When I was a kid...

We had to pretend sticks were guns when we played army.

You had sticks!?

That's a good one!

When I was a kid, I used to rub sandwich meat all over the cat and throw it into the same room as the dog. Then close the door.

When we got home from school, all we had to eat was rocks..but we were glad to git

'um..some families didn't even have that.

A recent discussion, Dangerous Things You Did As A Kid.

Lots of good stuff there.

Surprising that many of us, despite expectations, survived past the age of ten.

Yep.

BB gun fights, pipe bombs, Molitov cocktails, flame throwers, a couple of runaway fires that involved the fire dept., king of the mountain from the top of shipping containers.............................

When I was a kid my parents raised me according to "Hitlers guide to parenting".

My dad never needed such a guide, he was Hitler!

We never wore shoes except to church, not even to school,not even in the winter.Our feet were so tough they were like leather.Freezing snow or hot asphalt were all the same to us..no problem.

It was uphill and downhill to the school each way.We lived on top of one hill, the school was on another hill, with a valley in between.

One cold winter morning, it sleeted and a thick slippery layer of ice was on every thing.

Try as we might, we could not make it up the hill to the school, it was steeper than the hill we lived on.We went back home, and the old man said what are you doing here, why aren't you in school?We told him about the ice.He said wait right here, and he went to the barn and came back with a roll of barbed wire.He wrapped our feet in it, and sent us off to school.That wire gives real good traction on ice!

How environmentally irresponsible is That!

Wrapping - what a waste - shesh. and Steel is so energy rich!

My parents used broken bottles attached with boiling glue made from recycled departed granny.

You know Mate, it's all so long ago and to put into words how much things have changed, turned the other way, is madness and reinventing the wheel.

Thinking in generations helps but tolerance has it's moments. I am writing on a book with such stories as you mention ( I told you a hundredmillion times not to exaggerate), and others. It is for my grand children who still read books but are sucked into what communication tools are available now.

By the time it is finished I will have to turn it into a video game so that they can (by electric shock?) be reminded when they stuff up, in the old world. Not the dangerous stuff, no, just the shocks one can experience when doing muscle recovery treatment.

I wouldn't say we are done and over with but we are done, well done adults stretching tolerance to its painful limits. Michael Jackson wrote: "What have we done to this world?".

Removed justice, for a starters, just like when we were kids and we thought how and why am I being punished for what and why now? It has not trained me hard enough for the real world in the end.

I adore the arts in all its shapes forms and presentations and I have no idea why. It's just always been that way. Building an airplane from a cigar box or two. I know one thing for sure, I will not be known for the amount of dollars I have made during my life. I will be remembered for what can happen when lots of us start late in life and not complain about childhood anymore than is needed to have a bit of fun on the side.

My dad would hate me for that, but he's over it, deservedly

Tolerance, bloody tolerance

We never wore shoes except to church

That is the funniest thing I have read in a long time.

Have one on me, Ky.

When I was a kid we lived in a shoe box in 't middle of 't road!

A SHOE BOX?!?!?! Sheer luxury!!!

I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down 't mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

Try telling that to the kids today!

A version for computer geeks. (Common filk song at SF&F cons.)

Good I had a listen to that after my post. Does he ever come this way? You know, go bush?

When we were kids: my younger brother and I (about ages 8 and 9 respectively) got into my father's bullet stash, stole a handful of .22 LR cartridges and his framing hammer.....brought everything outside to the backyard and placed bullets atop of a piece of slate....aimed the bullets at a huge boulder the size of a VW Bug at the edge of the woods, and then proceeded to whack the bullets one by one. Of course they ricocheted off the rock and zinged by us. Hell one zinged by my left ear it was that close! Dad came flying outta his Dental office (downstairs from the rest of the house) and nearly killed the both of us for being so stupid! Dad was a Korean and Nam Vet, so he knew what war casualties looked like that resulted from bullets......Well, out came the leather belt and he tanned our backsides but good. I swear to this day that I didn't or couldn't sit down for at least 3 days afterwards.... REAL DUMBASS KID I WAS!!!!

During my colleges years, one of my roomies invited me to a July 4th bash. There were about 200 people on the dairy farm celebrating, then after dusk someone broke-out a HUGE HUGE stash of bottle rockets. I kid you not when I say there must have been 10,000 of these little buggers. We proceeded to form 3 separate armies and the "Great Bottle Rocket War of 1980 began! Shooting bottle rockets at each other is pretty stupid, but when you're drunk on mega amounts of beer & Jack Daniels WGAF! LOL Getting hit square in the chest or the head was the pits, hurt badly and left bruises. It could have been worse, someone could have gotten one in the eye......

One of my favorites to tell is smashing primers with a hammer. I used to pull the bullet off of the shell...recover the gunpowder...then smash the shell to make it go bang. To my dismay .357 rounds had a pressed in primer (unlike the .22 rimfires). Once a primer popped out and thoroughly embedded itself just under my left kneecap.

I managed to pry it out just before the folks got home. That was a deep hole.

Lawn darts, Mr. Wiggles (a hard plastic toy you hooked up to a hose that shot water out of all sides, and chased you) slip-n-slides, old school skateboards (no way to turn or stop) and playgrounds built with steel on asphalt (no rounded corners or soft landing materials, and the slide was for the bravest/ stupidest in the summer!) Trying to get a swing to loop-the-loop (unsuccessfully...damn gravity and physics)

We didn't know that everyone's parents didn't drive on cross country trips with a cooler in the front filled with beer and ice... I was 18 before I found out it was illegal to drink and drive!

Anyone remembers this?

Or these?

When I was a kid I built my own pod racer from salvaged parts, won a pod race against the reigning champion Sebulba and got dragged off by Qui Gin Jinn into the middle of a war between the Naboo and the Nemoidean Trade Federation. I helped put a quick end to the war by destroying the Nemoidean's flag ship by blowing it up with several proton torpedoes (that's ultra high yield nuclear bomb for you earthlings) from the inside.

When I was a kid, I was afraid to play in the sand box.The cats kept trying to cover me up.

I had a bad sandbox experience.

When I was about 3, one of the older kids in the neighborhood had an empty sandbox in his back yard. He and some his friends thought it would be a good idea to push me on the ground, flip the sandbox upside down on top of me, and sit on it............trapping me underneath. What they didn't realize, is that their weight was coming down straight on my chest and I couldn't breath...........................it was the first of several times throughout my life that I've said to myself, ' Oh crap, I'm going to die here'.

_{So, it's oxygen deprivation that induced your depravity?}

_{It was too much, or to little, of lots of things.}

I was never a child. I was always as you see me now.

When I was a kid I thought our family was poor. Later I found out my parents were just really cheap. Living poorly because you are cheap is self inflicted.

here here...er, hear hear....

When I was a kid, I was so ugly my mom sat me in the corner and fed me with a sling shot.

facing the wall, eh?

That ain't the half of it.Dad had to get her drunk so I could nurse.

Actually the other half of the truth is that you were so mafugly as a baby your papa got her drunk and then blindfolded your mama.....

Since we're on the subject of ugly kids:

Tell us, when it was time for vaccinations, did the doctor use a blown pipe and blow darts (that he stole from an Amazonian Indian tribe) to shoot you up? hehehehehe JKing!!!!!!!!

I was so ugly the bacteria avoided me, likewise the viruses.

nothing like ricocheting a spicy & rubbery meatball off the kitchen wall into you mafugly puss, eh? LOL

Meatballs were easy, so were biscuits.It was the mashed potatoes that were hard to catch.

I recall shooting rolls of caps off with a rock (the cheap-o gun always broke soon after purchase)...some brave/dumbass would bite them, _{but not for long...starting small fires with a magnifying glass that would quickly get out of control, and kids scattered like marbles hit with an enormous aggie...}

Growing up two of my four grandparents were managers the other two were sales people and my parents were teachers. Believe me I know how to b*llsh!t and sell from every angle imaginable.

My wife is from Turkey and has a 12 year experienced degree in Interior architecture and worked on designing custom yachts for Billionaires and ther spoiled sons, with the pick of whom ever she wanted, when I met her online.

Two years later she moved half way around the world and married me even though I was not employed at the time and I live in a crappy worn out trailer house thats worth less than some of the toilet paper holders she installed for her clients.

I never lied, I never made promises, and I never covered up who I was. Now if that ain't salesmanship and b*llsh!t skills I don't know what is!

Where I lived as a kid the fire department had to get another truck.