Yep…Luther College. And my parents though they were sending me to a nice, Christian school…

35

Kind of a double whammy, huh?

Having visited Luther College I would guess that the education received by the parents was at least as great as that received by the student. :wink:

Now the challenge is to see if my family members in Rochester can identify Mishell.

SouthernStyle

36

Coldfire…ROTFLMAO!!! Great story.
I actually got scolded for laughing so hard here at work! What a way to brighten a Monday…Thanks.

37

Before my wife’s grandfather died five years ago (he was 105yo), he got to telling stories one day. He grew up in Bryan, Ohio (home of the Etch-a-sketch). He was in Toledo and decided to hop a train to get home. He wound up in Gary. All this happened back around the turn of the century. Funny how things never change.

38

Coldfire, GREAT story! That was quick thinking on your friends part. BTW, checkout my new sig. (thanks!)

39

Hmmm, stupid things done when a youth…

  1. My brothers and I tried to teach ourselves how knifefight…Still have a scar on my cheek from it, though it is faint.

  2. Used to make homemade explosives, none of this breaking open firecrackers, shells, or model rocket engines for us. We researched the materials, and started making it ourselves, using SolidOx oxidizing pellets for our oxidizer base. At first there wasn’t a problem, since my father supervised to make sure we didn’t do anything too stupid and were properly cautous. (He was young once too…and he made nitro when a kid.) The problem was a friend of ours who watched us one time and learned how to make it. A few months later he almost blew his hand off. He made a pipe bomb to explode in the back yard, and tried to drill the hold for the fuse after he put in the powder. The bomb went off (He was lucky he hadn’t sealed the bomb, otherwise he’d be dead.) My brother was nearby, and ran into the garage to see his friend holding his hand and screaming “I blew my fingers off!!!” Blood all over the garage. Turns out the hand had clenched and because of all the gore you couldn’t see the fingers. They spent 10 minutes looking for the fingers while the ambulance came.

  3. Catching blackwidows with bare hands when about 5. Still get heebies when I remember those years, also because we’d tease rattlers with sticks back then.

  4. Bottle rocket wars, shooting each other with bottle rockets and roman candles. Also using cherry bombs as grenades. Was fun, but got burned a few times.

40

It’s not really something I did directly, but something I convinced my dad to do.

My dad had a VW Thing, which is basically a fiberglass box dropped onto a modified Bug frame. Ugliest production car ever made, hands down. The car was supposed to be able to float (it had been designed as the German answer to the Jeep, and I guess the Germans thought that Jeeps should float); you took some plugs, and blocked the vent-holes in the fiberglass floorboards, and there was a tailpipe extender available so the exhaust didn’t get flooded.

Anyway, we were out at my uncle’s ranch one day, my Mom stayed at home, and my brother and I (about 10 and 7 years old at the time) begged Dad to take it out on the small duck pond my uncle had, about 100 feet wide and around 5 or 6 feet deep. My dad, who did way more stupid shit than I ever did, decided it would be a blast, and so he plugged up the holes, clamped on the extender, and he went full tilt into the pond. The momentum took us about 30 feet out, and then two problems arose.

  1. We realized we had no method of locomotion. No paddles, no current, nothing. Dad revved the engine to try and get some movement from the spinning wheels, but water got into something and stalled it.

  2. One of the plugs had come loose, and water started pouring in around our feet. Not a tragedy, since the pond was only about 4 or 5 feet deep where we were, we weren’t going to drown, and the top was off the car, but my Dad was terrified of losing this piece o’ shit car, so he jumps out, goes around front, with water up to his chin, and pushes. My brother and I were in the car having a ball, splashing each other while the water is coming up around our ankles, while my dad was letting loose the foulest string of obscenities I’ve ever heard in my life. He finally got the car to shallow enough water, and collapsed in a heap.

My uncle had watched the whole thing, and while he was luaghing his ass off at first, by the time we were on dry land, he was superpissed. The grease and oil from the undercarriage and engine compartment had caused a huge slick on his pond, which later killed all the fish, and drove off the ducks.

Dad then calls up Mom tells her the car crapped out, and has her drive out to pick us up. He never told her exactly what happened, but I did a couple years ago. After laughing hysterically, she said, “If I knew he was that stupid, I would have asked for more money in the divorce settlement!”