What is the coolest thing that someone you know has done that you wish you could do?
It could be anything. Climbing Everest, finding a cure for a disease or just plain neat.
Mine falls into the just plain neat catagory, with a nod to it’s really important. My Dad ran an F-4 Phantom into a wall to test the wall a long time a go. I was about 17 at the time and he gave me a manila envolope and said I might find the stuff interesting. Inside there were 9 shots of this jet ramming into a wall at ~580 MPH. I asked my Dad what the pictures were from and he told me that he set up the test to get data in case a jet hit a nuclear power plant containment dome. (Note, this test was run in the mid to late '80’s)
It was truely cool. Regrettably I lost the pictures but I did find a slow-mo version of the video a while ago. Here is a link
My dad once bought trophies for the boys on the little league team who didn’t get one. The coach was an ass and only gave trophies to the boys who made All-Star. I was about nine, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
My dad once ran a sub 4 minute mile. He’s a stud. Oh and a friend of mine threw a Mary-kate and Ashley Olsen party last week for their 16th birthday, with friends who dressed up like the twins. We even had their horrible CD playing. Then we imagined how all the pedophiles were counting down the days until they were “legal.”
back in the pre-PC, tree-hugger days, this was probably considered pretty cool, but im sure im gonna get a bunch of negitive feedback now about it. My old man flew fighters and told me a story of how one time he flew thru the Grand Canyon about 20 over the surface of the river. Had to go knive-edge in several places or risk tearing off the wings. I always thought that was kinda cool.
all my friends are boring and while i was thinking of an answer for this, drew a blank or remembered stuff that i did! I skied the worlds highest permanently established “ski area” (hah!) at over 5000m, been lots of cool places and stuff. (got to go to work now)
Granted the “coolness” of this is debatable, and the OP says it should be something you wish you could do and I was never so motivated, however, I think it’s pretty dang interesting.
Drafted and sent to Vietnam very much against his will, he sneaked off and defected to the enemy. He was shuttled off to one of the Soviet’s allies (right now I can’t remember which one) and eventually ended up in the USSR, where they considered him a hero of sorts. (Quite the propaganda coup to have a U.S. solider defect. )
Eventually he ended up waaaaay north. Eventually he ended up in Finland where his wife joined him. They then moved to Canada and returned to the U.S. when the U.S. government declared an amnesty to draft dodgers and the like. He was thoroughly questioned by the CIA and various “men in black” upon his return however.
Now he lives in England.
A lot of people wish he’d put his adventures in writing because they are mind-bogglingly fascinating.
When we were kids, my dad’s company had the company picnic at the boss’s house, which was across the street from his club. He let all the kids go swimming at the club. My dad wouldn’t let us because they wouldn’t allow blacks or jews to swim there. Best lesson of my life.
A close friend (who was best man at my wedding) drove a car through a hail of bullets to rescue two mates he was on holiday with when they were attacked by gypsies in southern France both of his friends sustained serious gunshot wounds (but he got them quickly to a hospital and they both eventually made a full recovery). I saw a photo of the car; it looked like a sieve.
Hmmm…there are many kinds of cool I can think of, but the two things that pop into my mind are:
My dad was a diplomat and negotiator (he was a National Security Advisor) at Camp David with Carter, and he wrote up a lot of the agreement. I think that is cool in a way such that I have huge amounts of respect and admiration for him.
A neighbor of mine used to do deep-sea dives, and examine creatures underwater like 6-foot crabs and those really, really weird deepwater creatures. I wanna do that–but I’d be so scared!
My ex-boss is a friend of my brother…one day mom and I (mom is my bro’s step-mother) were talking about him (boss), and how good a person he was. Then mom told me a this story:
About a decade earlier, when my brother and boss were still in high school, my boss’s father died leaving a widow and four teenaged boys. My brother has a heart of gold, always has, and he asked his mom to become friends with the widow, and help them…and more, to treat his friend as another son. His mom of course couldn’t say no to such a request…and so be it, ever since then my bro’s mom has been keeping a watch on that family, and they all have become friends…oh yea, and some years after, the older brother drowned while on a vacation…again my bro’s mom was there to help them…
That is nothing outstanding, but it is neat, at least for me!
My cousin worked for the X-Files for several years (up until the last season) as an assistant to the producer (I’m not sure who, exactly, she mostly worked with). Never on set or anything really cool like that, though. Now that that job’s gone, she’s landed a new one working on the series Enterprise.
A priest friend of mine volunteered for an NIH AIDs vaccine study at Vanderbilt University. They wanted people that were celibate. My sister and I were inspired to do the same thing, so we both volunteered for a year of celibacy (not like we had any likely prospects anyway) and involved ourselves in the study. At the end of the study we found out she got the placebo and I got the vaccine. That was 13 years ago, and they told us they thought they’d have a workable vaccine in 10 years. It hasn’t happened yet.
As an interesting side note, at the picnic for study participents, I found out that of all the volunteers throughout the country, I had the strongest immune response to the vaccine. Pretty cool.
My father was the mid-upper gunner on Marauders training in Egypt in 1945. After training flights, they used to fly back to base and while over Cairo, open the bomb doors and take it turns to piss on the city.
Not to be rude but this one I’ll keep to myself. It actually isn’t a very interesting story at all. Lets just say I don’t start street fights with 5 guys with knives any more, and leave it at that.
My friend’s older brother was the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man. (Yes, in Ghostbusters.) He builds monsters and characters, and happened to build the suit to fit him, so he got to wear it in the movie.
