The "Share a Random Story From Your Life" Thread

One time, when I was about 4 or 5, I was in Hartz (now Big Bear) with my mom and dad. I was carrying a fountain drink around and for some reason, I decided that it needed to be launched across the store. I have no idea what compelled me to do that, as I was usually a very well behaved kid. But I took the drink and threw it over the aisles and heard it splat against a wall somewhere. I about died laughing. When my mom asked me why I did that, I told her dad taught me to do it.

I’ve always loved throwing things at other things. I about got my dad’s ass kicked once for doing it. He was driving and I was in the passenger seat, and for some reason there were tomatoes in the van. Of course, I launched one at an oncoming car, and they immediately turned around and followed us to a parking lot, where my dad had to apologize to these two guys. I was just sitting there cracking up. Ah, good times. I think I was around 12 then.

Oh, and once in high school, I was walking around the neighborhood with some friends, and we were throwing things at houses as we were wont to do. I had a whole pocket of Now and Laters (hard candies) that I launched at a house. It was great; for a few seconds, silence. Then: BOOM! BANG! KA-POW! - they all started hitting the roof at the same time. We all took off running and laughing, laughing and running, throwing eggs and mustard at things… Man, those were good times.

This happened a long time ago, when I was 12, so I may not be remembering it exactly correct. It’s so bizarre that I have doubts.

That summer, I was at Space Camp. The camp was a pretty neat experience, they let you go on various rides that simulate the things astronauts go through, and you get to do all kinds of space-related activities. One thing you do during the week is train for a mock mission. Our mock mission was a simple docking procedure, where the space shuttle was to dock with an orbiting space station. The group is split into three subgroups: the shuttle, mission control, and the space station.

I was made commander of the space station, with a crew of one boy and three girls. The way the mock missions worked was that everyone had a part to read from in a script, and in addition to reading the correct lines, you had to press the appropriate buttons and knobs on whatever control panel you had in front of you.

Up in the space station, there was an additional element of randomness. Around the station (a moderately sized room) were various dials representing things like the oxygen and CO2 levels. We had to pay attention to these dials, and make sure to attend to any danger that might arise. For example, if the oxygen level gets too low, we have to open the cupboard and grab a jug (oxygen tank) and insert it into another cupboard to refill the oxygen. It was a rather crude set-up that aimed to show how vigilant those on the space station must be at all times.

The godlike figure who was in control of all these dials was a guy who sat in a separate booth attached to the room. If he decided he wanted to test us, he’d press a button and drop the oxygen dial and wait for us to react. If we didn’t notice it, then he could walk up to one of the crew members and whisper “faint” and they’d have to pretend faint, which would undoubtedly get our attention that something was going on.

So that’s the setup. Our mission starts, and things go pretty well. Various little things go wrong but we’re quick to fix them. But once the shuttle gets into orbit, a glitch happens in the computer system and the shuttle refuses to dock. The shuttle’s stuck in limbo and no one’s really sure what’s going on. Then disaster strikes.

One disaster I didn’t mention before is micrometeorites. When the god guy in the booth wishes for a breach in the hull, he turns out all the lights except for the red emergency lights and sounds the alarm. This cues us to run into a small glass booth (airlock). Once the crew is secure, we have to go out and fix the holes (which are basically pictures of holes taped onto the wall by the guy). I take the other boy crew member, and we suit up (put on thick white jackets) and head out to fix the holes.

Now things start to get weird. As we’re working on the holes, we hear moaning. One of the girls has exited the airlock, sans spacesuit, and is slowly shambling around the perimeter of the station, arms out in front, moaning like a zombie. We try to stay focused on the task at hand, but then another one of the girls follows behind, prancing around repeatedly saying “I’m Wonder Woman! I’m Wonder Woman!” Finally the third girl joins the group with a chorus of “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” The trio walked in a line along the perimeter of the station repeating their catchphrases. So with the rest of our crew clearly insane, my partner and I begin to wonder if this mission is worth saving. Shortly after, the mission was aborted.

From what I can remember, apparently the control room guy told the girls to do those things, and they of course had to oblige. Was the mission so hopeless that he decided just to have a little fun, or was he trying to sabotage the mission for his own amusement? I’m still not really sure what happened that day, but it makes an amusing memory.

When I first began to date my current SO, he was pretty “traditional” and “vanilla” in the bedroom, so it became my goal to try and introduce him to a bit of kink, one step at a time. And I succeeded, somewhat, but one thing I could never make any progress with was anything anal, which I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past, but the idea of which he found very unappealing. Every once in a while I’d bring it up, laugh, resign myself to none of it, and that would be that. And our sex life wasn’t unsatisfying without it, so whatever.

Later on, the relationship went through a rocky period that seemingly only I was willing to acknowledge. I had some problems with how we were relating, he would get defensive if I tried to talk to him, and it just got worse. Finally, I became frustrated enough to temporarily break things off, for both of us to get some perspective, and we didn’t speak for a week or so.

When we did start talking again, he told me, “I was mystified. I went fishing, and I have to say that I stood there for hours, turning over in my mind what you could have possibly wanted or needed so badly that I wasn’t giving you.”

“And?” I asked, curious, “what did you come up with?”

Then he turned to me with this helpless, hangdog look on his face and blurted out, “Well, is it anal sex? Because… because I never said I wouldn’t!”

Bwahahaha! I cracked up until I couldn’t breathe. THAT’S what he concluded after wracking his brain for days? It might have been an assumption offensive in its sheer shallowness if it weren’t so damn funny.

“It is anal sex? Because I never said I wouldn’t!” is now an inside joke among my girlfriends, and has come to be our standard catch-phrase for when men seem oblivious about relationship disconnects despite our best loving attempts to address them.

In my previous life I was a first-level ISP support rep, working a 24 hour shift roster. My favourite part of the roster was graveyard shift (graves), when three people from the team that was rostered on nights (6pm-2am) would get to work 11pm to 7am.

That shift was great. After midnight, all team leaders and listeners had gone. So there were no calls being monitored. And unless something went really bad, the calls dropped off to about 1 or 2 an hour. So it was a doddle, plus you got double time. And you got to spend most of your shift watching TV or DVDs and browsing the 'net.

So this particular night, it’s me, Ando and Nella. Earlier in the night, whilst veryone was still there, we’d been amusing ourselves by turning on the “reader” software in Windows XP and typing in dirty words to notepad. But once everyone had left, we’d hooked up the Xbox to the TV in our section of the call centre, turned off the lights and were sat back watching the charming Period Drama “Hornblower” and making jokes about buggery. And drinking, for on this night, Ando and Nella had decided that working night shift was just too boring and everything would be much better with the application of vodka to orange juice. So we were chillin’, getting into the naval spirit and our PCs had locked themselves.

My last call had been about forty-five minutes before, and Ando’s had been not long after. So Nella was the next in line for a call, which dropped in about halfway through his second screwdriver. So he answers the call, turns around and realises his PC has locked. So he tries to unlock it. But unfortunately, he types his password in wrong. And being XP, with the sound still up from earlier in the evening, it makes a hugely loud “DONG” whenever he enters it wrong.

After about the third try (our PC guys hadn’t enabled 3-try lockout, you could try until you got it right, which was stupid), Ando and I were just about pissing ourselves laughing. I could hardly see straight anyway, when Ando suddenly calls out “Try HORNBLOWER!”. So then it is on. “Try HORNBLOWER” “Try BUGGERY!” “I think you said you set it to REAR ADMIRAL!”

In the end, Nella tells the customer that the network is down but we’re working on it and to try again in the morning. And he never brings vodka to work again :slight_smile:

A match made in heaven :slight_smile:

I remember when I was about 14 and my brother was 17. He was in trouble for something he did. It was so long ago now I can not remember what for.

I am sitting at the dining room table and my mother is yelling at him. The usual picture of the five foot two mom waving her finger and yelling at her six foot plus son. She is yelling and waving the finger…

Mom: And if you think you are going to get away with that you got another thing coming butter

Brother: ::smerk:::

Me: :::smerk::

Mom: ITS NOT FUNNY!

Brother: giggle :::smerk:::

Me: Teheeee ::::smerk:::

Mom: Damn it… :::smerk:::

My brother being the smart ass that he was knew he now had the upper hand. I mean what 17 year old would not take advantage of this situation.

Brother: butter butter butter

My mother and I both cracked up at this point. There was just no going back. He got away with whatever it was he did wrong.

My brother passed away many years ago but the butter story is still told to this day.

This is similar to something that happens frequently in our house:

Me: We haven’t seen (whoever) in a while; we should call and see about getting together.

Him: Uh huh.

3 days later:

Him: You know, we haven’t seen (whoever) in a while; we should give them a call.

Me (with extreme sarcasm): WhatEVER made you think of that???

Around about '85 or '86, while I was a college student, a couple of buddies and I rented a shack WAAAY out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of a lake outside Bangor Maine. We lived there for a couple of years, and great fun was had! I got lots of stories, but I’ll confine myself to just one for now:

During one winter a big blizzard was forecast. Having a couple of days notice, and knowing that we would probably be snowed in and unable to leave for 2 or 3 days, we got organized and went to procure supplies. We also notified our professors that we would likely not be in until the road got plowed…

I was tasked to go to the store for enough munchies to last us, another was tasked to go to the liquor store, and yet another was tasked to procure… other recreationals.

My trip to the store was a success, and I returned with enough food to keep us a couple of weeks if necessary. The liquor store trip also was a smashing success, and there was enough beer, tequila, and assorted other potables to keep us legally unable to drive for quite a long time.

The last errand was an unprecedented hit. We had hoped that our roommate would return with a little bit of pot… he came back with not only enough pot to keep us high for weeks, but magic mushrooms, blotter acid, and he may have even had some cocaine (my memory of this is understandably vague)! HOLY CRAP! Happy druggy college students.

Well, the blizzard hit, and as it turned out we were snowed in for a week. No worries, we had all the supplies we needed, and more. Week-long non-stop party.

Scene: It’s the 4th or 5th day since we got snowed in. We’re partying like mutherfucks. There’s about a half-ounce of pot strewn over the counter top where we had been slowly separating out the seeds, there’s mushrooms and LSD on the table, bongs, empty beer and tequila bottles everywhere. The place was a mess, and so were we. About 9PM, we’re playing pool on an old pool table one of my roommates had turned up somewhere. We have all the lights off except the strobe-light that hung over the table (ever get real high and play pool by strobe-light? Try it…), Pink Floyd’s Animals was blasting out of the speakers at ear-bleed level and…

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!! went the door.

Me: :confused: The fuck??

I stepped over to the door and opened it; a pall of pot smoke rolled out into the dark cold night.

When the smoke had cleared, I saw standing there a state police officer. :eek:

Dude had snowmobiled about 10 miles over the ice on the lake in about -10 degree temps to see if we were OK and if we needed food or anything.

Standing outside the door looking in you could see almost the entire shack (minus the bathroom and 2 side rooms), so there was entirely no chance of hiding anything. Plus there were so many illegal things evident that it would have taken us at least an hour to make the place law enforcement friendly anyways…

The officer took a long slow look around the room noting everything, then looked back at me. “I came out to see if you guys were OK… got enough food and such?” he said.

“Yeah, we’re good.” I said. “C’mon in…”

He came in, we made him some coffee and got him warmed up. After about 45 minutes, he got back on his snowmobile and left. Never a word said about the drugs. All I can figure is that there was no way he was gonna try to arrest all 4 of us with no back-up and haul us off to prison on his snowmobile, and we were cool enough that he decided not to follow up on it later.

In the late 90s, I used to review print zines for Zine World. Doug (the editor) used to receive dozens upon dozens of zines per week at his mail drop. We reviewed any kind of self-published periodical - travel zines, music review zines, personal diary-type zines, poetry collections… Poetry collections.

Once, Doug and I were coming home after visiting his mail drop. He and I each had full backpacks of zines to review - probably 40 or 50. We stopped at the little donut shop across from the old mint, at the end of the 26 bus line, for a cup of coffee and a donut or five. Doug picked a random zine to read while eating, and it was a poetry zine. Some guy’s self-published booklet of poems.

He opened at random, and started reading aloud. It started out great. And I HATE poetry. But it was good. This isn’t the actual poem, but imagine something like this :

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
Sandwich sandwich sandwich.

I think the donut guy must have thought we were completely about to die on the spot. I have never laughed as hard as that in my entire life. A perfectly decent, conventional poem, and that “sandwich sandwich sandwich” thrown in. I’m laughing now, and I will continue to laugh until the day I die. Tears. I could not breathe. A full two minutes of uncontrollable laughter, easily.

God, I miss that fun…

Joe

Very short but true story.

When we were young we were very finicky with our vegetables. Mom used to say “Eat every carrot and pea on your plate!”

October 2001

I was attending the Basic Airborne Course taught at Ft Benning, GA. During this course you are taught how to exit an aircraft while in flight and how to land. There is a mock up of an aircraft about 3 feet off the ground to teach you how to exit initially, then you get the 35 foot tower with a zip line. I could tell many other stories about the zip line training, but that is not the story to be told here tonight. You also learn to land, you will fall from a six foot platform many, many times, maybe in the neighborhood of 1000+ times. Exit and landing, exit and landing until you can do them in your sleep.
There is also the talk through of what you should do if you are about to land in water (no water more than a puddle is ever found on any training drop zone, and there are few puddles) what to do if you land in a tree (no trees on the drop zones either–trees may border the drop zone, but none of any size on it) what to do if you land on a power line (again, no power lines), what to do if you collide with another jumper (this could realistically happen, so I paid attention, and did at some point collide with another jumper, but that is also a story for another time). In short, anything that could happen is discussed and we were taught the appropriate action.

The last week of the class, we are about to make our first “Hollywood” static line jump. Hollywood means that we had no combat equipment on us. It was only the jumper and the parachute exiting the aircraft. Static line, for those who don’t know, means that the chute is deployed via a cord attached to the aircraft. No action required by the jumper. Anyway, my first jump. I exit the aircraft because muscle memory has taken over and I soon realize that I am outside an aircraft that I would disparately love to be back inside of. I am flying and falling.

Mother of God, the chute inflates and I am floating in the silence of the skies. I love the feeling. I am lost in my thoughts that I, who is scared to look over a canyon could be this high in the air and in control of my descent. I felt at piece with the Universe.

Remember the hazards that I mentioned a moment ago, water, power lines, other jumpers, etc. Well, I had one that was not discussed. I began to go up when the others were going down. I was actually going in the wrong direction. Land was getting farther away from me. THIS WAS NOT TALKED ABOUT!!! I was afraid that I would find myself in orbit soon. I had caught a thermal and the air around me was rising. I soon slipped out of it, but that was not a pleasant feeling.

I made the ground without incident and loved every jump since then.

SSG Schwartz
(Airborne)

The following isn’t my story, and some may have heard it before, but I thought I’d pass it along anyway.
(Warning not for the queezy )
Now, I know that there is a lot of embellishment that occurs on this group and I am aware that a small number of things are perhaps sheer fabrication, but I have a story to tell that is the absolute truth.

Funniest damn thing that has ever happened to me. A couple of weeks ago we decided to cruise out to Ryan’s Steakhouse for dinner. It was a Wednesday night which means that macaroni and beef was on the hot bar, indeed the only night of the week that it is served. Wednesday night is also kid’s night at Ryan’s, complete with Dizzy the Clown wandering from table to table entertaining the little bastards. It may seem that the events about to be told have little connection to those two circumstances, but all will be clear in a moment.

We went through the line and placed our orders for the all-you-can-eat hot bar then sat down as far away from the front of the restaurant as possible in order to keep the density of kids down a bit. Then I started my move to the hot bar. Plate after plate of macaroni and beef were consumed that evening, I tell you - in all, four heaping plates of the pseudo-Italian ambrosia were shoved into my belly. I was sated. Perhaps a bit too much, however.

I had not really been feeling well all day, what with a bit of gas and such. By the time I had eaten four overwhelmed plates of food, I was in real trouble. There was so much pressure on my diaphragm that I was having trouble breathing. At the same time, the downward pressure was building. At first I thought it was only gas, which could have been passed in batches right at the table without too much concern.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. After a minute or so it was clear that I was dealing with explosive diarrhea. It’s amazing how grease can make its way through your intestines far faster than the food which spawned the grease to begin with, but I digress… I got up from the table and made my way to the bathroom. Upon entering, I saw two sinks immediately inside the door, two urinals just to the right of the sinks, and two toilet stalls against the back wall. One of them was a handicapped bathroom. Now, normally I would have gone to the handicapped stall since I like to stretch out a bit when I take a good shit. But in this case, the door lock was broken and the only thing I hate worse than my wife telling me to stop cutting my toenails with a pair of diagonal wire-cutters is having someone walk in on me while I am taking a shit.

I went to the normal stall. In retrospect, I probably should have gone to the large, handicapped stall even though the door would not lock because that bit of time lost in making the stall switch proved to be a bit too long under the circumstances. By the time I had walked into the regular stall, the pressure on my ass was reaching Biblical portions. I began “The Move.”

For those women who may be reading this, let me take a moment to explain “The Move.” Men know exactly what their bowels are up to at any given second. And when the time comes to empty the cache, a sequence of physiological events occur that can not be stopped under any circumstances. There is a move men make that involves simultaneously approaching the toilet, beginning the body turn to position ones ass toward said toilet, hooking ones fingers into ones waistline, and pulling down the pants while beginning the squat at the same time. It is a very fluid motion that, when performed properly, results in the flawless expulsion of shit at the exact same second that oneÕs ass is properly placed on the toilet seat. Done properly, it even assures that the choad is properly inserted into the front rim of the toilet in the event that the piss stream lets loose at the same time; it is truly a picture of coordination rivaling that of a skilled ballet dancer.

I was about halfway into “The Move” when I looked down at the floor and saw a pile of vomit that had been previously expelled by one of those little bastards attending kids night. It was mounded up in the corner so I did not notice it when I had first walked into the stall. Normally, I would not have been bothered by such a thing, but I had eaten so much and the pressure upward was so intense, that I hit a rarely experienced gag reflex. And once that reflex started, combined with the intense pressure upward caused by the bloated stomach, four plates of macaroni and beef started coming up for a rematch.

What happened next was so quick that the exact sequence of events is a bit fuzzy, but I will try to reconstruct them as best I can. In that moment of impending projectile vomiting, my attention was diverted from the goings-on at the other end. To put a freeze frame on the situation, I was half crouched down to the toilet, pants pulled down to my knees, with a load of vomit coming up my esophagus.

Now, most of you know that vomiting takes precedence over shit no matter what is about to come slamming out of your ass. It is apparently an evolutionary thing since shitting will not kill you, but vomiting takes a presence of mind to accomplish so that you do not aspirate any food into the bronchial tubes and perhaps choke to death. My attention was thus diverted. At that very split second, my ass exploded in what can only be described as a wake…you know, as in a newspaper headline along the lines of “30,000 Killed In Wake of Typhoon Fifi” or something similar. In what seemed to be most suitably measured in cubic feet, an enormous plug of shit the consistency of thick mud with #### pockets of greasy liquid came flying out of my ass.

But remember, I was only halfway down on the toilet at that moment. The shit wave was of such force, and of just such an angle in relation to the back curve of the toilet seat, that it ricocheted off the back of the seat and slammed into the wall - at an angle of incidence equal to the angle at which it initially hit the toilet seat. Then I sat down. Recall that when that event occurred, I was already halfway to sitting anyway and had actually reached the point of no return. I have always considered myself as relatively stable gravitationally, but when you get beyond a certain point, you’re going down no matter how limber you may be. Needless to say, the shit wave, though of considerable force, was not so sufficient so as to completely glance off the toilet seat and deposit itself on the walls - unlike what you would see when hitting a puddle with a high-pressure water hose; even though you throw water at the puddle, the puddle gets moved and no water is left to re-form a puddle. There was a significant amount of shit remaining on about one-third of the seat rim which I had now just collapsed upon.

Now, back to the vomit…

While all the shitting was going on, the vomit was still on its way up. By the time I had actually collapsed on the toilet, my mouth had filled up with a goodly portion of the macaroni and beef I had just consumed. OK, so what does the human body instinctively do when vomiting? One bends over. So I bent over. I was still sitting on the toilet, though. Therefore, bending over resulted in me placing my head above my now slightly-opened legs, positioned in between my knees and waist. Also directly above my pants which were now pulled down to a point just midway between my knees and my ankles. Oh, did I mention that I was wearing not just pants, but sweatpants with elastic on the ankles. In one mighty push, some three pounds of macaroni and beef, two or three Cokes, and a couple of Big, Fat Yeast Rolls were deposited in my pants…on the inside…with no ready exit at the bottom down by my feet. In the next several seconds, there were a handful of farts, a couple of turds, and the event ended. Yet I was now sitting there with my pants full of vomit, my back covered in shit that had bounced off the toilet, spattered on three ceramic-tiled walls to a height of about five feet, and still had enough force to come back at me, covering the back of my shirt with droplets of liquid shit. All while thick shit was spread all over my ass in a ring curiously in the shape of a toilet seat.

And there was no fucking toilet paper. What could I do but laugh. I must have sounded like a complete maniac to the guy who then wandered into the bathroom. He actually asked if I was OK since I was laughing so hard I must have sounded like I was crying hysterically. I calmed down just enough to ask him if he would get the manager. And told him to have the manager bring some toilet paper. When the manager walked in, he brought the toilet paper with him, but in no way was prepared for what happened next. I simply told him that there was no way I was going to explain what was happening in the stall, but that I needed several wet towels and I needed him to go ask my wife to come help me. I told him where we were sitting and he left. At that point, I think he was probably assuming that I had pissed just a bit in my pants or something similarly benign.

About two minutes later, my wife came into the bathroom not knowing what was wrong and with a certain amount of worry in her voice. I explained to her (still laughing and having trouble getting out words) that I had a slight accident and needed her help. Knowing that I had experienced some close calls in the past, she probably assumed that I had laid down a small turd or something and just needed to bring the car around so we could bolt immediately. Until I asked her, I’m sure she had no idea that she was about to go across the street and purchase me new underwear, new socks, new pants, a new shirt, and (by that time due to considerable leakage around the elastic ankles thingies) new sneakers.

And she then started to laugh herself since I was still laughing. She began to ask for an explanation as to what had happened when I promised her that I would tell her later, but that I just needed to handle damage control for the time being. She left.

The manager then came back in with a half-dozen wet towels and a few dry ones. I asked him to also bring a mop and bucket upon which he assured me that they would clean up anything that needed to be cleaned. Without giving him specific details, I explained that what was going on in that stall that night was far in excess of what I would expect anyone to deal with, what with most of the folks working at Ryan’s making minimum wage of just slightly above. At that moment, I think it dawned on him exactly the gravity of the situation. Then that manager went so far above the call of duty that I will be eternally grateful for his actions. He hooked up a hose. Fortunately, commercial bathrooms are constructed with tile walls and tile floors and have a drain in the middle of the room in order to make clean up easy. Fortunately, I was in a commercial bathroom. He hooked up the hose to the spigot located under the sink as I began cleaning myself up with the wet towels.

Just as I was finishing, my wife got back with the new clothes and passed them into the stall, whereupon I stuffed the previously worn clothing into the plastic bag that came from the store, handing the bag to my wife. I finished cleaning myself off and carefully put on my new clothes, still stuck in the stall since I figured that it would be in bad taste to go out of the stall to get redressed, in the event I happened to be standing there naked and some little bastard kid walked in. At that point, I had only made a mess; I had not yet committed a felony and intended to keep it that way.

When I finished getting dressed, I picked up the hose and cleaned up the entire stall, washing down the remains toward the drain in the center of the room. I put down the hose and walked out of the bathroom. I had intended to go to the manager and thank him for all he had done, but when I walked out, three of the management staff were there to greet me with a standing ovation. I started laughing so hard that I thought I was going to throw up again, but managed to scurry out to the car where my wife was now waiting to pick me up by the front door.

The upshot of all this is that I strongly recommend eating dinner at Ryan’s Steak House. They have, by far, the nicest management staff of any restaurant in which I have eaten.

Me too. I’m still giggling.

ShermanAter, there are no words. I bow to you, sir.

My story isn’t original to me, it’s from my dad’s friend Ron. I may not get all the details correct, and excuse my lack of military jargon here. You’ll get the idea. WARNING: This may offend anyone who is sensitive to stories of animal cruelty.

So during or shortly after the Vietnam War, Ron was working in Ordinance Disposal with the US military. This entailed going and cleaning up stuff like undetonated explosives and other messes, but at one point Ron found himself without an assignment. Luckily, something had just opened up.

It seems there was a teeny island in the middle of nowhere with targets set up all over it for training purposes. The problem was, the island was populated by goats that had no other competition on the wee island. The goat population was growing and as it grew, the goats were eating more and more grass, which meant the little island was starting to erode. Because of the goats, these multi-million dollar targets were going to start tumbling into the sea. A biologist of some sort was called in and it was determined that the goat population needed to be reduced by 5000.

Enter Ron and his buddies. Basically they were sent to the island to take out the goats by whatever means necessary. A helicopter would bring supplies every once in awhile, but by and large they were on their own. So here’s 3 young men, unlimited ammo and all the time in the world. They began to get creative.

At first they were simply shooting the goats, but that wasn’t a very efficient method. One shot could only kill one goat, right? Grenades could kill on a larger scale but that method entailed getting close to a group of goats, which could prove a bit difficult. However, there just so happened to be some plastic explosive lying around. Ron and company got an idea.

Through hours of patience and wheedling and offering carrots, they manage to somewhat tame a goat and capture it. They pack plastic explosive into a backpack and strap it to the goat, setting it to detonate in 15 minutes. They give the goat a slap on the rump and send it off toward the herd as a sort of suicide bomber. They sit back and wait for the inevitable explosion.

So the three men are standing aroung and having a smoke, you know, killing time until killing time. They’re relaxed and full of happy anticipation. Until:

“Bah.”

Hmm?

“Bah-ah-ah.”

Uh huh. Suicide Bomber Goat decided it would rather stay with Ron and the boys, where it knew there were carrots and other tasty treats. The men were in a delicate situation, and did the only smart thing: ran like hell. Oh, but this goat wasn’t stupid. They had gone to the trouble of taming it and it wanted food. The faster they ran, the faster the goat ran, and the timer ticked down.

Mercifully (for the humans) the goat exploded before they got tired, and they escaped unscathed. Except for the mess of scattered goat parts, but there was no one around to care. :smiley:

ShermanAter, you totally blew my sweet potato story out of the water, seeing as I didn’t actually shit and all. Bless.

(When the day is long)

So I’d been taking singing lessons for a while. A year to be exact. Any while my singing teacher said he “wouldn’t call my voice shrill”, obviously it improved as I took lessons.

(And the night, the night is yours alone…)

And the drill was I choose a song I want to learn, we sing it at singing (well DUH) and then I practise it at home for the rest of the week. And I’d done this for many many many songs.

(When you think you’ve had to much of this life)

Countless songs. And I practiced usually on a Saturday. I did my Saturday chores. I put on my stero.

AND I SANG. Boy did I SING

(Well hold on.)

So this particular Saturday morning. I am home alone. In my pyjamas. And I put the CD on. The song of this week is of course, Everybody Hurts, by REM.

So - thus far.

  1. It is Saturday

  2. I am in my pyjamas

  3. Michael Stipe is bleeting about how Everybody Hurts on the stereo.

  4. I am singing along.

(Don’t let yourself go)

Here I pause. So humiliating is the next bit. So very embarrassing.

I am tidying up. I walk into the loungeroom. With a hairbrush in my hand.

And…I start SINGING into my hair brush. So intent am I on being pitch-perfect and musically correct, that I do not notice my neighbour walking down my driveway. And up my front steps to my front door.

(Coz Everybody cries.)

The reason I do not notice him staring in horror at me from the front door, his neighbourly gift of homemade Grappa forgotten, is this:

I HAVE MY EYES CLOSED AND I AM SINGING PASSIONATELY INTO A HAIRBRUSH.

Did I mention that I was at this time 30 YEARS OLD??

(Everybody hurts. Sometimes)

When I first moved here from back east 12 years ago, I had a roommate. We lived together for a few months, with only her name on the lease. She assured me that we were both on this lease, equal partners, blah blah blah. She decided we should move, to a nicer apartment, and that it would be her, me, and my boyfriend doing the moving. Except that she didn’t really do any moving, and so it was just me and my boyfriend doing all the work. It was July, during the middle of the day, and well over 100 degrees. The next day, she informed me that she was the only one on the lease, and that she’d decided I would have to move out. Right now.

Well, I was pissed.

A couple of weeks earlier, the roommate had been in a car accident that was her fault, and totaled her car. I knew she’d been having financial difficulties, so I was curious as to how she was able to immediately go to a dealership and finance a brand new car to replace the one she’d wrecked. She had confided in me that she just used a fake social security number and somehow it wasn’t her credit report that came up, it was someone else’s, and that was how she was approved for financing. So the day after she kicked me out, my boyfriend and I went to the car dealership she’d bought from, and spoke with the general manager and told him about her and what she’d said she’d done.

That was in July of '97. She just got out of prison a couple of years ago, having served 8 years for fraud.

Last Saturday, as we were sitting on a bench at the park, I mentioned that Mom interrupts me frequently. Matter of fact, if there was such a thing as Frequent Interrupter Miles, she’d be able to fly aroung the world twice.

She said “I never!”
Me: “shall we make it a bet? Or better, a finable offense. How much, any time you interrupt me?”
She, after some thought: “half an Euro.”

Pity we hadn’t done it sooner. She only owes me one Euro, so far - I’m actually being able to finish sentences!

Here’s a story that happened to me a long, long time ago (LOL - longer than I care to admit!).

When I was just out of kindergarten (so I was 5, getting ready to turn 6), some friends of my parents invited us to spend a weekend at a relative’s cottage at a nearby lake. The lake was just inland from Lake Michigan, and there were big sand dunes as well; one of the major attractions was dune buggy rides.

The other family had a son about the same age as I, and we were already friends from attending kindergarten together. As an aside here, my morning kindergarten class had -56- kids in it! At any rate, the families took the kids for a dune buggy ride, and he and I went exploring after the ride. We stumbled onto an old campfire and somehow he got the idea to walk across the remains of the fire - nothing smoking or anything, it looked completely cold. And so he did, then dared me to do the same. Naturally, I took the dare, and began walking over the coals. Unfortunately, there must have been one that was still a bit “live” and I burned the heck out of the bottoms of my feet! :eek: I ended up spending most of the rest of the weekend laying in the hammock, in the backyard of the cottage. And to this day, my feet are extremely tender.

This story takes place on the third-to-the-last day of school of my senior year in high school.

The senior orchestra students are gathered together to practice for the cheesy “Visions of the Future” ceremony (otherwise known as the baccularette). We are playing the Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, which features first and second violin solos.

My twin sister, being the chair of her section, is supposed to play the second violin solo. I’m the chair of the viola section, but alas! No viola solo, so no solo for poor, neglected monstro (cue the violins).

Now let’s step back a little and get some background. This ensemble has been playing together for 4 years. Because we attend a performing arts school, all of us have spent a considerable amount of time together. Two hours of practice and music lessons every day. Millions of concerts and overnight field trips. Countless hours hanging out in the practice rooms, goofing around. We should all be friends, but this is not to be the case. During our sophomore year, two groups began to form. The Kiss-Ups, who fashioned themselves as the conductor’s exclusive harem. And the Cool Kids, who–while never openly defiant of the conductor’s authority–never fell over themselves kissing his hiney either.

My sister and I were staunchly in the Cool Kids camp.

The Kiss-Ups had our effete conductor eating out of the palm of their collective hand, or so the rest of us believed. They would have nervous breakdowns after juries and chair auditions, compelling the conductor to bend to their whims. One of the most histrionic girls, who I shall call Wah!, was notorious for these tantrums. By senior year, she’d had enough of the competition and the stress and decided to drop out of the orchestra. The Cool Kids thought this was a fine decision. The year went by smoothly and uneventfully.

Until we get to the bacculeratte rehearsal. Guess who magically shows up? Wah!, that’s who. The conductor is out of town, so she takes this opportunity to plop her ass down in the first violin section, right next to her best friend–the concertmaster.

“We have a recommendation,” begins the chairperson of the Kiss-Up Contingency, the orchestra’s irritating concertmaster. “We think Wah! should play the second violin solo for the Corelli. What do you guys think?”

The rest of us have heard the words, but we can’t really understand them. They just don’t make sense. Wah! isn’t in the orchestra anymore. She dropped out wayyyyy back in September. So why would it be a good idea for her to play in our last concert together, especially as a SOLOIST?? If she wanted to play, why not as a regular player, in the back of the section like the rest of the johnny-come-latelies?

“I just want to let my mother see me play one last time,” is Wah!'s explanation.

I look over at my sister, who’s crestfallen face is apparent to everyone in the goshdarn room. This is the girl who’d led the worse section in the orchestra through the toughest repertoire we’d ever played together, working with them patiently through frustrating sectional after frustrating sectional. This is the girl who had regularly sacrificed her academic team meets so that she could play in the orchestra’s lame-ass concerts. The previous school year when we had played the Corelli for the Christmas program, the conductor had given the 2nd violin solo to the substantially weaker player who had shared my sister’s seat, just because she was a senior. Wah! had been granted the first violin solo for that concert, basking in the rarefied spotlight associated with concertmaster. Meanwhile, my sister had spent three years working towards being a section leader, always being passed over because of someone else’s seniority or schmoozing ability. Now that she was a senior, she could finally shine as the virtuoso that she was.

The baccularette concert is to be an culmination of this achievement. It will be the first time our parents (and grandmother, aunt, and cousins who had come to see us graduate) would see her perform as a concert soloist.

And here is Wah! threatening to take it all away.

“Look, Wah!”, my sister begins, unable to hide her flabbergastion in her face and voice. “I’d like to play in the concert as well, seeing as how my mother is going to be there too. But I guess if you want–”

Wah!, wrongly believing that my sister is telling her off, whips her head around and starts yelling, “WHY DON’T YOU GROW UP!!! ALL I WANT TO DO IS PLAY ONE MOVEMENT!!!”

She said some other things, but they were so shrill and hysterical that it just came out like screaming.

The rest happens in slow motion.

My sister’s face changes color, from light brown to purple. She puts down her violin and stands up, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Wah! All I was saying was…” Her voice trails off as she becomes overwhelmed with emotion. In that moment, our eyes meet, and we suddenly have the kind of psychic connection that people wrongly assume all twins have. I can hear her thoughts as clearly as if they were mine: This bitch is trying to steal my solo, and here I am giving it to her! And I’m sitting here letting her cuss ME out? HELL TO THE NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!

I have made my sister cry countless times during physical and verbal confrontions–fights that are usually my fault. But the sight of her crying at the hands of another causes a cascade of visceral, animal-like reactions in me. Suddenly I’m a tiger, leaping up out of my seat and flying towards Wah!, who totally does not expect to see me. She’s like Rae Dawn Chong in The Color Purple, and I’m like Miss Sophie about to give her a fistful of what-for.

Unfortunately, I’m grabbed by millions of hands and literally carried back to the other side of the room. I’m cussing and screaming and bucking, trying to break free from my restraints so I can beat some bitches down. The kids holding me back are laughing at the sight of me so fired up, but they recognize that the anger is hot and real. So their laughter is nervous.

Wah! suddenly starts crying: “WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE ME!!” Her friends rush over to comfort her like the delicate flower she is.

At the absurdity of it all, the Cool Kids start laughing, like we’re at the end of a four-year-long Hannah Barbara cartoon. Then we hurry back to the gym where everyone else is practicing for graduation. Within minutes, everyone knows that nerdy, dorky monstro was just seconds away from kicking Wah!'s ass, and I’m suddenly the most popular, beloved girl in the room. Thugs that never knew my name are shaking my hand and giving me pats on the back.

Thing is, I can’t remember who played what solo at the actual concert. Just goes to show how trivial the whole matter was in the grand scheme of things. (But Wah! was still wrong!)

FYI - while it is a good story, it has been circulating the net for years. But it was nice to see it again.