Every once in a while we have a mojo thread around here. We have them so we show appreciation for each other and gain extra strength to combat the inevitable influx of stupid trolls.
For this evening, share a story about something stupid you did as a child, and receive mojo.
It doesn’t have to be a short story, although it can be. I once put my hand on a bright orange electric stove burner because my mother told me not to.
I have it on good authority that the most commonly spoken last words are: “Here, dude, hold my beer.”
I think most stupid-adult-tricks are preceeded by “Hey guys, watch this.”
I think you’re close.
They’re preceeded by remarks starting with "Hey, beautiful…"
(Though I know folks who tell a stupid adult trick story that — stipped of context — goes "This tent will not burn! <whooompf!>)
Ever! Say something “won’t burn.”
As someone handy with a welding torch, I know the folly of that personally.
One of my stupid-adult-tricks would be welding inside a horse trailer’s tiny tack compartment. My shirt looked like Swiss Cheese when I was done.
Speaking of never…
Don’t make tents of parachute fabric.
<whoompf!>
Yeah, major stupid kid trick there when I told all my friends I was a natural pyro and I could control the flames….The local fire department or three were not happy! Thankfully, no homes were lost.
Stupid adult incident…I was applying for my first job after high school as a jeweler’s apprentice. I had taken a jewelry making class at my high school, so I claimed I knew all about settings and soldering and what not. I was so nervous at my interview that when they had me do a simple solder job on a necklace, I did the work, but then flipped the hot metal tweezers into my palm. It left a heck of a burn. But, I just smiled and blinked back the tears and showed them the solder job. I got the job. Best job I’ve ever had!
Heh, sounds familiar.
See my story way down.
We also had a variation of playing ‘cops and robbers’. Try playing ‘arsonist and firefighter’ in the forest – game over when all are firefighters…
(phonetically) hay yawl woch-eeyus : the handing off of the beer is a rare variant seen on occasion…
Although maybe planting marijuana seeds in the greenhouse at the back of the high school biology classroom wasn’t entirely clever . . .
backyard..they grew..i took such care of my plants. My grandfather thought they were weeds and picked them and threw them out
When we were 21, my first husband and I planted mj in his father’s greenhouse. We got one really healthy plant and pinched back every other leaf bud so, instead of growing straight up, the thing turned into a bush with a four-foot spread. We told his father it was an exotic variant of citronella and that the smell was a bug repellant. He believed us.
On the day we harvested this baby, his mother confronted us and we admitted what it was. She then amazed us by asking to try it out. After a few puffs, she said, “I don’t think I’m stoned yet. Well, maybe… a little pebbled.”
Did you get the seeds from Jerry Garcia? 😉
One morning when I was 15 and heading out to school, my mother confronted me with my Zig Zags in hand. (Said she found them in my jean jacket pocket when she went to wash it – um. . .sure Mom. . .gonna wash my jean jacket at 7:00 a.m. as you’re heading to work) She said we’d deal with the situation with my father when I got home from school. All day long I consulted with friends, and the “best” excuse we came up with was that I used them to write cheat notes for tests and needed the glued edge to attach them to the inside flap of my purse. Funny thing happened tho – she never brought it up again. Just wanted to ruin my day.
Fast forward 30+ years, during a heart to heart talk a couple months ago. She informed me she was well aware I smoked weed every day as a teenager, but never said anything because, “it was the 1970s and 75% of the kids your age were smoking pot, dear”. I love that wonderful woman! (That was quite a display of tolerance on her part, considering she was a generation older than my friends’ parents and really straight-laced.) At 86, she thinks it’s ridiculous that marijuana has yet to be legalized.
Hey! What happened to spellcheck?
At 17 or so (1968-69 time frame) they planted seeds in the flower beds at the front of the Utah state capital building…
The gardeners didn’t know…and the plants were kept nice and trim. LOL
Now that’s going to keep me smiling all day long!
Next year I’ll be reading some MoJo thread and I’ll read that the stupidest thing that Militarytracy ever did was when you guys planted all the weed in her yard and she pruned it and hung Christmas lights on it. I wouldn’t even know what the heck the stuff looked like.
Does eating dog kibble on a dare count?
I’m having a hard time thinking of stupid things I did as a child. I was very well behaved and intellectually precocious – which ruled out a lot of stupid behaviors.
Now, as a teen and a young adult, that’s another matter.
as your loving partner, I can confidently – or should I say with trepidation – speak of the terrifying combination of you, the natural klutz, with you “I can do anything in my pyjamas”. Need I remind you that when I met you, you had a far more comprehensive first aid kit for your animals than yourself? :p
Are you saying I’m no longer “young?”
And I think, at the time, since I was living on 75 acres in the middle of nowhere, with no visable neighbors and temperatures often over 100 degree F – that was “I can do anything in my underwear.” Except buck hay – that leaves a nasty rash.
One day I pretended that I could not bend my knees, but then my mom caught me walking normally.
I was sitting at the lunch table, eating a sandwich my nana (grandmother) made me, it was tuna on wheat with extra mayo….you can see where this is going.
As I was eating my sandwich, a girl my age sat across from me. She was wearing a green dress her grandmother made for her. We chit-chatted, and then I said, “I don’t feel so good….BLECH!”…and yacked all over her.
I was still at the age when I cried whenever I threw up. She was obviously crying too… We were both sent to the nurse and went home for the day.
It’s been twenty years since that incident. That little girl is now my best friend and loves to tell that story to people we meet. Oh, and she has hated wearing dresses ever since our first meeting.
studying Latin in High School when I discovered that there was such a thing as a vomitorium…
I was one of those kids that never learned from being told, but rather, always had to experience things for myself. In that light, I too, touched the stove. My parents always said that it was hot, but would I listen? Heck No.
The stupidest thing I did as a kid was start smoking. Sadly, that is not even funny, it is just stupid.
I almost got busted for cheating in school. What made it stupid, however, was I didn’t even need the stupid crib sheets I had made and never even looked at them during the test. Then, instead of properly disposing of the cheat sheets, I threw them in an open garbage can. My teacher found them and threatened to catch the culprit by matching the handwriting. Thankfully, I don’t even think he thought it could have been me, since I was a really good student, so I never got busted. On the plus side, I was so freaked out by the experience that I never even thought about cheating again.
I fell to tears in the cafeteria, because I was so worried I couldn’t find the right bus to make it home from kindergarten. The principal ended up holding me in his lap in front of the entire school while I sobbed.
Oh man. . .I’m so sorry! (Is that the real reason you’re homeschooling 🙂
First day of kindergarten my mother had to close her store and come get me. I was sitting in the corner sobbing my eyes out because I didn’t want to play with all those strange kids, and I didn’t want to play with all those strange toys. (Thankfully, I grew up in a small town, and I lived within a couple blocks of the school, so it wasn’t until I moved to Minneapolis as an adult that I fell to tears worrying about catching the right bus home. Yes. Sadly. . .)
Although not my stupidest thing (I have to keep some sense of pride), this ranks up there.
In my early teens (around 14) my friend and I would hitchhike and get the drivers to get us beers. Oddly enought, we didn’t even like beer which makes it even stupider.
I have no idea how I survived my childhood.
I hitchhiked to California from Pennsylvania on a whim when I was 18…when I got to Iowa, I realized “Gee, 3000 miles is really far,” but decided it was just as far to finish the journey as it was to go home.
I’m not sure how I survived my young adulthood; when I was filling out the information for one of my kids’ birth certificates, I listed my occupation as “former thrill-seeker”.
LOL! I did the same thing at 16. Granted it was stupid, but it was a life changing experience and the biggest reason I am in California today!
I once rode a motorbike (a dwarfed motorcycle) without any head protection.
I have a nifty (now faded and hard to find–but it’s there, and I can still feel the bump) triangular scar on the middle of my forehead (think eyebrow for a third eye), as a result.
I rode the bike back to its owners, thinking I’d just whacked my head. As I approached the cluster of kids, something — sweat? — dripped off my eyebrow. I wiped it off, and didn’t notice it wasn’t sweat, because I was distracted by the strange… horrified?… looks on the faces of the kids, and the fact that most of them were scattering like… Wall Streeters when Elliott Spitzer arrives… heading home for safety.
The kids who belonged to the bike couldn’t flee.
About the time I stopped, I realized my eyebrows were wet. Thickly wet….
Their mother barely knew mine, and was certain they were about to be sued beyond paupery, when she arrived. Head wounds look bad, even when they aren’t.
She got me inside, wiped me off, stanched the bleeding, more or less determined that it didn’t appear that I’d staved in my fool head… and waited.
My mother arrived, and took it all with great aplomb. Much as she did, years later, in rather similar circumstances, when I shot myself in the finger with a bb gun. After all, I was the idiot…. Of course, this was the woman who’d jumped from a 3rd floor balcony at age 10, a la Mary Poppins….
Speaking of stupid… uh… I know my UID preceeds the Great Migration… slightly… but what can one spend mojo on around here?
I’m slowly figuring this stuff out, Mr. Ogre (nice handle, by the way. It suits you).
These folks over here hand out 4s like candy. In just a few days of posting comments, I was surprised to find that I could rate comments 0. I’d never seen that rating before, and I wondered how it happened. After some nosing around, I discovered that I had become a trusted user because of all the good mojo these
Boo-berries hand out.
It feels good, and I’ve taken to handing out 4s myself. And recommending all the good diaries. I sometimes wonder whether that dilutes the excellence, but there are so many excellent diaries and comments, that I think these folks deserve it.
So don’t be stingy with that mojo.
or when you’d spot me.
It’s my goddaughter’s fault. The titular "uncle" was a challenge for her, as a wee thing. And for some reason, I scared her rather easily. So "ogre" was what "uncle" sounded like… and it stuck.
I don’t scare her anymore. But we have an interesting relationship that I value. She once told me "You annoy me, even in my dreams!" (which I told her made my day–as her mother laughed herself silly). But she also calls me up and asks for help with math, or volunteers to go grocery shopping with me and we talk about history, or politics.
Some ogres are more equal than others.
To say the least, I have a certain… how shall I say… soft spot for helmet laws. But being mildly Darwinian in outlook, I’m willing to allow people to opt out.
[ ] Check here to:
1. Opt out of the obligation to wear a helmet.
2. Free and release the state from any obligation, cost, or expense on my behalf for any injuries sustained while riding and not wearing a helmet.
Who amongst other things, was a professional motorcycle racer, died when he was test driving a small motorcycle he was going to get for my mother on her birthday. He was on a residential street, doing 25mph, and swerved to miss a dog. The only thing injured was his head.
He died on his 35 birthday. My mother was 28, I was six, my sister was eight.
Always wear a brain bucket (helmet), please.
Sorry to hear about that.
I sincerely support the wearing of helmets–and have ever since, without any exceptions.
I advocate it. But I hear the libertarian argument and it has some weight with me. But only as long as those folks accept that their actions make the price of stupidity something that the rest of us shouldn’t have to bear (though that’s not really entirely true–any spouse and kids left behind will get some public aid, potentially… and I refuse to make them suffer for someone else’s foolishness).
I’m lucky mine lived to have kids (he’s still alive).
This is a stupid kid trick that’s not mine… and that he didn’t tell me until I was an adult. I think he’d had a couple drinks, too.
Dad grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, during and after WWII. He tells stories that are sort of tropical Huck Finn tales. Fishing in the canal, sailing… etc.
So he and his buddies, the oldest of whom could drive–just–were poking around in the jungle. Panama is jungle par excellence. And they came upon one of the Army bunkers that were built to defend the Canal from Japanese attack.
Buncha teen boys… this was cool.
What was cooler was that the Army had just closed the door and left. They didn’t pack. The place was full of munitions. Grenades, practice grenades, shells….
Testosterone-stupid heaven. They came back with grocery bags and packed a bunch out–quick, before someone found their El Dorado. They strung up some quick warning booby traps to scare anyone off while they were gone, and departed….
Only their drive drove over the speed limit and got stopped. The cop looked in the back… and saw bags full of the strangest groceries–and took them (and it) in.
(Recently, Dad confided that they’d planned to go to Gatun Lake, where myth has it that a relative of Nessie has taken residence, and use the grenades to chase it out. He said it made sense at the time…)
The police frog marched the boys back into the jungle after grilling them enough to figure out where it had come from–and then told them to shut up. So when they got close to a trip line and one of them tried to speak up, he got told to shut up, again. Dad says that none of them actually laughed when the lead cop walked through the first line and a practice grenade went off off in the forest, but… he still grins when he remembers the looks on their faces and their panic, drawing guns….
The police cleared the place out… and the judge let the kids parents know that they were the worst sort of juvenile delinquents who were going to get the whole book thrown at them, and that it would be thrown so hard that it would get them again on the bounce.
Fortunately… my grandfather, clever fellow that he was, just nodded, told the judge that he understood, and that the boys were certainly in a mess they’d made… but that the New York Times was certain to be very interested to know that the US Army had left enough munitions utterly unguarded that a group of boys could make off with enough to put the Canal out of operation.
The whole matter dropped with some very stern warnings….
If you taught elementary school kids, you’d be a hero! (My husband has a similar scar too, – from head-butting his school building – now there’s a “smart” move!).
The one that my kids and wife say is the Harry Potter scar I got as an adult.
Taking out the garbage. But that’s a stupid adult trick, and rather embarrassing….
and didn’t realize that it is a Harry Potter scar. It is the dumbest thing I ever did as a kid though. My fifth bday my dad put a swing set up for me. The whole neighborhood came over. My father had to place it close to a tree so he was admant about NO JUMPING OUT OF THE SWINGS or someone was going to crack that tree. A twelve year old came over and jumped out of the swings repeatedly almost hitting the tree several times. I told him to quit it, he ignored me, so out came my favorite thing to say then to other kids, “Get off my property!” He started to leave and when he got to the gate he bent down and picked up a rock. I was a long ways off and the dumbest thing I ever did was laugh at him.
Brand new Easy-Bake oven. New, half-gallon bucket of playdough. I guess we forgot the “play” in playdough. My sister and I rolled them out, made all sorts of designs on them and baked many batches of exquisite playdough cookies. They were hard as a rock, way too salty and all the playdough was toast!
Heck, it was probably a lot better than those dinky “cakes” they try to get you to bake.
using bottle caps for pans, and “baked” them by using the holes in a cinder block as a pretend oven.
And then I made my little brothers eat them.
I made mine bigger–about the size of a jar lid–and fed them to my dog, CeeCee. She loved them.
That’s one of the reasons I love my dogs so much. Because they love me enough to eat mud. Well, maybe not my current dogs, but definitely the one I had as a child.
. . . you’re right.
Now that I think of it, maybe that’s one of the reasons I love my brothers so much, too. 😉
Living in SoCal my Mom (single parent) used to pack up the kids (all 4 of em) and take us to the beach..it was about 1/2 hr. drive from where we lived. She used to do the best things with us on weekends. Taking us all to the Drive in movies, we couldn’t afford the refreshment place, so she popped the corn, got the sodas (complete with cups, a small ice chest for the ice and to keep em cold) and most of the time she would cook Cheeseburgers before we left and wrapped them in tin foil. Blankets, pillows, big old station wagon that she would back in and put the tail gate down and from there we would watch the show…oh..I forgot to mention all the candy she would pack. Anyway this was about the Beach trip, not the Drive in Movie theater trip.
So one Saturday we were at the Beach…wow..it was packed, we finally found a place to put all our stuff down, including a big ole umbrella..we did not travel light (Two boys, two girls). Before we left the house I insisted on wearing my favorite swim suit (I grew up in a pool, awesome swimmer and diver) anyway…we had a fight about my suit. I won. I had out grown it, but it was my favorite (I had just turned 12). So there we were having a great day at Santa Monica beach, I was running around like a mad man..flying around in the water, the sand, the sun…I was digging for sand crabs…running, stopping, digging…I continued doing this for a while until I squatted down to grab a crab and RIP…yup…RIP…the entire crotch, along the seam RIPPED. From my Ass to what seemed like my belly button…I was basically standing there naked on the beach, hold two pieces of shredded Hawaiian material that used to be my shorts, knocking my knees together, as to not expose myself to what seemed like hundreds of people who were looking down at me near the waves, laughing wild. I my memory, they were pointing and screaming with laughter. My siblings did laugh and refused to bring me a towel. My Mom finally did, as we walked back up to the umbrella, she said…”I told you you had outgrown those ……..” I had the most amazing childhood, with the coolest Mom in the world…Truth be told…Mom’s always knows best, especially when you are a stubborn kid.
that was you? Ha.
me and all of my Italian/Irish self hanging out for you and the world to see. If I would have grown up in Europe nobody would have given a shit, including me. But growing up in the Uptight US of A, we are brought up to be embarrassed of our bods. I saw Claudia Schiffer at a beach in Mallorca, Spain back in ’88…Topless..this was before she was The Claudia Schiffer. Just an innocent, free 15 year old girl…I will never forget her telling me her name with a thick German Accent…C L A U D I A…We all went out that night and had a BLAST…
At the age of 3 I attempted to saw a leg off a piano while I was under the piano. Fortunately I was using a plastic saw and it didn’t work so good.
I always played outside and waited for the last minute to use the bathroom. According to mom; one day, I miscalculated and changed my soggy panties to clean ones. Left the dirty one in hamper with a little puddle. Oh well I was approx 4 when this occurred. I now leave plenty of time for potty breaks.
tip over.
This would be 1955, when the last few steam trains were still running.
My friend Roger and I, being 4, staggered up the block to the B&0 railroad line in Lakewood (adjacent W. suburb of Cleveland). We figured that if we set a line of small to increasingly-large roadbed rocks on one of the rails, the engine would ride up the rocks and fall over.
We calculated that if we finished with fist-sized rocks, that would do the job. Nothing in our experience could ride over rocks that size.
We were smart enough to place the rocks on the closer rail so that the train would fall over in the opposite direction. When we heard the whistle of the approaching train, we climbed back under the fence 50 feet back of the tracks, and hid among some bushes so we wouldn’t get caught.
For some reason the train didn’t tip over. It rumbled right on past–but it shattered the rocks into a burst of shrapnel whizzing all around us.
I told mommy that afternoon and got into all kinds of trouble.
I just got caught.
A railroad track ran behind my grandfather’s stables, and of course he spent most of my childhood telling me to say well back from it when a train passed by.
One day when I was about 10 years old, I gave in to the ever-present impulse to hop aboard. I rode an open boxcar for about a mile, and then jumped off and walked back toward the house.
Grandad was waiting for me at the crossing. It was the only spanking he ever gave me, which might explain a great deal. He probably should have done it a lot more often.
Only after I had chidren of my own did I understand how terrified he must have been when he realized why he couldn’t find me.
I didn’t try to make the train tip over, but I did have a practice with friends for a while of putting (pre-1966 and decimal currency) Australian pennies on the railway tracks for the suburban electric trains to flatten. They came out oval shaped rather than round. Incredibly stupid really, to play on the railway line. We also used to crawl through the stormwater drains running under the roads and railway lines, which wasn’t smart either.
I think the most stupid thing I did as a child was to take up smoking for a short while as a young teenager.
now and again… I have a whole jar of pennies, dimes nickles, quarters, half dollars, and even a few Sacajawea two dollar coins that have been extruded in this manner… It’s pretty cool the way that it leaves faint facial impressions in the rails, too…
There’s just something about knowing that you’re breaking so many different laws at once with such a simple act that I find so enticing…
Hey, Bood! I keep finding that we have these little ideosyncratic things in common. Trying wine from a definitely-not-a recognised-appellation winery was the last one. Now I find you enjoy the frisson of breaking the law on the train tracks. (I have to confess I gave it up as a kid – probably beacuse the trains weren’t nearby any more.)
When I was a wee lass, I got into the fridge when my mother wasn’t in the kitchen. I found the most marvelous white balls in the door of the fridge. I took one, and tried to bounce it on the floor. To my shock and surprise, it didn’t bounce. Sure that must have been a single horrible anomaly, I took another one. It didn’t bounce either. A half-dozen eggs later, my mother came running in to find me sobbing.
They didn’t bounce for her, either.
and she used to buy these little plastic tops that snapped onto the bottle and kept the fizz in after a bottle had been opened. Don’t know why but one morning (like about 5:00 am) my brother and I decided to take one out of the frig and shake it and laugh hysterically passing it back and forth. When the top finally blew it went all over the ceiling. My mom wasn’t a morning person and that was stupid!
we had to take home all the tests that we got bad grades on. Math was never my strong point so I had plenty of Ds and Fs that needed to be signed. But, the teacher never asked me for them. So I never took them home.
One day, the smart kid in class, Tony, got a bad grade. I told him not to worry about taking it home because the teacher was so stupid she never asked for them.
Two days later, I came home from school and my dad was PISSED! He’d recieved a letter with all my test grades from that semester. Tony, the rat-fink, had told the teacher everything.
In hindsight, it was stupid not to study for the tests. It was even more stupid to tell an ass-kisser about my evil scheme.
Imagine a big family reunion at the grandparent’s camp on a lake in western PA. I’m maybe 13 and about the geekiest 13-year old you can imagine. Bad hair, pimples, really bad coke bottle glasses and knees and elbows all over the place.
This is the German side of the family and they really like to eat, so there are three (count ’em) three sawhorse and plywood tables with all of the aunties and uncles and cousins and kissing-cousins sitting around them. And food.. BBQ chickens and hot dogs and hamburgers and potato salads, and deviled eggs and green salads and chocolate cake and pickles and jelly and bread and all the trimmings. And the aunties and uncles and grandparents are tippling a bit, too. So a couple of the aunties get up and start singing and I lean back onto the end of one of the plywood tables, hitch myself up and and plop down into a sitting position so I can enjoy the festivities. And that table does a see-saw thing under my weight, and there are chicken bones and bowls of potato salad and deviled eggs and chocolate cake flying through the air in perfect arcs to land “splat” and “sploosh” right at the singing aunties’ feet.
I can offer two:
First, I was about five years old and precocious. I decided it would be fun to draw a picture on the wall. You know, the kind kids do all the time. But then I figured out that if my parents saw it, I would get blamed for it. So, I signed my sister’s name to it (her full name, first, middle and last). She would have been somewhere around 3 at the time and could neither read nor write. Then I added our address for good measure, complete with city and state, so they’d know for sure it was her and not some other girl with her (reasonably unique) name.
Then several years later I’d stuck something in an electrical outlet and used a butter knife to pry it out. Zapped myself real good, although it did no permanent damage.
Frankly it’s a wonder I survived to adulthood, because I’m almost positive I did that more than once.
just because I’m in the mood for it.
Back when I was a kid, about 11 or so, I was an electronics geek and was in with a bunch of other electronics geeks. I almost got busted once for reading Popular Electronics magazine in school. In Electronics class. Go figure.
Well anyway, we got our hands on some plans in Popular Electronics and decided they would make a fun toy. They were based around a time-delay switch that looked like a regular old light switch. The switch was designed to allow you, for instance, to turn the outside light to “off” as you left the garage and the light would stay on for about 60 seconds while you made your way to the house, at which time the light would shut off.
Well, we modified the plans we found just a bit. First, we got four D batteries and wired them in series to make a 6 volt power source. (Stay with me, it’s worth it, honest.) Then we got a couple of lights, transistors and resistors and hooked them all up so that when the switch was thrown, the lights would blink on and off. Then, finally, we went down to the local Lafayette Electronics franchise (a parts house sort of like Radio Shack), got ourselves a 3 inch speaker, an enclosure box, a replacement line cord for a TV, a couple of assorted nuts and screws, and finally, a little module that would, when hooked up to a 6 volt power source, produce an ear-splitting siren.
I’m sure you can now start to see where all this is headed.
One Wednesday, just after noon, one of our number who shall remain nameless even though the statute of limitations has I’m sure long since expired produced a small black box with two lights, a switch, a power cord, and a Civil Defense emblem painted on its front. He plugged the box into a wall outlet, then we went to get our lunch.
Here, as best I can reconstruct it forty years later, is what happened next:
You know the idiot who, when confronted with a big red sign that says DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON, pushes the button? Well, that idiot went to our junior high, and he came up and flipped the switch. A piercing siren filled the air in the lunchroom, bringing conversation to a standstill.
He flipped the switch off. Nothing happened.
He flipped it back on again, resetting the timer. The siren continued to wail. The lights flashed back and forth.
One of the teachers came up and flipped the switch a few times. Nothing happened.
He unplugged the cord from the wall. There was no effect, which is hardly surprising, since inside the box the cord was just taped to the inside of the box and had no function whatsoever except camouflage. The siren continued to wail. The lights continued to flash.
At that point we lost sight of the box, as the assistant principal carted it out of the lunchroom to thunderous applause. When we got up enough nerve to look, we found it in a dumpster behind the school with all the wires ripped out of anything they could be ripped out of and the speaker ripped in half.
Remarkably none of us ever got into trouble for this. I suspect it may have been because there was no law against taking a box to school and plugging it into the wall as long as you didn’t cause it to do anything loud or disruptive, which we didn’t, and also because we had been pretty stealthy about hooking it up and no one could positively identify us as the culprits, although many had their suspicions. We of course had no idea what they were talking about; but, let the record show that nothing like that happened for the rest of the year.
Oh, and I got an “A” in Electronics. I’m probably wrong, but I’d like to think that the Big Loud Box had something to do with that.
I wrote dumb teenage screenplays (I’m sure of it).
That is a perfect scene for the genre.
I had a renegade grandma who loved to teach me to swear, which of course, got me punished regularly.
In church one Sunday, (front pew of course), as the minister said something about “Praising Jesus,” I leaped up and shouted, “Mom! We’ve gotta the git the hell outa here! That asshole is SWEARING!”
OK, I’m going to make a really big confession. Really big, really shameful childhood stupidity.
And distinctly UN-mojo.
Especially for a professional scientist, who is female, a proud feminist, liberal, etc.
I entered a beauty contest. (I’m shuddering to think of it). I did.
Rather, I browbeat my parents into entering me in the beauty contest.
I was “just about 5” as I told the judges, (actually a week away from being 5). I was in Kindergarten, and I had read about it in the newspaper, had been reading since 2 or so. It sounded like fun. And I had the goods: Blond Hair! Not afraid of people!
Little. Miss. Cotton. Top.
(I’m shuddering – and laughing). Small town, Southern, just horrible. But no makeup, bathing suits, strutting, dancing, or adult-izing, fortunately. The pictures show the little girl that I was.
And what’s worse – I won.
Now, no one who knows me now, or who ever knew me from puberty on would ever have thought me a candidate politically or visually for a beauty contest, but there I was. Long blond hair, absolute confidence (I told my classmates I was going to win), and fearless in front of an audience – about the only attribute that is still present from those days!
Like hell would I let any child of mine do such a thing! And now you know my secret shame.
because I know your shame – my mother made me perform in ballet recitals.
Tulle tutus. Sequins. Toe shoes.
But it was a long time ago (at least in my case) so maybe we’d better just try to rise above it. 🙂
I still can have nightmares if I think about trading my sneakers and shorts for tap shoes.
Tea for Two aaarrrgh!
for this diary could have been, should have been, “Emergency Room Thread’.
Gee I haven’t even posted yet
Oh well I’ll just jump in here and mention playing catch with darts at about age 7 – caught one dart in the back of the hand and sank it pretty deep. Still have the scar! :^)
Or jumping out of trees 10-12 feet from the lowest branch….no damage…
Or popping wheelies on speed bumps at age 11…got a broken arm out of that one….
Or whittling with Exacto knives…got stitches there…
Hmmmm maybe I should stop and go back to the tap shoes up thread. ;^D
“Watch this!”
The first was probably around 4th grade or so. I’d been invited to a birthday party at a classmate’s house; she was actually a pretty good friend — I used to go play at her house after school.
Anyway, she had a real pool (built into the ground and all) in the backyard. Unfortunately, I’d never learned how to swim. I didn’t want to be left out, so I got in the pool with everyone else, and pretended to swim by walking in the pool and moving my arms. Well, I decided to walk from one side to the other…but didn’t realize that by the time I got to the middle, the water would be over my head…
I was pulled out by someone (either my friend’s parents or her big brother), and they actually had to give me mouth to mouth I think.
The second story was a few years later. It was after 7th grade I know, because it involves swimming and I actually had learned how to swim (that was the only time I ever got an “A” in PE).
My aunt and her family were living in London at the time (for my uncle’s work), but every summer they’d trade homes with one of their friends and come back to visit (and their friends would have free lodging in London). That summer, the home they stayed in had a pool, which was very cool, because I wanted to show off my new-found water skills.
So, I’m in the water, and showing my cousins some of the warm-up exercises I’d learned to get used to the water. I bounced up…and down…dove under the water…and came up……
….but the top of my swimsuit stayed down under the water….
I think you can see where this is going….right in front of my (male) cousin and (male) uncle…….
Okay, if I tell you this story, do you promise you’ll still respect me?
When I was about twelve, on the army base where I lived, the fad for a while was to make tennis ball mortars. What you did was cut the tops and bottoms off three steel beer cans, and the top only from a fourth. Then you taped the cans together with duct tape, so you ended up with a cylinder closed at one end. You punched a hole in the cylinder wall close to the closed end.
Then you got some gasoline(!!), filled a Dristan spray bottle with it, and stole one of your sister’s brand new tennis balls. New balls were important, because the fuzz helped make a snug fit against the barrel of your mortar. You’d spray a few puffs of atomised gas into the open end of your cannon, stuff the tennis ball in and poke it down real good with a piece of hockey stick to compress the propellant, get someone to firmly grasp the barrel and aim it, and hold a flame to the small opening at the base. Those suckers could launch a tennis ball 300 yards easy. After a dozen shots or so, you could give the ball back to your sister, because all the fuzz was burnt off, and you couldn’t get decent compression… bear with me because I’m not even to the stupid part yet (believe it or not).
So one day, to get some propellant, I went into our neighbors garden shed and "borrowed" his can of lawnmower gas. It was one of those old fashioned steel cans, red with a diagonal yellow stripe, and it was almost empty. Not empty, but almost. I wanted to gauge just how much gas I had– remember, I had to fill an entire nasal mist bottle.
So, I put this 95% vapour space can on the ground, took the cap off, and peered in. Couldn’t see a thing. So, bright spark that I was, I took out my Zippo, and tried it again, with light this time. I guess my eye was about 6 inches above the can when I heard a WHUMP, and felt a hot wind. Well, shit, THAT was stupid, I thought. I put the cap on the can and gave it back to my neighbor. A little shaky, but trying to be cool, I went into the house. My mom was at the kitchen sink. When she turned and looked at me and screamed " What on earth have you been up to?"
"Nuthin’", I said. She turned me to face the mirror above the kitchen sink and said "What’s this then?" I had a great black scorch mark across my right eye and temple. In trying to rub it off, she rubbed off my right eyebrow. That night, when my explosives technician father came home, my tennis ball mortar days were ended permanently.
One final note: DON’T TRY THIS. Today’s beer cans are aluminum, not steel, and the whole contraption will explode in your hands.
Never mind, guess not, because we never lived on an army base . . .
But you had me going there for a minute. 😉
in college… I cleared a five story campus building with a shot once… it was so cool at night with a brand new ball when the fuzz caught fire… I still have scars to this day on the thumb of my right hand from when they kicked back… I have even imploded the barrels on them…
Yes, there are indeed angels, and they are exhausted…
It was in Herrmann Park in 1965, just after the opening day parade of the Houston Fat Stock Show. The pony’s name was Babe, and she might have been smooth-mouthed, but she could still jump like a white-tailed deer.
Some boy bet me $5 that we couldn’t jump across the hood of the Falcon. I swapped my stock saddle for my little brother’s lighter one, shortened the stirrup leathers to keep my feet above Babe’s belly, and she cleared it like a dream.
Everything went great until we landed and Babe’s front legs slid out from under both of us. The ground in Houston can be muddy and slippery as wet clay after late winter rains, and we’d built up a lot of momentum. I did manage to dodge the steel saddlehorn when Babe rolled over on me, but occasionally my right hip brings back the memory to this day.
I have always just been thankful that at least my foolishness didn’t get her hurt, too. It was a valuable lesson, but that would have been too much to pay.
It’s hard for me to think of something stupid I did as a kid (ok, as a triple Virgo, I’ve probably blocked it, or even possibly had it surgically erased from my brain).
One of the funnier things I did was when my parents took us to the famous Madame Toussad’s waxworks museum in London, I stood stock still against a post & pretended to be a waxwork. If you haven’t been to Madame T’s, as well as all the famous waxworks, there are also ones of ‘ordinary people’ scattered through the museum – like a woman asleep on a bench, etc.
Sure enough, in no time people were coming up and pointing at me and talking about how lifelike I was. Of course I couldn’t resist, and winked at a couple of kid who were about 9, and scared the absolute cr*p out of them – who promptly howled and ran for their mum. Luckily for me she thought it was funny.
Hmm, ok perhaps that was stupid. But it was funny!
When I was a wee lad, while my father was in the shower, I decided that I would “wash” my brother’s eyes out with some stain remover.
Whoops.
He regained his vision after three days. I had a seriously red bottom.
When I was a lad, I watched a bit of a documentary on Trench Warfare in WWI and WWII. Thinking they looked like fun, I proceeded to go out into the back yard and try and dig one for myself.
With my hands and my plastic shovel.
Through my mom’s favourite flower bed.
The day after she had spent six hours in the graden planting new bulbs.
Bulbs which – in the process – I had seen fit to throw at the bird’s nest in the near-by tree.
Oops!
I set a dry bamboo thicket in an alley on fire. Now I know where “kids, don’t play with matches” comes from.
Once again Leezy arrives late to the mojo party. Can’t you post these at 3am so when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep I can be at the top instead of the bottom of the thread?
My stupid story…I had an older sister(actually three of them)that loved to terrorize me. She was a neat freak and I was the slob. I had a very long blonde ponytail that she loved to grab and pull me around by. My mom was a single mom at this point so we had the chore of cleaning the house on Sat. mornings. Vicki would pull me out of bed by the ponytail and say”Get up now and let’s clean”. One day, I had finally had it and grabbed a scissors and pointed it at her screaming leave me alone or I will stab you. She just laughed and said “Drop it Lee or I will kill you”. I was so afraid of her I dropped that scissors right there and then and started running.
To this day, she loves to tell that story.
If you think the server crash was bad the other night, well….if I listed all the dumb stuff I’ve tried/done, it wouuld not recover ; )
enjoyed all the posts, and think that a couple of you may have even come a little close to my stupid adventures..LMAO
Grew up in a small town, and most of us kids had family in the countryside. One of my good friends, Erik, had been visiting grandparents over Easter. Grandfather was a hunter who made his own ammunition. Hence, he had powder in the barn – or wherever it was stored. Erik took a bag (a paper roll, probably holding 6-8 ounces).
The powder was used for various experiments. With about half of the powder left, we decided to blow up an anthill in the forest (close to home anyway). Fuse was a cotton cord dipped in parafin leading into the remaining powder in the bag.
The fuse was a ‘dud’. No explosion. Erik suggests; ‘let’s light it directly!’. Erik, his younger brother and I then proceeded to do so. Lit a match and stuck it in the bag. Well, you could say we all ended up with new hairstyles + scortched eyebrows and lashes.
Did not dare go home till late that night…(we were 11 or 12).
Let’s see…two things immediately come to mind. When I was about 5, I put my Barbie through my Easy Bake oven to give her a suntan. Around the same time, I also covered my black cat, Scooter, in suntan oil. Not so good for the cat.
What was my obsession with suntans? Weird. I did grow up in SoCal, but still…
I was about 5 or 6, and we went to the big city to one of these indoor boating and recreation shows… they had the usual “catch the trout in a barrell” tank exhibit… Dad pays for me to have a go and I toss my line in and instantaneously hook this huge fish by the tail… he gets wrapped up and iced down and we drive home and they put him in the freezer… in the middle of the night, I’m feeling so guilty that he’s dead that I sneak into the kitchen take him out of the freezer and tearfully bury him outside… Don’t think Mom or Dad ever noticed that he was missing…
I really loved cats as a kid. Actually, I still do. I would do anything to make the cats happy. My mom raised Oscars – the big orange and black fish? At Christmas one year, after opening all of the presents and rewrapping them to see what I got (I had to open them all because I couldn’t read cursive yet), the cat was sitting in front of the fishtank looking plaintive.
I got out the fishnet, snagged one out for the cat to look at. Of course, the cat ate it. All of a sudden it made sense! We must be out of cat food, he’s hungry!
I fed all six fish in that tank to the cat. Mom was a wee bit pissed, and the cat puked on my pillow. Darn cat.
I got in even more trouble though, when I figured out that if I put bits of my dinner under the bed long enough, they started to turn different colors. Mom was not happy about that at all.
Late again.
If your parents put a ladder on the side of the house, and if the family cats climb the ladder to sun themselves on the roof, and if the cats start fighting….. Don’t climb on the roof to play referee.
No serious injuries (just some bad bruises), but falling off the house because you tried to stop a cat fight really isn’t the brightest thing in the world!
I was thinking for a moment that I never did anything stupid. I was such a namby pamby perfect little Virgo that I even folded my socks before I put them away.
But reading all this reminds me of many stupid things I did. Burned the front yard playing with matches. Got caught tearing apart a Kotex (curiosity almost killed this cat) to see how they worked, climbing a tree to get away from my belt-wielding father (there’s no escape once you’ve climbed a tree).
Sheesh.
Stupid story!
My friends and I once found a stash of old flourescent light-bulbs behind our middle school, so we decided to play javelin with them on the paved path through the woods we used to walk home from school. Sure enough, the whole thing was covered in broken glass by the end of our escapade that day. This wouldn’t have been too bad, except I decided to race one of my friends back to our neighborhood. I was about 11 at the time, so I was lanky and clumsy. I promptly fell directly onto my face, but luckily the shattered glass broke my fall. I still have this wierd bumpy scar on my forehead from where some glass got implanted under the skin.
Well, there’s the time my friend’s mother caught me kissing a Shaun Cassidy poster . . . but that was just embarrassing, not stupid.
Here’s stupid:
The kids across the street had it made, we thought–their mother worked full-time and so during the summer they were tended by their two kind but inattentive grandmothers. So my brothers and I spent all our time over there. One day when I was about 10 one of the girls and I decided to make cupcakes out of every disgusting ingredient we could think of, and see if we could get our brothers to eat them. We mixed up flour and water with ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise . . . (our neighbors were not adventurous cooks), spooned the very thick batter into the muffin cups, and baked. Surprisingly enough, they looked lovely–sort of the color of corn muffins–but were so heavy that the boys were suspicious and wouldn’t touch them.
Ah well, so we cleaned up. And realized we couldn’t scrape the now-congealed batter off the spoon. So after a few Lucy-and-Ethel moments of panic, we decided the best course of action was to throw it in the bushes.
Fast forward a couple of years; my co-conspirator and I are hanging out on their front porch while her brother is raking leaves out from under the bushes. “Hey, I found a spoon! But what’s all this crap on it?”
Their poor mother–they didn’t have a lot of stuff–I’m sure she had noticed the spoon was missing and was wondering what had happened to it. But she couldn’t get it clean either, and threw it out.
I must have been about 6 or 8 years old, and I was fooling around with my new cub scout knife. “Hmm, I wonder how sharp this blade is?” So I ran my thumb over it, just to check. Yikes! Fortunately, my grandmother was there to patch me up.
I guess this story is more funny than stupid, and I did plenty of stupid things, this is just what came to mind first:
When I was 3 and my brother was 2 we were playing invisible airplanes. Well, pretty soon I came out crying to my mother that his invisible airplane had shot down my invisible airplane. So my mom did what she always did when we fought over anything. She took our invisible airplanes and put them up in the closet and told us to go play with something else. So we did.
One time, when I was around 15, my mom made pancakes for breakfast and had leftover batter, but no appropriate Tupperware to put it in. So she got out a paper milkshake cup & lid from the trash, washed them, and put the batter into it and into the ‘fridge.
Now money was tight growing up, and a trip to McDonalds was an infrequent treat for a family night out. So it was unusual for there to be a milkshake cup hanging around the house.
Sometime later, being a typical teen, I went looking in the ‘fridge for something good and saw – bathed in a supernatural glow and with angels singing – a milkshake!
Wow! My lucky day! I picked it up, it was cold and thick and the right weight and consistency, and I had chugged about half of it before the message got from my taste buds to my brain – “Abort Mission! Abort Mission – Not Milkshake! Repeat, Not Milkshake!”
After that, my mom put labels on things in the refrigerator!
I have two younger brothers; the one that’s closer in age is about 2 1/2 years younger. This happened when I was about 12 and he was 9 or 10. On a family trip to McDonalds, we’re goofing around and he takes one of the little foil catsup packets and folds it in half and squeezes it tight. The packet explodes at the fold, directing a spray of catsup straight up and all over the white ceiling tile above us.
We had that “Oh my God!” look on our faces for a fraction of a second, and then start laughing uncontrollably. As do the people in the surrounding booths. My parents didn’t see what happened – they were probably discussing how to pay the bills that month or something – and when they finally got out of us what had happened, my mom was so embarrassed she made us immediately all leave the restaurant & go home without even finishing our meals.
😀
Well, there was the year or so when I thought I’d discovered a superior form of walking that made me much faster than everyone else: it involved staying somewhat close to the ground by keeping my knees bent and taking giant steps while putting most of my weight on my rear leg. I did this walking home from school almost every day. Then, when I was about 11, I saw the Monty Python skit on the Ministry of Silly Walks and realized mine was probably worse.
Not the physical ones–the genuine metaphorical birds and bees.
When I was 3 or 4 I was outside playing with Mary Lou when I had to go in to pee.
Mary Lou said “why don’t you just pee out here?”
I’d never thought of that. I said “Can you do that?”
She said “sure, like this” and pulled down her pants.
To my shock, her peeny was gone and there was nothing left but a crack. I said “What happened to your peeny? Did you get hit by a car?”
She looked puzzled and said “No, it’s always been like that.”
I ran in & told mommy. Mommy said “It’s ok, all girls are made like that.”
I said “Ok.”
Cut to age 7. I’ve discovered electricity and graduated from scotch-taping together a crystal radio to trying to make some little circuits more formally.
Looking in the Allied Radio catalogue at socket connectors, the chart identified them as “male” and “female.”
I said, “a-HA!!”
I guess I was about 11, built a bicycle from spare parts of others discarded bikes and thought I was way cool. So cruising around with some buddies and said, “hey I bet I can ride my bike 5 ft up that telephone pole if I get a running start and pull a wheelie as I start”. Dumb dumb dumb, wrapped that bike around the pole, busted my pride, and fractured my standing with my pals, but no broken bones, lots of bruises and contusions. Walked my bike home, limping and lamenting and I have always remembered that little bit of education, boy + bike + trying to show off = disasterous events.