Stupid Things You've Done

Yeah, I'm fond of the thought of putting someone else's house up for sale, myself. There's probably some stupid law against doing that, though.

I never heard from anyone about the stapled shut mail box, so I think that one is just going to be our little secret.

As far as stupid deeds from my mis-spent youth, I'd say that driving over Red Mountain Pass with a pint of Wild Turkey in the middle of a raging blizzard was right up there. On the way, I over took a snow plow driver who got slicked off the mountain by an avalanche about 20 minutes after I'd passed him.

[Elspode]

Ummm...how does passing a snow plow that got thrown overboard qualify as stupid? What would have happened to you if you'd stayed behind him, hmmmmm???

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by marichiko

I had my handy staple gun in my hip pocket, and I whipped it out and pretended to be Annie Oakley and shot at the ax murderer's box.

Well, damned if I didn't score a direct bull's eye! The staple went right into the key hole of his box. Now, I am not a good shot and the odds of this happening must have been a zillion to one.

.

OK, that's it, LJ! You, me, staple guns on Main Street at high noon. May the best girl win! :p

Patrick, I don't think I was stupid to pass the snow plow driver. I was stupid to put myself in the situation in the first place. Let's see: Red Mountain Pass, blizzard, 2:00am, pint of Wild Turkey... I know! Jump in the car and drive 60 miles to Ouray from Durango! I mean, doesn't everyone?

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

[Sundae]

Jumping out of a moving car.

We were at a festival, we had decided to go & play rounders (similar to softball). About 8 of us squeezed into one car, in varying states of sobriety. We were within the actual campsite rather than on the open road.

I was squidged up against the door, and as we bumped over the field I wondered if we were going slowly enough for me to open the door and fall out without hurting myself. I really did think it through, and decided the car was going as slowly as the buses & trains I had stepped off in the past.

What I didn't consider was that I would not be springing out in a forward motion and landing on my feet. Instead I fell out backwards and there was bumping and rolling involved. I ended up losing quite a bit of skin - just grazing, but difficult to keep clean when camping. Oh and some spectacular bruises.

Even now I am puzzled as to why I thought it was a good idea.

[lookout123]

stupid things i've done? hmm...

you really expect me to remember their names?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by marichiko

OK, that's it, LJ! You, me, staple guns on Main Street at high noon. May the best girl win! :p

Or at least be the one with the least trouble removing her shirt after you've both shot those staple guns empty!
...ooch! eech! owie!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

Jumping out of a moving car.~~snip~~Even now I am puzzled as to why I thought it was a good idea.

Standard category, "Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time".
We all have some in that category.

[BigV]

hehe... sounded like a good idea at the time...famous last words.

I love science. I learned I am related to Bill Nye the Science Guy on my wife's side (I would have married her anyway, but that's a different thread ) Aaaannnyway... I have this great recipe for Instant Ice Cream. I think I've posted it...maybe not. But it is 50% dessert and 50% performance art. In addition to the regular ice cream makings, the secret ingredient is liquid nitrogen.

I made a batch at work one time. The ice cream was delicious and all my friends enjoyed it. Afterward we would play around with the liquid N, freezing things. Leaves would crumble, flower petals shattered, little drips dropped from waist height onto the tile floor made little bombs, hissing and smoking. All in good fun.

Not only is liquid N reeeeaaaaallllly cold, when it boils away it expands considerably. Like 800 times it's liquid volume. I took about a capful and poured it into a two liter plastic pop bottle. When I shook the bottle, it became rigid with pressure. I opened the cap and **WHOOOOSH** the gas came out!

Well, following the maxim of shadetree scientists everywhere, if some is good, more is better, right? Well I put about an inch in the bottom of the bottle, not even enough to connect all five of the little wells in the bottom of the bottle. Shake shake shake. Like. A. Rock. Well, I couldn't wrench the top off and quickly became bored with it and set down the bottle and went on my way. I really did forget about it and was back at work on the computer when the bottle exploded.

The sound was literally deafening. People came running from all over the floor, even from the floor below. What happened?! I could barely hear them, my ears were filled with ringing. I managed to talk my way out of it somehow. I had a large office at the time, and there was green plastic shrapnel everywhere. I found little green bits of twisted melted plastic for months afterward. But the most amazing part was that the cap to the could not be found. The only clue we had was a hole one inch in diameter in the ceiling tile directly above the place where the bottle blew.

That cap weighs, what, a fraction of an ounce? The hole it cut in the one inch thick acoustic tile was as clean as if it were laser drilled. No breaking out in the backside of the tile. I don't know, that cap was probably moving at the speed of sound. Cause I never heard of it again. To think I was shaking it around just minutes before...:shudder:. Like juggling a live hand grenade.

Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Er... How did you talk your way out of it, BigV? Alien landing? Drive by shooting? Construction work across the street? Inquiring minds want to know!

[Tonchi]

How about being lost in the middle of the commercial airliner approach path to Mexico City International Airport at midnight in a Cessna 152?

I didn't get into that spot by myself, it was a group effort. There were three guys from Albuquerque who wanted to do a scuba diving tour of Mexico and I went along as interpreter (due to the pilot being my boyfriend). Due to leaving the previous destination late in the day (a frequent problem when guys stay up drinking every night of their vacation) it was already quite dark when we were approaching Mexico City. Although the pilot had an instrument rating, we could not find the outer marker to save our lives. Everybody was looking out at the ground and searching for the signal and we just could not find anything where "it is supposed to be." We kept circling and circling, and nothing.

At that point we should have figured out an alternative, like going to Puebla, but instead we got the bright idea to go in further and talk to the tower. It is International Law that all controllers are supposed to speak English, but guess what? Nobody in the Mexico City tower could understand a thing the pilot said, so I got put on the radio to talk at them in Spanish. We then discovered that THEY didn't know where WE were either! It was pitch black and we were swinging back and forth trying to pick up the marker and suddenly we noticed we were not alone out there. In fact, we were getting less alone all the time. I said "Jesus! Let's get out of here!" but my boyfriend-the-pilot said "They're just going to have to talk us in now." I said "HOW??! We can't understand a word they say!" So with his Chuck Yeager attitude he just picked up the radio again and kept repeating the same request over and over again: to get a controller online who could speak English because we were coming in for a landing and could not get lined up properly without the outer marker. Then I would repeat it in Spanish, then he would say it in English again. (plthijinx can probably correct me on the procedures because I am remembering it from 30 years ago and I didn't understand then what I was doing)

Somebody in the tower told us something to look for on the ground where another beacon was supposed to be and we were all staring out the windows trying to find it, with all these huge commercial airplanes in holding pattern around us and getting thicker traffic every minute. We could pick up their landing instructions coming in from the tower on our radio but nobody telling us what to do still. It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, I was looking out the window and there were people in a Braniff liner looking back at me! The tower told us to keep holding, we kept getting blithering instructions in something that was neither English or Spanish and completely incomprehensible. My boyfriend finally radioed very calmly that he intended to follow the next plane going down for a landing if he didn't get specific directions how to come in otherwise because it was only a matter of time before somebody hit us and we would come down on top of them. I don't even remember seeing any runways in sight, just all those huge planes all around us.

The other planes now began getting into the act because the word was spreading that there was a single-engine Cessna lost out there and they were more nervous than we were (this was in the days were there were considerably more primitive warning devices onboard commercial airliners, if any). One pilot even shouted into the radio "Will you fucking tell him how to land and do it now!!" For whatever reason, maybe it was that the other captains refused to attempt landing until they knew we were out of there, everybody in the sky was put on hold until we got down, with a controller who spoke well enough to get it done. I honestly expected to be arrested when we checked in after landing, but nobody paid the slightest attention to us. We did the usual sign-in-and-bribe-the-customs-officer routine and left the terminal. It occurs to me now that there was probably not even a report filed by the tower of this incident, and that "air traffic control" was a truly relative term there. What is the "near miss" category in the US, 2 miles? Heck, how about 200 FEET?!

The really stupidest part I played came later, when I kept flying with this guy. By the time we arrived at the hotel, he had started shaking and could not sleep all night. He said he'd decided to give up flying because of not being able to handle the situation we had just been through. I should have agreed with him.

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by BigV

The sound was literally deafening. People came running from all over the floor, even from the floor below.

Without access to liquid nitrogen, dry ice works well when mixed with a little water, or Red Devil brand Lye and aluminum foil. Louder than a 12 gauge and enough to make car alarms in a nearby parking lot go off. The little 20oz bottles usually blow out the bottom and are still pretty damn loud. In a dorm setting, lowering an "armed" 20oz with a string to someone's window two stories down at 3:30 in the morning is hilarious.

Beware: they are, under legal definition in most states, bombs. They will blow your fingers off, getting caught is a bad thing, don't try this at home, etc, etc.

[LabRat]

BigV, you are one lucky SOB!!

[plthijinx]

Originally Posted by Tonchi

......He said he'd decided to give up flying because of not being able to handle the situation we had just been through. I should have agreed with him.

probably a good idea.
thinking about this: 1. his marker panel was either not turned on or was broken. 2. mexico city's outer marker could have been inop. (a marker beacon is a transmitter that emmits a cone like radio signal straight up widening with altitude to a max width of something like a 1/4 mile or something, it's not something that you can see on the ground at night. daytime? perhaps.)
or 3. he didn't have the right frequency tuned in for the ILS/LOC approach or NDB.

[BigV]

I talked my way out of it by running out the door "looking for the explosion" same as everyone else. There was only a BIG noise, but no smoke, and except for the easily overlooked plastic "shrapnel" remains of the bottle. I just sideslipped the attention and kept looking with the rest of them. Lucky, in more than one way.




edit: brainlocked and failed to finish a sentence, now fixed.