I knew a guy that had a mocking bird hanging around their property. One summer he taught it meow like a cat.
Required background for this anecdote: My father was a lifelong drunk.
One time I was visiting him, and the moonshine flowed like water, because that’s the way it was with him. He used to sit with a tumbler full of ethanol and store-brand cola on the wide arm of one of those awful, massive '60s style naugahyde & wood armchairs, and after the nth refill, he set his glass down there and knocked the tumbler off as he sat down. He looked down at the floor, and with a drunk’s nonchalance he proclaimed, “We do not spill alcohol in this house – it is just Not Done.” Then he reached down and picked up the glass, which appeared to have not lost a drop – it had just went straight down, and remained upright, without a splash to speak of.
This would not, by itself, be in the category of “incredible if not for witnessing,” but what amazed me was that this was repeated twice more during the night. A tall glass, newly-filled, elbowed off the armchair and casually picked up off the floor, still full - and each time, no expression of surprise from him, just “Thou shalt not waste booze.”
At my old restaurant I once grabbed a bottled water out of the cooler and it slipped out of my hand. The bottom of the bottle must have hit the floor perfectly level, because the water bounced straight back up into my hand. I didn’t even have to reach for it. Luckily, I had a witness - one of my workers happened to be looking at me, and said “Ah, dude, that was SICK!”
A few years ago my boyfriend, his friends and I effected a daring rescue of a woman whose car was caught on the train tracks. Frankly, I can hardly believe it myself. The train stopped no more than twenty feet from the car.
Oh, and once I hit a golf ball into a water hazard, but it bounced right out of the water and within a foot of the hole. It was beautiful. Nobody saw it but me.
When I was younger and stupid, I didn’t really believe in black ice. I thought there was no way that the exhaust from multiple cars would freeze to the ground in such a way that you wouldn’t be able to see it, at all - I just knew that there’d be some sort of indication; that you’d see it in some way.
Until I almost hit somebody outside of Madison, skidding on ice that wasn’t there. Yep, it certainly exists.
Since none of my friends with whom I go shooting are on the Dope, I’ll post about something I, myself, pulled off a few years ago.
We’d all take off into the desert at 0 dark hundred and go shooting on Thanksgiving or Christmas. One day one of my friends brought along a bunch of 12 gauge flares. They skip and skitter along the hillside we were using as a backstop, bouncing all over the place.
After a few rounds of this, he fired one off and I snap drew my .357 from the holster on my hip and hit it on the first bounce. Everybody turned and looked at me like I’d just pulled off a major Annie Oakley trick shot.
Seriously, I’m a pretty fair shot, but I couldn’t have repeated that one if I tried.
I was 18 and driving in the mountains in Northern California. It was near Thanksgiving time, late in the afternoon, shadows laying across the road in several places. No snow on the ground but the temp was in the low 40s or high 30s.
I am hauling ass up the road (about 50 on a very twisty section) and my buddy says:
“You might want to slow down through these corners, there might be black ice in one of these shady spots.”
Less than one second after he says the word spots the car hits black ice and pitches sideways. :eek:
I counter steer, correct and get the car straightened out. I turn to him and say “OK, now just how in the hell did you know that in the 13 miles of windy road we have been driving that there would be ice on that one corner?”
This one happened when I was in high school and working in the gas station. A buddy of the boss bought an old Rambler for $35. He brought it in and said it had a noise in the engine. We all listened, and could not tell exactly where the noise was. We racked the car and listened to the engine from below, the noise sounded up top. We listened from the top, the noise sounded low.
So we turn off the engine and take the valve cover off, everything looks normal. Finally after a few minutes of dinking around the decision is made to start the engine. We still can tell.
Then they decide to pull the oil pan off. They drain the oil, and unbolt the pan. About the time they get the pan off several gas customer show up, so I am busy on the pumps for about 15 minutes. When I get done, I walk back into the lube bay and there is no Rambler. 
Where is my boss and his buddy? I start looking around. I find both the oil pan, and the valve cover on the bench, but no car and no boss or his buddy.
I am perplexed, as I have not seen a tow truck so I have no clue if what happened.
Anyway about 20 minutes later they come driving back in the Rambler. They pull into the rack and raise the car. NO oil pan.
WTF? Where have you been, what is going on?
The answer was they started the engine with the pan off and still could not tell, so they said aw hell let’s take it to the machine shop and ask the machinist. So they drove it there.
Turned out it was a rod bearing was bad, they replaced it at the machine shop, drove it back (about 2 miles each way).
They put the oil pan and the valve cover back on, and poured the old oil back into the engine and off he went with his $35 car.
If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it.
No one event springs to mind, but my life has had so much drama it feels like a bad soap opera sometimes, from tragic beginning to triumphant success story. It’s not the individual event that seems beyond belief but the cumulative probability of all that stuff actually occurring in one person’s life. I really had a fantastically shitty childhood, ran away, was poor, and then met the man of my dreams and became incredibly successful. (I should just change my username to Cinderella.) Occasionally when I’m recounting events, I have this moment where I’m like, ‘‘Wait, am I just pulling this out of my ass?’’ Nope, all that shit really happened. I truly am a walking work of bad fiction.
Maybe that’s one reason I’m so damn gullible.
Anyway, I’d rather have lived my own harrowing, dubious life than someone else’s boring one.
I remember being at a friend’s house as a teenager and hanging around in his backyard. His brother walks out with a BB gun and says “Hey, you guys see that hummingbird?”, which was easily 100 feet away darting around randomly. While still looking at us and not aiming, he randomly fires the gun, and the bird drops to the ground dead. We all just sat there (including the brother) going :eek:
I could fill this thread with stories. All these are true.
Many years ago I did some writing work for a company. Shortly after, I moved to a different town in a completely different part of the country. I received a cheque through the mail for the work I’d done and took it to the bank to pay it in to my account. The cashier politely pointed out that she couldn’t accept the cheque because the payer hadn’t signed it. I said I’d take the cheque away, mail it back to the company and get them to sign it and send it back.
I left the bank and as I walked along the shopping mall I bumped into the man who should have signed the cheque. Entirely by coincidence, he happened to be visiting the town to which I had relocated. I explained what had happened, and he signed the cheque for me there and then. I turned round and took it into the bank, and paid it in to my account. The cashier recognised me and thought this was odd, so I explained to her what had happened!
[Preamble: I am a writer and I’ve written one book that has sold fairly well albeit to a small, specialist audience]. I went to a dinner party where I met a man called Tom who mentioned that he ran a small bookshop. He did mention where it was, but it was a part of London I had never visited and the conversation was fairly chaotic so I didn’t note the details. About a week later I went to a party that kept going until the early hours, so I crashed on a friend’s sofa until morning when I could make my way home. As I made my way back to the train station, I noticed what looked like an interesting little shop so I peered in the window for about 30 seconds before moving on.
Very soon after, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Tom, the man I had met at the dinner party, saying he had just noticed me gazing into his shop window. He went on to explain that he had a customer in his shop who had just been asking about me and my book. Tom had been explaining to this customer that he had in fact met me at a recent dinner party… and at that precise moment he had noticed me peering into his window! This is why he had raced outside to catch me before I vanished into the nearby train station. Tom asked if I could spare a moment to come back with him into his shop and meet this customer who had been asking about me, so that’s what I did. I went with Tom back into the shop, greeted this particular customer and answered his question.
Now imagine how this all looked from the customer’s point of view! I bet he still tells the story to this day.
Around 2003, I think, I happened to be visiting New York for a few days. I learned that Ricky Jay was performing an amazing one-man show called ‘On The Stem’. I really wanted to see this show, but the omens were not good. It had been sold out for weeks or even months, and when I phoned the theatre they said there were very few ‘returns’ or unwanted tickets. My schedule was such that there was literally only one, single performance that it was even possible for me to attend. I went along to the theatre anyway, despite not having a ticket for the show. When I got there, with less than 10 minutes to go before show time, I checked with the box office and was told sorry, no tickets available. At that precise moment, a man turned up who had overheard me asking for a single ticket. As it happened, he had a spare ticket because his wife had been unable to come. So he sold the ticket to me at face value.
It turned out to be an excellent ticket for the show - centre stalls, fourth row. In the row behind me were John Cleese, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.
A shot bullet half sticking out of a log. The bullet hit it, turned 90 degrees to go with the grain and stopped before it could get all the way through. Half of it was still in the log, half sticking out.
It had penetrated about 4” of Hickory.
.22mag.
I have another one that is similar. My little brother and I got Woodstock Daisy BB guns for Christmas (not the famous Red Rider model but similar). My best friend, his little brother, and my little brother came over to our house for a sleepover a few days later. My little brother really pissed me off so I took my Woodstock air-gun into the woods far-far away, pointed it in his general direction at an extremely high trajectory and fired it.
It was well over 75 yards away with the others standing close by him. That made me feel better for a few seconds until I heard the scream. I hit him in the neck with the BB. It only made the tiniest of a pink mark that went away in a few minutes but that was the only time my father came close to beating the hell out of me. My subconscious mind wanted to hit him with it but I never thought it could ever happen.
All of these shooting stories remind me of the time when I was ~12 or 13 years old and visiting my best friend up at his parent’s cottage just south of Algonquin Park in Northern Ontario.
He had just gotten a bow and arrows and we were practising our archery out near the fringe of the woods where his father had set up a target. Just above this target was a hummingbird feeder, so my friend decided to take a shot at it. Big mistake. The arrow hit the feeder but it was a glancing blow that ricocheted almost 90 degrees to the right and buried itself in the wood pile about 20 feet away, missing his fathers head by no more than a foot.
This was shocking enough, but his father’s reaction will always stay with me. Without saying a word, he pulled the arrow out of the wood pile and broke it in half over his knee. Then he walked up to his stunned son, grabbed the bow, whipped him once across the back of his legs (raising some serious welts), took the bow back to the wood pile and chopped it into several pieces then walked away.
Needless to say, there was no more target practice the rest of the trip.
A few years ago I was on the palisades near the Santa Monica pier and saw a dolphin jump out of the water, do a somersault and re-enter the water with minimal splashiness. I’d never thought they’d do something liket that just for fun. (Note how I’m resisting using the word “halibut.”)
I was visiting my friend who lived in the college dorm. We would regularly play pool and after a few games, would try to impress each other with trick shots.
The pool room of his dorm had 2 tables right next to each other, about 5 feet apart. He took the 8 ball and placed it right next to the side pocket of table 2, then put the cue ball on table 1, and started making like he was going to do a jump shot.
“No way you are going to jump it over to the other table,” I said.
“One bounce on the floor,” he replied.
He hit the cue ball, it proceeded to jump off the table, bounce once on the floor, then land on the 2nd table and sink the 8 ball in the side pocket!!!
If I wasn’t there to see it I would not have believed it.
We both freaked out.