My mother used to chase kids while threatening to cut their tongues off with scissors.
Hmmm, running with scissors and threatening young children with mayhem (while indirectly encouraging them to stick their tongue out at adults) – might explain a few things…
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I’m afraid that @OtherMichael will hear me one of these nights and finally figure out who has been replacing the semicolons in his code with greek question marks…
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The windows in my condo go from floor to ceiling…
I clean the insides each spring and need to use a ladder to reach the top…
I use almost no force though; for fear of the entire (50-yr old?) assembly giving way and my falling 11 stories.
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I don’t have the right words to describe what I felt. It was when I looked up, not down that the shivers came on. It felt similar to when you are on a boat and you know there is a mile of water between you and the bottom, or you take a road trip by yourself and end up vastly far from anything resembling help.
It is a damn odd feeling, one I will overcome, and also one I acknowledge. Hell, Felix Baumgartner had to as well.
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I’ll carping do it again. Even with the same captain who took us up, and was shot down twice as a pilot.
When we came down, there was a bottle of champagne. He was more terrified about sabering it than I was in the balloon.
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I used to be not very environmentally responsible as an adolescent so I’d throw fireworks in the bay to watch them fire underwater. Ground bloom flowers looked really cool. The trick is to use fireworks with the thicker fuses that have oxidizers in them and make sure they’re fully lit before you toss them in. Also, if you’re me, never throw an M-80 off a bridge into a bay. You will feel guilty the rest of your life when you realize that there were fish in there, and they’ve started to float up. My brother used to make Molotov cocktails and throw them at the sea wall so the burning gas would float on the water, so at least I’m not as bad as that maniac.
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Those and their little cousins, jumpin’ jacks, were our water-bombs of choice. We used to have jumpin’ jack wars (throw them at each other) until one stuck to the back of what must have been a polyblend t-shirt of one of my buddies (he didn’t get burned, but it made a giant hole in his shirt).
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I’d cut open the jumping jacks and smaller firecrackers, collect all the powder, and when I had enough, put it in plastic model tanks and planes doused with model airplane fuel. With little army men circled around also covered in model airplane fuel. Then my brother and I would light it and watch for the nice big burst when the powder finally flared. By all standards I shouldn’t be alive right now. At one point I got a box of.22 cal plastic blanks (what the hell is up with my parents) and started adding those in.
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It is always good to have a mitigating factor around, when you are learning. Parents, teachers, dad’s, the like. We all do dumb things.
My dumbest has got to be Fire Football. My brother and I took a soccer ball, and cut a slit in it. We then filled it a quarter way full with gas, and lit it. Of course since the slit was so small it didn’t just burn out of control.
But every time he and I would kick the ball, a spout of flame like Mad Max Fury Road would erupt.
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Long time ago I was pulling into my apartment complex, and as I came over the top of a crest in the road, there stood a peacock directly in front of me, maybe ten feet. On. Full. Display. Dude stared me down for what felt like an hour but was really just a few minutes, mostly spent with my jaw in my lap. At some point I realized that he wasn’t going anywhere on my account, so I backed up and went the back way.
I have a pretty garbage LT memory but I can still close my eyes and picture it perfectly.
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You have to imagine me speaking like Eddie izzard to make this bit work: peacocks are such bastards
Only topped by Canadian geese. Canadian persons are amazing, which is balanced by their geese, who are horrible mean people.
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I am now afraid to google ‘Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’.
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Geese are basically the least awesome animal.
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Separated at birth…
My brother always had black powder that I would use and then I discovered his “Solidox” brazing stuff that I could grind up and mix with sugar.
I would also disassemble bullets for my powder fix – usually the 30-30 and 30.06 shells because they had the most.
It is rather amazing that I still have all my fingers (and sense of touch) – there were a couple times when I was afraid to open my eyes because it felt like I had lost the tips of my fingers. I always feared losing my fingers because there was a guy in our church who had blew his fingers off as a kid, but I didn’t fear it enough to actually avoid the hazard.
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Anyone who’s not afraid of geese is wrong.
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The road thing doesn’t bother me, but I grew up in the vicinity of such things.
The ground being a mile beneath the water, that’s terrifying.
Balloons, no. Theoretically, anyway.
In high school marching band (first year only) I was afraid of my saxophone mouthpiece smashing through my teeth, upper palate and nose.
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Oh, Jesus, I am very afraid of disassembling bullets now. I disassembled a couple .45 magnums but saw powder at the end of the bullet that never came out, not realizing what primer was, so I scraped at it with a screwdriver (while looking into the casing, naturally) and got the scare of my life when the primer ignited.
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Dinosaurs, I tell you. Stick your finger in a carps mouth, it is pleasant. Stick your finger in a gooses mouth, you will do a sillier walk than John cleese ever did on python.
Stick your finger in a pythons mouth… I’m not even gonna go there.
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I went to a classmate’s farm in 3rd grade. He helped burn the trash, and we went and played buying things, melting lipsticks, styrofoam, pouring cups of used tractor oil onto detritus, etc. We had a bullet from his brothers gun, and it eventually went off in my face. Fortunately, it was pointing into the ground and didn’t ricochet of any of the rocks.
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You would kick it.
Jesus.
No WONDER you’re on a watchlist.
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