How did you almost die as a kid??? (stupid stuff we did)

[rallynavvie]

It's the folks that evacuated Prypia that are the worst off from the Chernobyl disaster. Those watching the open reactor burn off into a pretty luminescent cloud from a nearby overpass were not likely to have survived

When I was a kid I loved Patrick F. McManus novels because his stories inspired my best friend and I to do all sorts of crazy shit. The best of which was the concrete sewer pipe cannon with the croquet ball cannonball. We used a whole can of smokeless powder for a charge. Fortunately we hid in a nearby crater (perhaps from the last children that tried this stupid idea) so none of the concrete shards tore us to bits. The blast stunned us for a few seconds though. However the trial was a success: the croquet ball "mysteriously" went through a barn 3 miles away

[Roundabout]

It's the folks that evacuated Prypia that are the worst off from the Chernobyl disaster. Those watching the open reactor burn off into a pretty luminescent cloud from a nearby overpass were not likely to have survived

Actually, there aren't any overpasses in the area, as there are no divided highways, only two way roads (I've been near there) and small villages. Prip'yat was a thriving town before Chernobyl' exploded. The sad part is, there are many people that were children at the time that are now dying from thyroid cancer. The Soviet government chose not to tell them of the danger from the exploded reactor for several days after it happened. By then, it was too late. There are still large parts of Belarus that are contaminated, esp. near Gomel (the Chernobyl' AES sat on the border of Ukraine/Belarus, and most of the radiation went north into Belarus).

Most of the townspeople that were evacuated from Prip'yat were resettled (forcibly) with familes in other parts of the country. The people that were not directly affected in other parts of the country were required to take them in, whether they wanted to or not. Many were afraid of them, that the radiation would affect them too. But in those days, you did what you were told. Prip'yat residents were not even able to take anything with them (contrary to what was told in the recent TV program) so they had to start life all over again. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

Things are more or less normal in Ukraine these days, no one really wants to talk about it at all. But the contamination is still there, though all 4 reactors have been shut down at the station. There is a initiative for several industrialized nations to help seal up the reactor for good, though nothing lasts forever. It still hasn't happened yet. The concrete cover that is over it now has cracks and leaks. It's still a "hot" site. Scary.

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/threadjack

[thecoalman]

Coalman --

I'm going out on a limb...

... and say your childhood near-death experience was nearly choking to death on a lump of coal you found in your Christmas stocking.

I thought it was candy :P

My old man pulled a trick on us when we were young, couple of days before Christmas there was a few stockings with coal in them. He told us Santa stopped by and said this is what we were going to get if we didn't behave for the next week. We were the most perfectly behaved kids you would ever see.

Speaking of going out on limbs...... I have a few near death experiences on that subject too.

[fritzi93]

I grew up on a farm and am lucky to be alive. Or so my elderly mother is fond of saying...at every opportunity.

At the age of three, my mother looked around and saw I had disappeared. She looks out the kitchen window and there I am leaning over the (running) silage chopper. A trough with a sort of Archimedes screw arrangement and chopper blades with blower for sending the silage into the silo. Supposedly there was never heard such a hair-raising screech as Mom came running.

February was maple-sugar time. I was four and riding the tank wagon when I got bounced off while crossing a stream. There had been a sudden thaw and I was swept downstream. The hired man spotted my red cap and hauled ass downstream to pull me out.

Dumb idea to go barefoot with a lot of manure around. Got blood poisoning when I cut my foot. Forget when that was.

At six, a red cap saved me again. The school bus dropped me off in a blizzard at the end of the mile-long farm lane. My father came along on a tractor looking for me and spotted the red cap in a snowdrift.

At seven or eight I took an ill-advised shortcut through a pasture. That morning my father had turned the bulls out. I got halfway across before they spotted me and I realized the mistake. Barely made it to the fence.

About the same age the neighbor kid and I invented a dumb game. Go into the farrowing pen and swat the piglets with brooms, then jump the fence as the enraged sow comes back in from the outside pen. Got a real ass-beating for that. "If that sow had caught you dumbasses she woulda et you!" And it's true.

There's more, but you get the idea. Farms are dangerous places, particularly if you're stupid.

[kyemeng]

For me, it was when I was around 12. Went to the seaside, but at that time did not know how to swim. Ventured out on my own till my neck level on a dare. Almost drown when my feet lost contact with the ground. Well, did not die, drank lost of sea water. The good thing about it, was that, when I returned to the exact same spot a year later, I had learned how to swim!

[bugster]

At seven or eight I took an ill-advised shortcut through a pasture. That morning my father had turned the bulls out. I got halfway across before they spotted me and I realized the mistake. Barely made it to the fence.

Wearing that red cap again were you

[Lucifers_Ghost]

Like all kids, I have done some pretty stupid things. Here are the highlights

- When I was 13, and friend and I made a "blowtorch" with a can of hairspray. We used it for a bit too long I guess, because my friend decided to throw it up in the air and on its way up, it exploded. I got a piece of the can stuck in my leg.

- When I was 11, I was playing hockey in the street with some people I really didnt know that well. A bunch of other guys, bullies, came by and took our ball and wouldnt give it back. As they were leaving, I threw my stick at them and hit them. They werent impressed. Because I was 11, all they did was throw me over a fence that was about 10 feet high :P

- When I was 16, a bunch of my friends and I went to an abandoned rock quarry. It had been filled with water and was just sitting there. We thought it would be a great place to swim. There was a tree hanging out over the quarry so I thought, hey, lets make a Tarzan rope. I should have tied it myself because I took the first swing and .. you guessed it. It let go. I dropped like a paper weight about 30 feet, landed square on a rock with my left shoulder, then fell into the water. I broke my shoulder in 3 places. Twas not fun.

Those are the worst of it :P

LG

[888888]

I never did anything "stupid" that almost killed me. But I was very sick for a while when I was like two with a digestive illness cause by radiation poisoning. Yes, it's true.

I hate to ask, but radiation poisoning? May I ask how?

Hello,

He must have known indolikaa!

But seriously that does seem hard to believe????

Kevin

Not so hard to believe when you are born in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear plants.

Speaking of which...

My wife really was born in the vicinity of the Chernobyl' AES, in Ukraine. The town she is from is only 35 miles away.

Well, I wasn't that close. I was in Kiev.

[northcat_8]

I can't think of anything that made me almost "die". Somethings we did that wersn't to mart....

We use to have BB and Pellet gun fights in the barn. We would wear goggles, but I got shot in the corner of the eye.

We learned to swim by playing in a boat on a pond. Sink or swim was a hell of an educator, we got lucky on this one, there were 4 of us and not one could swim a stroke.

The guy we use to work for almost killed us when we "borrowed" his truck at 2:00 am and then got it stuck in a field.

We did some stupid things, but nothing that really "almost made us die".

[edsmith77]

Well a few years ago, in my younger and mostly drinking days, I did something that to this day makes me wonder why I didn't die.
The story goes,
after an evening if rabble rousing (which included many cans of beer) I decided I was going to finsh off a project that I had started some time ago. I was building a 3500V 3A power supply for a linear amplifier (4-813s in a grounded grid configuration) used in Ham Radio.
I had finished putting all of the major components, transformer, cap's, relays, diodes, etc onto the chassis. Now I was debating how to meter (monitor) the voltage and current. What I had at hand was a bunch of 1 Mil meter movement gauges with appropriate (enough) panel markings.
What I was going to do was bridge the voltage output with a resister in series with the meter such that a max voltage I would get a 1 mil current thus maxing out the gauge. As the voltage fell so would the current an the meter would respond accordingly. After thinking about this for a time I decided that that approach was foolish putting the resister across the entire output voltage. Smart move on my part. So I did what I thought was the next best thing. Only bridge across the part of the output and then apply scaling. Yes! I did the necessary calculations for resistance and wattage. Found that I had the right value in my parts bin and went off to apply the smoke test. For my test bed set up I had a 1/2 inch piece of solid plexiglass that I used to mount my resister and meter and connection cables. I forget the exact values but the resister turned out to be something like 70 ohm and 10 watts, which was one of those three hard sided sand filled resistors. I am not sure what the material was but it felt and looked like sand. Any way in my state that is where I should have left things until the next morning. But by this time is was nearly 3am, so I connected the cables, then reached for the power supply switch. When I turned the switch on all that I remember was the explosion, flying plexiglas and about 5 or 6 neighbors knocking on my door wondering what the hell was that noise.
All that was left of my test set up was the ends of the two power cables. The rest was fragments and dust. It seems that my plan to only grab the voltage from part of the output turned out to be in fact across the entire output, which I had originally said was not a good idea. Now I know why. I ended up putting 3500v across basically a 70 ohm 10 watt resistor. From ohms law, that resistor tried to dissipate nearly 50 amps which if memory serves is nearly 175,000 watts. Hmmmmmmmm. Big noise.

[fritzi93]

At seven or eight I took an ill-advised shortcut through a pasture. That morning my father had turned the bulls out. I got halfway across before they spotted me and I realized the mistake. Barely made it to the fence.

Wearing that red cap again were you

Probably. The way they came after me was like I waved a red flag or something. :P Uh, maybe some of the younger members aren't familiar with that expression: "waving a red flag at a bull". Whatever.

[Roundabout]

Well, I wasn't that close. I was in Kiev.

My wife is from Chernigov (Chernihiv). You most likely know where it is, about 75 mi. north of Kiev. I think Kiev got some amount of fallout too, although it's hard to know exactly how much. I doubt the government would like people to know, but you can be sure that a fair quantity went into the large Kyivs'ke Vodoskhovyshche that the Prip'yat river emptied into (Dnieper River). They claim most of it (radioactive particles) settled into the silt at the bottom, but who knows?

Chernigov gets their water from the Desna, so they hope it didn't see the kind of fallout that got into the Prip'yat river. Again, who knows? Maybe someone, but they're not telling.

[ViRaL1]

Surprised I haven't seen anything like this yet but here goes.

When I was a freshamn in high school, I 'came across' an older single action Colt 45 revolver my grandfather owned. Though I had been given strict instructions to stay away from it and the like, I still decided to mess with it. Apparently in all of their 'don't let me catch you touching this', no one had bothered to show me how to make sure the safety was engaged. Needless to say I found out the hard way, when the hammer knocked it back in. Lucky for me, all I lost was some small amount of hearing (didn't get it tested but I had ringing for weeks). Although I wouldn't doubt that it took at least a year off my life. An additional year was lost when I tried to cover up the hole in the closet door...and the closet wall...and the living room wall...and make up some story about how it happened. In short, I got my ass beat...WELL!

[NamPla]

I once plugged wires into the power socket & sticky-taped them to the power-lines of a CB radio & got the shock of my life!

Needless to say I picked up Alpha Centauri, Neptune, Andromeda Galaxy...

My mum freaked out!

I also ate a poisonous plant in our back yard, and got my leg stuck in the escalator at Myer. Also got my head stuck in the railing at the airport (had to get butter on my head to slip it back out!).

Another time (much later, when I was 19-20) I was drunk jumping a train fence, banged my head on the railway & passed out! I woke up on train tracks, not knowing where I was, etc...

I have escaped death many, many times. I'm HOUDINI!!!!!