Childhood passtimes…

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  • version30

    dropping dummies off bridges into the highway

  • _niko0

    fuck we were dumb as kids.

    we would stop the elevator in-between floors, open the door and jump down to the floor below.

    • huh, using the STOP button to brake the lift leveled perfectly on a floor!raf
  • raf0

    Putting coins, screws, firecrackers and stuff in general on train rails.
    A year later a teenager got one derailed in our neighbourhood.

    • sweet. the most we got were slugs for video game machines._niko
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    0

    Shooting cars from my bedroom window with a stolen BB gun.

  • raf0

    I taught my little brother physics dropping stuff from our 8th floor window.
    I threw a lot of stuff from that window. Loved to dispose of used light bulbs this way at night.. they gave a nice loud pop on impact.

  • ********
    0

    me and my buddies would climb up to the roof of my apartment building and just chill up there after school, smoking and whatnot. we'd made a makeshift fort up there using some nasty old mattresses... it was a pretty cool place to chill until someone found out about it and called the cops on us. makes me realize just how much free time i use to have back then.

  • kona0

    I grew up living next to a set of railroad tracks. Anytime a train came by when we were out playing or riding our bikes we'd high tail it down to the railroad bridge and hide out until the engine passed. Then we'd pop up and throw rocks at the passing train cars. Back then the train cars that hauled new automobiles used to be completely open. We'd try and see how many windows we could bash in with the rocks. Now you see that all train cars that carry autos come fully enclosed.

    You can thank me for that. :)

    haha

  • mg330

    Man this thread is one of the best things I've read in a while. Makes my youth seem boring!

    The only really crazy thing I instantly recall was a time during the summer when the ice cream truck would come around the neighborhood. As it was moving slowly along everyone circled around and laid their bikes on the street in front of it, then jumped on back of the truck and shook it like crazy, making stuff fall off the racks inside and scaring the driver.

    The next day we all peeked from over fences as the truck returned with a single police car escort trying to catch all the bad kids.

    It's funny to think about that now - everyone has a cell phone now and the driver could have just called the cops right then. But I'm sure he had to go to a pay phone or the actual police station.

  • _niko0

    dumb thing #67

    tying your little brother up to a tree by a busy road and pulling his pants down while cars drove by in shock.

    • Poor little brothers :(. I weep when I think what I did to mine. He's a great guy now.
      I'm still a worthless cunt : /
      mikotondria3
    • That's also Great Thing # 15.mg33
  • mg330

    I grew up in the country-ish suburbs of Dallas Ft. Worth, TX. As a kid there was tons of land around before it all became developed subdivisions, so we always had big hide and seek matches, places to hide and hang out that was private property for the most part but nobody came out there. It was always so much fun to find something new - rusted out abandoned cars, animal bones, a way to sneak through someone's fence and take a shortcut to a friend's house. I remember when they built a bunch of new houses, it meant I had to take this long-ass route to a friend's house that typically took me 5 minutes to get to. The solution was just hopping some guys fence and shimmying along the side of his house and dropping down into a field. I was in middle school, so at that age you're constantly scared of getting caught doing anything.

    • i know and LOVE that nervous feeling. being paranoid of getting caugh. i feel like doing something bad.
      ********
    • me too. The only legit thing you can do as an adult like that is driving around with drugs on your person. Meh,mikotondria3
    • yeah, there was comfort in knowing that you could only be tried as a juvenile.
      ********
  • kona0

    I had a neighbor who's brother was in the army so he'd send home all his army fatigues for his little brother. So we'd put them on and tunnel rat through the larger drain pipes out in the fields. We did it for years until we all got too big to fit through them. That and one afternoon my friend turned a corner and staring at him was a giant possum. Turns out they are not cute and cuddly.

    • I think I spent 1/4 of my youth underground in tunnels, culverts, drainage systems...mg33
    • me too!scarabin_net
  • mg330

    One of my friends' and I thought it would be a great idea to have a BB Gun war with each other in his backyard. His dad caught us and thought he was going to murder us. The stupid things kids do... could have shot out a window, an eye...

  • raf0

    From "The Real Frank Zappa Book"

    "My Dad was employed as a meteorologist at the Edgewood Arsenal. They made poison gas there during World War II, so I guess it would have been the meteorologist's job to figure out which way the wind was blowing when it was time to shoot the stuff off.

    He used to bring equipment home from the lab for me to play with: beakers, Florence flasks, little petri dishes full of mercury -- blobs of mercury. I used to play with it all the time. The entire floor of my bedroom had this 'muck' on it, made out of mercury mixed with dust balls.

    One of the things I used to like to do was pour the mercury on the floor and hit it with a hammer, so it squirted all over the place. I lived in mercury.

    When DDT was first invented, my Dad brought some home -- there was a whole bag of it in the closet. I didn't eat it or anything, but he said that you could -- it was supposed to be 'safe,' it only killed bugs."

    http://www.amazon.com/Real-Frank…

    • Love Zappa. Started reading this book and couldnt finish. He was sooo full of himself.baseline_shift
  • SteveJobs0

    let's see, for school: super glued chalk to the teachers' chalkboard trays, left unrolled condoms in the desk drawers of the socially awkward teachers. would throw pencils up so they'd stick in the classroom ceiling while the teachers weren't looking.

    prank calls were fun at 1am, telling locals in our best grown-up voices that 'their cows were in my garden'. given our rural surroundings, we'd sometimes get horrified shreiks, just before our agrarian victims would apologize and run off into the night to retrieve their wandering cattle.

  • Melanie0

    Going to Hogganfield Park fishing for sticky back minnows, then taking them home and flushing them down the toilet.

    We lived up above the liquor shop. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&…

    • How exactly was this fun or interesting?mg33
    • When you live in a housing scheme catching minnows was a big deal. We also used to make petrol bombs for the big kidsMelanie
  • SteveJobs0

    i used to go down to the creek and drop fishing lines with lunch meat down into crawdad holes. some of those fuckers were strong and would hold on to my line to get a few nibbles before finally letting go.

    apparently i didn't respond well to conditioning, because whenever i caught one, i was immediately curious how strong it's pinch was, despite the cut flesh i was still nursing from my last big catch.

  • raf0

    I haven't done this myself, but saw it done:
    At school, people leaned onto or sat on radiators below windows during breaks. Radiators were powered by central heating, hot water circulating through pipes in the building - these things differ across countries.
    You take a capacitor, put its ends into a wall socket so it would get a charge - you had to know which one would work and not explode. Then you have to stick both of the capacitor's ends to a pipe that supplied heat to the radiator people sat on. They would feel the discharge on their asses!

    These pipes had often two scratches on them, each for each of the capacitor's 'legs' - paint removed for better conduction

  • SteveJobs0

    i remember some kids used to make these stink bombs out of a click-pen, a bobby pin and a few other items that i can't remember. i was quite impressed with the work of genius that they were able to fit inside those pens - the mechanics of it all being set off by actually clicking the pen top and the horrendous rotten egg odor it gave off.

  • SteveJobs0

    ^ ok, so it's not as amazing as it was in the 5th grade, but here it is:

  • scarabin_net0

    • i dragged my mattress into the backyard and set fire to it just to see what it would look like

    • we also did the whole drainage pipe thing, we'd sometimes wander and crawl through these for miles, mapping them out and finding ways to travel to different places (usually it was this place called "mott's 5 and 10", which was our favorite place to shoplift candy and toys). we'd steal flashlights from our houses and tear up t-shirts to make torches. one time our flashlight broke and my stupid friend dropped his torch while we were at least a mile into one of those things. that shit was terrifying, trying to find your way back through those labyrinthine tunnels... there was also a rumour we heard from the older kids about there being "pockets of natural gas" that were supposedly explosive. that made using torches pretty scary

    • then we'd go to nearby creeks and capture crayfish, the bigger the better. we'd put them together in ladder-style tournaments in which they'd rip each other's arms and stuff of, and care for the champions...

    • another thing we'd do is steal steak knives from our houses, then take them out in the woods, detach their handles, and put the blades on carefully prepared sticks and shoot these arrows from homemade bows from our treehouses

    • one of our group got some shotgun shell primers from his older brother. we'd take aluminum arrows, unscrew the heads, fill their hollow bodies with powder, fit the primer on top, then tape a bb over that. we'd shoot them at trees and stuff. on impact the bbs would fire off the primer, which would explode the arrow

    • or we'd make elaborate wooden swords using one of our friend's dad's workshop, then fuck each other up swordfighting

    come to think of it, most of my childhood was spent making weapons