Wild, weird or stupid things that happened to you in or out of the ministry!

[Rocky]

btw, the word "Rocky" does not equal "politicizing".

I agree the statute of limitations has passed on Oak's "felonious" ways (really not felonious).

My concern was more parental than related to political ideology. and panty raids do not necessarily all cross the line, but might.

anyway, Oak has grown out of his youth, and done so with dignity and grace such that he is beloved by many... and I appreciate his humor too.

[Oakspear]

Okay Rocky, let's kiss and make up...but hold onto your undies :D-->

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice...but in practice there is

Oakspear

[Linda Z]

Dabobbiedoo:

I agree with your assessment of politics. Mwah.

{{{{Rocky & Oak}}}} I love a happy ending.

Linda Z

[Linda Z]

Dot:

Arnold the Pig was fine. I was the one who was traumatized. :)-->

He probably grew up to be dinner, but I didn't like to think about that.

Linda

[Dot Matrix]

That was a funny story except thinking of him as dinner...

[dabobbada]

Huuss, wahh, uusss, waaa, Arnold Skywalker, it is your destiny!

:D--> :D--> :D-->

Way II much fun for one man.

love ya,

Bob Hansen

[alfakat]

vickles--if you can remember a funny one, do tell! I will think of a good one and post it in a bit...

[socks]

:o-->

[This message was edited by socks on January 11, 2004 at 20:47.]

[vickles]

ok alfakat, remember that funky car you drove? With all the graffitti over it? Gosh I had to drive that car sometimes and had people actually yell at me......lol God it was awful....but now looking back that was pretty funny!!!!

Or how about the cat that was paul's that you all used to play with? Now that was pretty funny.

Ok!! I will not try to be a nice person...ok? I will not!!

[vickles]

but I know you can tell those stories better than I...your a great story teller if my memory serves me right.

Ok!! I will not try to be a nice person...ok? I will not!!

[socks]

These are great stories! I can think of so many acts of random weirdness.

Think it was my junior year of high school. I'd transferred to a "Public School" after 10 years, 1 month of Catholic parochial education. Lo 'n' behold came to find that all those years paid off. I'd completed most of the requirements to graduate and only had to take a couple classes both remaining years. So the rest were Art, Music, Drama, Creative Writing, whatever. I had two lunch periods. It was sweet.

The band I was in at the time played at one of the school assemblies my Junior year and we played two songs, one was "I Can See For Miles" by the Who and the other, think it was "Fire" by Hendrix. Hold that thought...

One of the guys got a bright idea, he had some smoke bombs he'd gotten from somewhere, pretty decent size, in stands. They were "safe" supposedly, wouldn't ignite or flame but would let off huge amounts of colored smoke. Somewhere in our teenaged minds this sounded like a cool idea. During "Miles" we get someone to light them behind our amp line, there'd be smoke, it would be cool.

So we did and another legend was born. But instead of the smoke rising triumphantly over the stage and wafting out the back, it rose about 10 feet and proceeded to drop down and fill the stage and the front of the entire auditiorium with smelly smoke.

The drummer was doing his Keith Moon thing, knocking over his cymbals as the bass player flailed away, while the other guitarist Pete Townsend'd his Gibson 335 through the front screen of one of his speaker cab's. I had my Sunn amp stack on "11" and ceremoniously dropped my Telecaster on the floor where it squealed heinous harmonic languages as I knelt over it, Jimi-style. And brownish smoke covered the entire thing in a blanket and somebody set off the fire alarm and marched everyone out.

To a select group this was awesome-cool, if only for the fact that it ended the assembly, which if I remember right were only otherwise memorable for the guy in the balcony who always did animal sound impressions during announcements. For everyone else it was like, a total drag dude. The girl I was dating at the time told me "Well that wasn't very good, all that smoke!" The reactions ranged from "you guys suck!" to "oh yeah, oh yeah!"

A horse is a horse of course of course and this is the answer that you'll endorse,

You've never seen a talking horse? It's the famous Mr. Ed!

[Dot Matrix]

Socks

Oh my, that was so cool about the smoke!

I have to read your second post!

Oh shoot just a double post! Tell us more stories! That one was great!

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

[socks]

Well, since ya got me started...

After I graduated, I got back together in a band with a couple of the guys from the Smoke Experience. We were in to a very artsy kinda thing, hooking up with some peop's out at Cal Berkeley, and consuming massive amounts of druggz on a regular basis. This started out as a fun, creative time and ended up somewhere else. But along the way, they started going to the Mojave Desert to experience the Oneness of the Beauty of the Stuff of the Universe. :D-->

The stupid part - we went off road in a 4-wheel drive one trip to find a spot one of the guys had been before and ended up way out in the middle of the desert, no idea where we were. No matter, a couple of the guys had said they'd seen flying saucers on a previous trip, so we needed to be out in nowhere land. So we had no idea where we were when we got up the next morning.

But the first night there, we had our camp stove going to make dinner as the sun set and geez-o-pete, the sky I remember was incredible. Not a light anywhere except the stars and our campstove. I don't know if it was for real or the uh, condiments, but we saw some strange lights all night in the sky. Later one of the guys decided to light a propane bottle and make a lighter and we went around and set fire to all these little mesquite bushes that were everywhere. Which was kinda cool looking but it brought out the rattle snakes, and I almost stepped back right on one. The guy yelled "SNAKEEEE!" and I literally jumped a foot in the air, like a cartoon character. So I came *this* close to getting bitten by a rattle snake in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. We all slept in the van that night.

More stupidness and weirdness - when we got going the next day, we realized we were lost. We drove around and got more lost. Finally found a little path in the dirt and started heading east. We met a truck along the way, finally! Rescued! We pulled off and were waving at the truck as he drove by, probably figuring we were nutz and he didn't stop! So we kept on going that direction and got to a road that went to a road and to another and finally hit asphalt.

Which was nice, so we headed sort of north east, figuring this looked good. But the freeway was west. The Mojave's in Southern California. We ended up in the mountains somewhere, lost again, and it was snowing and now it's Sunday night. We finally started heading north, to Lake Tahoe. And actually drove all the way up to Tahoe, and then back down to the Bay Area, Oakland. If you look on a map, you'll see that makes as much sense as leaving San Francisco and taking Hawaii as a shortcut to Los Angeles. -->

At one point I called back to home and my later-to-be mrs. socks and reported in that we'd gotten lost somewhere in the Mojave and were heading home now. That thrilled everybody, although I gotta say she took it in stride even though she was worried. We got home Monday morning. Dazed but happy.

Kids.

A horse is a horse of course of course and this is the answer that you'll endorse,

You've never seen a talking horse? It's the famous Mr. Ed!

[johniam]

Vickles: In 1971 I saw the group 'It's a beautiful day' (White bird, Hot summer day) and one of the girls was wearing this sexy red dress. Damned if one of hers fell out of the dress. She noticed it at the end of the song and discreetly slipped it back in. Didn't look embarrassed.

[Dot Matrix]

Socks

Okay, kids are nuts! Can you imagine what would have happened if the snake got ya? We sure do not think of that stuff as kids, huh?

To be that carefree again.... sigh.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

[JA47646]

This happened the year after we left TWI. We were driving to my in-laws for Thanksgiving and were absolutely, flat busted broke on our buts. We had just bought a house and had a 1 y/o baby and did not have the mortgage payment and the night before we left our stove broke. We got caught in a snow storm on the way to the in-laws and used a credit card to stay in a very cheap hotel. Anyway, we survived the trip and on the way back to our home my husband (who has excellent eye sight) saw what he thought was a bank bag lying in the middle of the highway. He turned the car around and stopped and picked up the bag. Inside was $1,500 cash and no name, no receipt, no proof of who it might belong to. Because I was a big old girl scout at heart, I made him turn the money in to the local police. They said to keep it since they felt it probably belonged to a drug dealer who had gotten caught in the same storm we did on the way up and that money paid for our mortgage and a new stove. We gave them our names and address and were told if someone claimed they lost it they had 5 years to claim it. My son is now 15 and no one (as of yet) has claimed it.

[WordWolf]

None of my stories are from twi.

In fact, the stupidest things tended to just barely miss me.

One teacher in high school NEVER, EVER wore a tie.

I didn't think much of it, until I found out why, from a upper-classman.

The year before I arrived, he had sat in the same teacher's class.

Now, each science class had a bunsen burner safety lab. We wasted the

first lab of each just to say "don't set stuff on fire." You sat thru

the lab twice in freshman year (intro bio, intro physics), once each in

sophmore, junior and senior years (usually, in order, bio, chem and

physics.) This was a physics class full of juniors and seniors.

He's teaching the safety lecture, they're finishing his sentences since

they've seen it all before.

However...

the teacher wasn't paying close attention.

"Ok, now, you always use a small blue flame..."

True, but he had a large yellow flame in front of him.

Actually, it wasn't in FRONT of him like you are supposed to have, he was

sort-of bent over the thing.

So, when he stepped back from the flame, it was noticed by the class that

his tie was on fire.

He put the fire out with no real danger and somehow managed to finish

the lecture.

Same teacher, same year.

He's demonstrating something with an acid. He spills some on his hand.

A student suggests "Uh, don't you need to wash that off immediately?"

"Don't worry-it won't hurt you." *pats hand on pants-apparently he's

losing a little sensation in his hand*

Several minutes later, the teacher decided his hand was in trouble.

So, he dashed down the classroom, turned the sink on full-blast and

shoved his hand under it, spraying acid solution across his desk.

A little later, he needed to be excused.

His pants were smoking from where he brushed the acid onto them.

Same teacher, same year.

Demonstrates that magnesium and water are volatile when mixed.

Most teachers use a little of each and make a tiny explosion in the lab.

He used a fist-sized chunk of magnesium and blew up the container when he

dropped it in.

================================================

My own high school graduation might qualify, I suppose.

We did a wave when the valedictorian's speech ended.

One plan, which was discovered, was to throw ALL the graduation caps,

not UP at the end, but directly at the principal. (He was really

arrogant.) Apparently, they found out, and had us file past a receiving

line and shake hands on our way out. It worked well and was pretty smart

of them. However, it meant that most of us were in our seats for several

minutes. The instant the receiving line started, you would have thought

you were at a concert. Frisbees were being tossed back and forth, and a

giant beachball was in play. My parents still have a photo of that thing

somewhere.

I'm sure I'm just glossing over memories of some REAL crazy things.....

[socks]

Aaaah. I'm not sure why this is so much fun. Maybe just thinking how as a kid, life was often one weird stupid escapade after another.

One of the first bands I was in got a lead singer that was the older brother of the guitar player. I was about 14 and was starting to do pick up dates too, working whenever I could. This guy was a good singer, sort of a soul singer, r and b kind of style. We played every high school and dive we could get in to, including a summer when we played for a string of Job Corps concerts around Northern California. These were county fair kinds of things, temporary stages put up. The Job Corps had a lot of petty criminals out working as part of their sentence or a way to train for something. They could get pretty rough, chicken wire across the front of the stage kind of things.

Our "road manager" was a guy named John who was a great guy, friend of the lead singer and both a few years older than the rest of us, drank beer non stop and had been in the Golden Gloves boxing league all through high school. John could fight so he was a good guy to have at these gigs. Plus, he could buy booze.

The lead singer would do this James Brown kind of dance thing in songs, and we'd close with the song Brown song "Please Please Please" and he'd do the J.B. deal with taking off his jacket and throwing it on the stage, down on his knees screaming and John'd come out and put it over his shoulders and walk the singer off dramatically who'd then scream NO! Baby PLEASE!!! and toss the jacket off! and slide back across the stage, over and over, it'd get pretty crazy sometimes, fun, guitars flying. And the lead singer started wearing this blonde wig that he'd tear off at the end of the set as part of his schtick, "Oh baby, please come back to me, I'll change for ya babeeee!" :D-->

Sooooooo, anyway one night at one of these Job Corps gigs John the road manager ended up in the backseat of our station wagon with the girlfriend of one of these Job Corps guys, under a blanket with a case of beer. We finish our set, start packing up, and this crowd of guy's show up..."We saw Doris with one of you, where is she?" We exchange some words and it starts to look bad. Real bad. This guy's getting in our singer's face who's still got the wig on, not having torn it off in our closer. And this guy's giving him $hit about his "long hair". Meanwhile the singer's saying "WHERE'S JOHN! GET JOHN!" Cause John's always got a few beers under his belt and can pretty much take anyone out in a few swings. But no John...John's with Doris doing the funky alligator in the backseat of the wagon.

Finally, the singer says "Hair? You got a problem with my hair? How's THIS!" and he rips the wig off and throws it down on the ground. This shocks this gang of guys so much they just stand there, jaws dropped. The singer takes his jacket off and says "Let's go, right now!" We're all thinking great, we're about to get our a$$es kicked, but what the heck. A knife comes out and from behind comes...John!shirt hanging off, belt undone. He doesn't ask any questions, runs up and lays the first guy he sees out flat. Blood everywhere as the guy's nose turns into Old Faithful. John mixes it up for a second and these guys back off. We're throwing stuff in the car. A cop finally shows up, we shove John in a car, get our money and rip out of there. With Doris, who we drop off at her place on the way out of town.

The "good old days?" :D-->

A horse is a horse of course of course and this is the answer that you'll endorse,

You've never seen a talking horse? It's the famous Mr. Ed!

[This message was edited by socks on January 12, 2004 at 3:36.]

[Dot Matrix]

Dang JA

I bet the cop you turned it into had a nice $1500 vacation! But I would be nervous about keeping it....

WW-

Oh my gosh! That teacher was a walking disaster! Did they fire him? Love the hat frisbee thing!

Socks

Well, aren't we the wild one? Wow, what a wild story! Thank God John came flying out of the nookie car to help you!

And Doris - dear Gawd woman I bet you didn't even know his last name! Lord knows if the gang went and beat her up....

More....More....

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

[Zixar]

WordWolf: Magnesium? Never heard of that reaction with water. Sure it wasn't sodium or potassium instead?

The Secret Signature of the Day has been cancelled by the HTML Police.

Or so the Germans would have us believe...

[J0nny Ling0]

Socks, your California stories have me laughing, as well as have inspired me. It's kinda strange that alot of my wildest weirdest stories are about things that happened to me while in California, or should I say like the Governator "Collyforneeya...."

Back East, every so often, one of our high school friends would drop out and take off "to California to get his or her head together". That was a common theme back in the day. I wonder if kids still say that one? I am from Maryland, and just after I had sailed on my first merchant ship to the Meditteranean and back, I headed out to California to meet up with some other guys with whom I had been classmates at the maritime school from which we had all recently graduated. We had all agreed just before we shipped out on world tours, that after we all came back to the States with lots of moolah, that I should come out to West Covina, Collyforneeya, where three of the four buddies lived, and that they would show me a "California good time". This seemed like a good idea to me, because this way, I could "go to California to get my head together"..

So, I got off the Trailways bus somewhere near West Covina, or Valinda, and there were my three grinning Merchant Marine Buddies, and the "California good times" began. That first night we went to a party which was mostly high school kids, and lots and lots of nicely tanned high school beauties. Since I was only seventeen, this was way ok for me! A few nights later, after we had drinken (drank? drunk?) a bunch of canned mixed drinks that we had stolen from a grocery store freezer- we drank 'em and then put the empties back-they decided that I had to see Hollywood.

So we go to the liquor store-one of the guys was 21-and buy a bunch of booze. My closest friend, Jonny Vermoch and I had decided to split a 5th of Tequila, and the other guys being "smarter" bought a couple 5ths of Jack Daniels. Then we all piled into this borrowed "spray painted silver" 69 Volkswagon van, commence to drinkin' and head west to Hollywood.

We managed to get there in one piece, but as soon as we got to Hollywood Blvd, we had determined that we needed more booze. So, we stopped right on the boulevard (either Sunset or Hollywood-I can't quite remember, really) and took a pee right next to the van, just giggling and laughing away as pedestrian passers by kinda laughed at us but steered abit clear as well. Then we went into this liquor store which also had a huge jar of pickled eggs for sale at the counter, and for some odd reason, I decided that "we all had to try some pickled eggs". Well, everybody tried one, but I ate four. Mmmm, pickled eggs and tequila! After that we bought another bottle of Jack Daniels to pass around as we drove in search of Gromman's Chinese Theater so I could see the foot prints and or hand prints of the Stars.

[Ya know, I have to go to work, I will have to come back to finish this one!]

Ok-ok-ok, I'm back.

So, we drive around Hollywood, watched the all of the interesting people, yell stupid things to girls and hookers, and finally end up at Gromman's Chinese Theater. I did find John Waynes hand prints and put my hands in his hand prints, but for some reason, I seemed to be even more intrigued with the idea of putting my hands in the hand prints of Dick Van Dyke. Unfortunately there was already someone there (poor people!) putting their hands in DVD's hand prints, and although I wanted to be polite, I stumbled right into them and pushed this woman away while exclaiming; "Hey it's Dick Van Dyke!" She and her friends were annoyed as I fell down while trying to bend down to put my hands there. Good thing there was not a boyfriend, or I woulda been toast for sure...

Well, that's all I can remember of Hollywood that night. The next thing I remember is being in that VW Van, going down the freeway with my friends and announcing to them that I was "going to be sick! Stop the van!" Well, we were going pretty fast, and there were lotsa cars on the freeway (Santa Monica Freeway maybe? Socks?) and so someone opened the sliding side door to the van and said; "Go ahead! Start heavin'!" So I lean out of the van while someone is holding my belt, and as the asphalt is speeding past my face at around sixty or so miles an hour and only three feet away, I clear my belly of all of those aweful pickled eggs, the tequila, and the Jack Daniels. After that they pulled me in, and the next thing remember was the smell of rubber and lots of intense heat.

Yeah, it must have been three o'clock in the afternoon, when I woke up to the smell of rubber, intense heat, and an even more intense headache. When my eyes began to see, I was looking very closely at tire tread and I found that I was "spooning" with the spare tire that was laying on the van floor. I was all curled up sweetly around this tire in some nice suburban neighborhood that only looked vaguely(sp?) familiar. I sat up with much pain in my head, got out of the van and somehow walked to a 7-11 store and called my friend John, who, knowing where I was, came to get me. His mom had a pool at her/his house, so when I got there, I ate some aspirin, and relaxed in the pool for a bit, as they told me of the nights escapades. To all of this, I say; "Whoaa dude! That was some AMAZING GRACE!"

Oh, and you might never woulda guessed this, but just the smell of Tequila (Ta-Killya!) makes me ill to this day...

[This message was edited by Jonny Lingo on January 12, 2004 at 22:47.]

[Dot Matrix]

Johnny

I just wrote a reply and it vanished!

So, here is the short version! Hurry back and finish!

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

[WordWolf]

*thinks a moment*

Zixar,

thanks for reminding me.

Must have been something else, like sodium or potassium.

Magnesium goes up if LIT, and phosphorus goes up in oxygen,

correct? He was dropping a chunk of SOMETHING, we know that.

Dot,

actually, last I heard, he was no longer teaching, especially

freshmen intro, but for other reasons I don't feel like

getting into at the moment.

[Linda Z]

Ooh, ooh, Mistah Kottah, Mistah Kottah, I can answer this one!!

We just had a horrendous fire in Cleveland at a magnesium-recycling plant. Despite the best efforts of umpteen firefighters, it burned for 2+ days because it was raining/wet-snowing at the time, and water causes magnesium to burn and explode. Looked like the 4th of July.

Zix, I am shocked that I knew a science answer that you didn't!! :D--> (I do recognize, however, that "umpteen" is not a scientific term.)

Linda Z

[Steve!]

Ummm, Linda, actually, magnesium will burn IN water, but water does not CAUSE it to burn!

If you light magnesium on fire and then drop it in the water it will continue to burn until it burns out.

But if you drop it in the water before lighting it on fire, it will do nothing.