Stupid Stuff We Did As Kids thread

[DanOregon]

AKA - Probably a suspension or a criminal charge today thread.

Had a friend who did this when I was a kid - never understood it or where the hell it came from. Until now

https://whereofonecanspeak.com/2017/03/15/apple-core-baltimore/


I also seem to remember a variation of touch football called Philly Eagle where you could pass it past the line of scrimmage and it could get pretty violent - kind of like Kill The Carrier (or the less PC name) but with sidelines. Fun stuff. But everytime I research it - all I get are posts about the Philadelphia Eagles.

 

[da man]

We just played tackle without pads or helmets. That seems pretty damn stupid in retrospect.

 

[User 150927]

Smear the ...... Which I guess was kill the carrier

Tackle football all the time

My brother and I would have match fights in the living room. It's exactly what it sounds like. We'd stand about 10 ft apart, each with a pack of matches. We'd tear match, then using our thumbs, flick it across the match pack and at each other. Sometimes they lit and sometimes they didn't. We never burned the house down.

Bloody knuckles. No one has heard of this so I think we made it up. It was a card game that however many points you lost by, the other player used the pack of cards and whacked the hell out of your knuckles till they bled.

Jumping off the roof of the house. Jumping off the top of the slide. Climbing onto the roof of the school next to my house.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Bloody knuckles. No one has heard of this so I think we made it up. It was a card game that however many points you lost by, the other player used the pack of cards and whacked the hell out of your knuckles till they bled.

We used to do this. I can't remember what we called it, I don't think it was "bloody knuckles" but same thing: you lost, however many points, you got that many whacks on your knuckles with the deck of cards -- which the other person angled to do maximum damage.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Our version of Bloody Knuckles was laying a stiff plastic comb with a handle (it was the 1970s) across our hand. The handle stuck out past your knuckles and the end of the comb was against your wrist. The other player tried to grab the comb, twist it and rake the stiff teeth down your knuckles before you moved.

 

[The Big Ragu]

We weren't that sophisticated. We stuck to the simple, tried-and-true classics, like "kill the man with the ball."

 

[misterbc]

I’d play a form of what we called ‘murder ball’ but with bow and arrows. You would stand 50-60 yards away from your friend and shoot an arrow either at, or just to the side of him. Not at full draw on your bow or else it would be coming at, almost, a speed that you couldn’t pick up the arrow in flight. The object, natch, was to not get hit but to come ‘very close’, like a foot or two away. We had red arrows with yellow feathers that we had painted up so they were easier to see and you didn’t play it where someone had look into the sun. All of this was on a gopher hole filled field a few hundred yards away from my house that eventually became a shopping mall.
Double Jeopardy in that you had to worry about the arrows while not stepping in a gopher hole and breaking your leg.
Fun time, then we would smoke some Kool cigarettes afterward. 1967-68.

 

[MisterCreosote]

My three brothers and I spent an inordinate amount of time recreating pro wrestling matches to see if the moves/holds really hurt or not.

Among our findings: The figure-four doesn’t really hurt. The flying elbow off the couch does.

 

[Songbird]

Collect bags full of ripe acorns and tennis racket them as hard as we could throughout the neighborhood.

 

[The Big Ragu]

I never did this. ... but I remember other kids shooting roman candles at each other.

 

[BTExpress]

Wasn't "stupid," but my local Putt-Putt hosted midnight tournaments once a month on Saturday nights. Here I am, a 15-year-old kid, playing miniature golf until 1:30 in the morning, when they would crown the winners of the three divisions. Afterward, we would get about 4-5 pairs and play best ball at $5 per game until about 3 a.m., at which time my dad (bless his heart) would come pick me up.

Those best-ball games are where my yips started. Lost $35 in one night (about two weeks of paper route money) and never regained my touch --- at my peak I averaged about 30-31 on the par-36 course with a low score of 24.

 

[DanOregon]

I loved staying out all night in line for concert tickets. A Genesis show in the Bay Area, I'm in line - maybe 20 spots back. I'm jacked - granted this was at the local Record Factory or whatever it was that was the Ticketmaster outlet. I see a buddy of mine, he goes to the 24-hour grocery in the same mall and shoplifts a bottle of schnaps, having a good ol time one minute, it's morning the next thing I know. Get to the front of the line, they give me two choices, About a third of the way up in line of the stage, or floor way back. I took the seats higher up. Good show - but the night in line was more fun. PS - Genesis added three more shows the next day. Do people even do this anymore or just head straight to the scalpers/I mean "premium seating agencies."

 

[spikechiquet]

My buddy cracked his back in 7th grade and had to wear a brace. After he got out of it, we used it as BB-gun armor. Yes, we would take turns wearing it while the other shot a BB gun at the guy wearing it.

Had about a 15/20-ft cliff in my backyard that was littered with jagged rocks. In the winter we would sled off it and hope we didn't get impaled.

I knew where my grandpa kept his Marlbolo Reds and matches. Would take a pack and go in the woods to smoke them. Accidentally started a fire and had to use my jean jacket and Huffy bike tires to put it out. Had burns all over both the jacket and the tires. I could have easily taken out the whole forest.

Those are the most traumatic moments I recall offhand.

 

[spikechiquet]

My three brothers and I spent an inordinate amount of time recreating pro wrestling matches to see if the moves/holds really hurt or not.

Among our findings: The figure-four doesn’t really hurt. The flying elbow off the couch does.

Oh, you didn't do the figure four right then. Done properly, it can rip some ACLs

 

[Killick]

I never did this. ... but I remember other kids shooting roman candles at each other.

Guilty. I still have two wounds from our “wars.” One, a scar on my neck in which a rocket wound its way from about 40 feet away and nailed me in the neck. I can still see that thing corkscrewing in while I stood frozen like a deer in headlights.

Second one is a two-inch burn scar on my stomach. Was fashioning a “gun,” basically a pipe like a bazooka to direct my shot. I didn’t make the stopper on the back end thick enough, so when I test-fired it the first time, all the propellant was directed right into me.

 

[bumpy mcgee]

I remember playing a version of 'Kill the man with the ball.' Basically one guy has a basketball at the top of the key, everyone else was in the lane waiting for him and he had to try get to ge bucket and score with everyone allowed to do whatever to stop him. On blacktop.

 

[justgladtobehere]

Friends and I would sit on our skateboards and ride down roads making turns and blowing through stop signs. It was on quiet suburban streets, but if a car did come by we would have been ****ed.

I used to melt the wheels on these toy cars I had. I would stuff the spent matches in the couch.

 

[Roscablo]

We just played tackle without pads or helmets. That seems pretty damn stupid in retrospect.

We played just about every damn day in front of the neighborhood middle school. It was a perfect field for us. Good width and length. We broke one of my best friend's collar bones one day. His mom worked at the school and she was still there, so we just went in and turned him over so he could go get it taken care of. He was in a lot of pain, but we all thought it was sort of funny. It didn't stop the games either.

 

[Roscablo]

One of the absolute dumbest things I did was we were all hanging out one night, driving age, and there were too many of us to fit into my buddy's freaking Pinto station wagon. We weren't going far and on neighborhood streets, so I rode on the bumper! Was standing up, holding onto the rack thing on the top. I was jacking around and turned to the side of the car to wave inside, just as my friend decided to fly around a corner. I took flight. He saw that I did and slammed on the breaks. I can still see how close that bumper came to hitting my head when he stopped. I was a bloody mess but nothing broken or otherwise off. I am lucky I didn't die.

 

[Batman]

We didn't have a lot of open green space in my neighborhood, so we played football on the blacktop. There were a few dead end streets in the area that were perfect for it.
It was two-hand touch, not tackle. We weren't complete idiots. But we would still occasionally trip or slip and get scraped up pretty bad. One time we were playing on a street that had a rose bush or something close to the curb and a kid ran straight into it trying to catch a pass. He got torn up pretty bad.

In high school we played dodgeball with racquetballs and racquets. It was supposed to be a racquetball unit in gym class. They pulled out the wooden partitions that divided the gym into three sections, so at any given time two of the three sections were out of the teacher's view. I don't remember how exactly it started. Probably somebody horsing around and sending a ball someone else's way. But it didn't take long for it to devolve into full-on, 45-minute, full-court wars. There were 6 or 8 of us in that part of the gym and we'd divide into teams, then play it like a regular dodgeball game. It was, hands down, one of the funnest times I've ever had in gym class.
Turns out, though, that it's really hard to hit somebody with a racquetball, which is probably a good thing. We spent most of the time just sending them each other's way. I almost drilled a guy right between the eyes once. The shot went about a foot over his head and might have done serious damage if it had connected. I got hit in the leg a couple of times and caught one ricochet behind the ear. The latter was not very pleasant. My ear was ringing for about an hour afterward.