When I was 15 or so I used a bent nail to pull a 100A fuse out its socket and the nail slipped and made contact with one end and I ended up shaking pretty violently while screaming "aiiiaaaa" lol. I got a burn on my finger and the nail welded itself to the end of fuse it contacted.
One other mains voltage oops happened some 10 years later. I fixed up a laptop charger, and while it was out its casing I took it firmly in my hand and I then for some reason proceeded to plug it in. Another loud "aiiaaa" happened and the newly fixed charger was completely toast and I had whole bunch of burns on my hand that took several weeks to heal up.
230V is really energizing lol
One other mains voltage oops happened some 10 years later. I fixed up a laptop charger, and while it was out its casing I took it firmly in my hand and I then for some reason proceeded to plug it in. Another loud "aiiaaa" happened and the newly fixed charger was completely toast and I had whole bunch of burns on my hand that took several weeks to heal up.
230V is really energizing lol
In my early twenties, after having read Walt Jung's article on upgrading the Magnavox/Philips CD player and being successful at it, I got cocky. I told my cousin that I could refurb his Technics receiver with better and bigger psu caps. I didn't think at all about the bleeder resistors. I swapped out the caps and flipped the switch. Ahhh, powered up fine. But realized I hadn't tightened down the screws on the cap terminals. So hit the power switch to OFF. Tightened the first screw and then to the next. Obviously, I had the screwdriver slide a bit on the 2nd terminal...BAM! My cousin and I were both hovering over the cap and we saw a bright flash and we couldn't see anything for about 20 to 30 seconds. Melted that screwdriver tip pretty well.
In my limited experience, I can't imagine driving or doing anything other than going for a walk in a local park or wherever, and wondering why I never realized how important all the creatures of the planet were. Even mosquitoes and honey badgers made sense. Then there was the deep thinking part about how I fit in to the whole scheme of things. Too much.
The problem I had was why my face hurt the next day. Others told me it because of the unavoidable **** eating grins. Maybe you guys can confirm that.
A part of me misses my youth.
I spent a wasted weekend at the rangers station for a park in the Florida keys some time in the late 60's with perhaps a dozen people. Some were friends from high school, others I did not know. One of my friend's older brother was the park ranger. He would not take place in the journey, only insure the safety of those involved and the park itself.
Electric Orange Juice and other implements were involved. I had remembered multiple "lightning flashes" that were unexplained at the time. This would be the first time that I had ever heard the music of the Moody Blues, specifically On The Threshold Of A Dream and In Search Of The Lost Chord. For some unknown reason I have seen them in concert at least 20 times, and have all of their recorded music in several formats.
About a week after the journey my friend shows up as school with some pictures. It seems that the unexplained lightning was the ranger's camera. Photographic evidence confirmed the "grin" effect and zombie like countenance on some, but not all participants. Possible the effects of added alcohol.
To those of us who spent many nights in the Florida Keys, the Everglades, or on a boat somewhere near the coast line, mosquitoes NEVER made sense. I have no recollection or whether they did that night, or simply went unnoticed, but there was evidence that I spent several hours wandering around the park dressed in only a pair of shorts.
For reasons that I don't understand mosquitoes seem to find me far less appetizing than most other people. They will always attempt to attack Sherri through her clothing which is doused in repellent, than my bare skin.
A mosquito, like a flea, must bite a warm blooded animal in order to complete it's reproductive cycle, so any target should be acceptable, but some seem to be preferred. I have read that is has to do with your CO2 footprint.
Mosquitoes don't like me, either, and only bite if no one else is around. Sometimes it's good to be undesirable.
Isn't there already a long thread just like this one? I remember it from a few years back.
EDIT: Yep, here it is. stupid things we've done
Isn't there already a long thread just like this one? I remember it from a few years back.
EDIT: Yep, here it is. stupid things we've done
It's interesting to look at the recollection of the flaming car incident which happened in about 1971. I recalled and wrote about the incident in the other thread in 2010, then again in this thread a few days ago. The incident happened about 45 years ago but my two recollections separated by 7 years are nearly identical except for the time it took me to reach the lake, which in reality had to be a few seconds.
Ditto the Gates transmitter incident, and the Tull concert incident. I can even recall the name of the kid running around the concert field with a Tupperware container full of Electric Orange Juice. But, can I remember what I had for dinner last night, or where I put my %$*^%# car keys......NOOOOOOO.
Looking back, there were multiple incidents of stupid human behavior that could have ended very badly. Why is it that I'm still alive?
Ditto the Gates transmitter incident, and the Tull concert incident. I can even recall the name of the kid running around the concert field with a Tupperware container full of Electric Orange Juice. But, can I remember what I had for dinner last night, or where I put my %$*^%# car keys......NOOOOOOO.
Looking back, there were multiple incidents of stupid human behavior that could have ended very badly. Why is it that I'm still alive?
Thats just your brain telling you what your priorities are in life. Tupperware containers have good stuff in them, FAR more important than stupid car keys and stupid jobs.
So that we can laugh at your misfortunes. Someone must've said "oh we've gotta make this guy survive, his stories are funny as hell."
My exploits are pretty tame by comparison, a few accidents here and there, the ReVox G36 being the only one memorable enough to remember 40+ yrs later. I've had photoflash caps turn into roman candles on a hot summer day, but the fire extinguisher routine is too boring to relate.
Thank you for sharing some great stories, well told..
Thank you for sharing some great stories, well told..
Did a load of shrooms one night and attempted to drive , managed a few miles but kept getting distracted by all the pretty things flashing past so pulled up in a lay-by and went walkabout.
Eventually found my way back to the car ( Morris Marina
) and rolled a much needed joint.By the time all the pixies , aliens and assorted Tolkien characters had started to wander off the sun was starting to rise and i was feeling cold so i decided to light a fire .
I gathered anything flammable i could find and built a bonfire .
The heat soon got really intense so i tried to retreat a bit ... it was at that point i realised
that i was still a long way from 'normal' and i had built my campfire in the passenger footwell of the car which had now spread to the seat .
Being miles from the nearest house or phone all i could do was watch it burn until a local farmer came along and gave me a ride back to civilization.
Then there was the time ......
We are ALL part of the matrix......(by the way my real name is Anderson).
Photoflash caps, a blown fuse followed by a NoBlo fuse (not to be confused with SloBlo) are the reason my 300Beast sits on a shelf awaiting a rebuild. There is probably remnants of one of those caps still left behind in the Florida house where I lived for 37 years.
The NoBlo fuse when employed in a certain Sorrensen power supply, which had been given the Tubelab treatment, became a useful diagnostic and short removal tool in the (then) new 4 layer PC board technology being developed at Motorola for the MX-300 two way radio (1975).
My last experiment with mushrooms was in 1975 while in the Jacksonville FL. One weekend my roomies and I decided to make a batch of Mushroom cool-aid, actually using frozen Lime concentrate as it covered the taste best.
I picked the shrooms on my way home from work as I was working night shift at the time and could hit the field early in the morning.
So that Saturday we were all setting around in the trailer, and I was to the point I was seeing music coming out of speakers when everything went away.
The best way I could describe it is that I had a total computer hard reset.
When I came to, I didn't know anything. Not who I was, not where I was, not who I was with, etc. At this point I started to panic and latched onto the phrase "you have nothing to fear but fear itself" and calmed down. Eventually I heard people calling my name, and asking if I were ok, and the reboot finished and I was back to normal so to speak.
That woke me up to why I would never play with shrooms again.
I picked the shrooms on my way home from work as I was working night shift at the time and could hit the field early in the morning.
So that Saturday we were all setting around in the trailer, and I was to the point I was seeing music coming out of speakers when everything went away.
The best way I could describe it is that I had a total computer hard reset.
When I came to, I didn't know anything. Not who I was, not where I was, not who I was with, etc. At this point I started to panic and latched onto the phrase "you have nothing to fear but fear itself" and calmed down. Eventually I heard people calling my name, and asking if I were ok, and the reboot finished and I was back to normal so to speak.
That woke me up to why I would never play with shrooms again.
I tried shrooms once, and did not like the effect. My brother, however was a fan. He and his friends would go out into a dairy cattle field to gather shrooms late at night. In the 70's most of western Broward county Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) was a huge dairy cattle grazing field.
Sometime in early 1973, my brother woke me up in the middle of the night scared silly. He was totally white faced, nearly incoherent and kept repeating a story about "Army guys with M-16's and attack dogs" chasing him and his friends down. It took an hour or so to calm him down enough to get the whole story. His story would later be corroborated by his friends.
It seems that I had told him about some large grazing fields that I drove by on my commute back when I lived in Miami and worked in western Broward county. He and a few friends decided to check out the shrooms in those fields since most of the cattle fields in Miami had been developed into residential property. They had left their car on the side of Flamingo road and walked east into a large field with a dense jungle in the middle (uncharacteristic for the area). As they walked toward a gathering of cattle they were surrounded by the "Army Men" on all sides, interrogated, and "given a two minute head start" to get out of the field.
Even though they all stuck to their stories, I blew it off as being similar to an event where myself and 7 friends "saw UFO's" one night where we had two 34 foot sailboats rafted together and anchored off of Bimini Island in the "Bermuda Triangle" and several people all made contributions to the blender, including frozen Lime concentrate.
Fast forward to the mid 1980's. My friend (standing next to the road runner in a previous post) was a military surplus dealer. He often called me for odd jobs that needed technical electronics ability, or sometimes just physical strength to load big things onto trucks. I would often get some of the "stuff" in exchange for my work (like 100,000 vacuum tubes). He calls me and asks if I can help drag some stuff up out of an "underground bunker" not too far from my house. OK, I'm curious, there are NO underground bunkers in South Florida, wrong!
He picks me up in a 20 foot or so box truck and takes me to a site in undeveloped southwestern Broward county in what is now Miramar. It is an abandoned Nike Missile launch facility being demolished. This is the field where my brother and his friends met the Army Men! His story WAS true after all.
We were not permitted to take any pictures while at the site, and I had nearly forgotten about both incidents until the mention of shrooms triggered an old memory, so off to Google Earth I go. There is now a large modern National Guard Training Facility on the western edge of the site, and an old barracks style encampment on the east side. The former underground bunkers are just north of the barracks.
The whole area is called the "Snake Creek Training Center." This is now in the middle of a developed area with everything from trailer parks to upscale housing communities. The old folks still talk about a "live fire" training exercise that scared the crap out of an entire community 15 years or so ago.
Google Maps
City of Miramar, Florida: Snake Creek Training Facility : Previously Nike Missile Defense Base
Google Groups
Sometime in early 1973, my brother woke me up in the middle of the night scared silly. He was totally white faced, nearly incoherent and kept repeating a story about "Army guys with M-16's and attack dogs" chasing him and his friends down. It took an hour or so to calm him down enough to get the whole story. His story would later be corroborated by his friends.
It seems that I had told him about some large grazing fields that I drove by on my commute back when I lived in Miami and worked in western Broward county. He and a few friends decided to check out the shrooms in those fields since most of the cattle fields in Miami had been developed into residential property. They had left their car on the side of Flamingo road and walked east into a large field with a dense jungle in the middle (uncharacteristic for the area). As they walked toward a gathering of cattle they were surrounded by the "Army Men" on all sides, interrogated, and "given a two minute head start" to get out of the field.
Even though they all stuck to their stories, I blew it off as being similar to an event where myself and 7 friends "saw UFO's" one night where we had two 34 foot sailboats rafted together and anchored off of Bimini Island in the "Bermuda Triangle" and several people all made contributions to the blender, including frozen Lime concentrate.
Fast forward to the mid 1980's. My friend (standing next to the road runner in a previous post) was a military surplus dealer. He often called me for odd jobs that needed technical electronics ability, or sometimes just physical strength to load big things onto trucks. I would often get some of the "stuff" in exchange for my work (like 100,000 vacuum tubes). He calls me and asks if I can help drag some stuff up out of an "underground bunker" not too far from my house. OK, I'm curious, there are NO underground bunkers in South Florida, wrong!
He picks me up in a 20 foot or so box truck and takes me to a site in undeveloped southwestern Broward county in what is now Miramar. It is an abandoned Nike Missile launch facility being demolished. This is the field where my brother and his friends met the Army Men! His story WAS true after all.
We were not permitted to take any pictures while at the site, and I had nearly forgotten about both incidents until the mention of shrooms triggered an old memory, so off to Google Earth I go. There is now a large modern National Guard Training Facility on the western edge of the site, and an old barracks style encampment on the east side. The former underground bunkers are just north of the barracks.
The whole area is called the "Snake Creek Training Center." This is now in the middle of a developed area with everything from trailer parks to upscale housing communities. The old folks still talk about a "live fire" training exercise that scared the crap out of an entire community 15 years or so ago.
Google Maps
City of Miramar, Florida: Snake Creek Training Facility : Previously Nike Missile Defense Base
Google Groups
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I think I was a senior in high school when we went out and did some acid. We both laughed uncontrollably for hours. I was choking trying to catch my breath I was laughing so hard. I don't remember what was so funny, but when it was time to go home it took a while for us to stop laughing. I felt like I had it together when I walked in the door, but my mother immediately said "what happened to your eyes?" I thought oh-oh and looked in the mirror. I had two huge shiners from laughing so hard. My mother walked in the bathroom and asked "were you fighting?" I said "no ma we were laughing." She said "laughing at what?" I had to tell the truth- "I don't know." She though it was odd to say the least. Next day was Saturday and we both went back to our routines - she went grocery shopping and I cut the grass.
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