The dirtbaggiest thing I did was take up smoking when I was 15. Other than that I was not much of a dirtbag.
At camp we played Great Balls of Fire, which is not the song but a game in which you coat a tennis ball with bug spray or some equally flammable substance, light it on fire, and kick it around the cabin with the goal of not letting it go under someone's bed where it could burn everything down. See, it was really responsible, the goal of the game was to keep the place from catching on fire!
The best thing about a The a Toast is that it's layout is totally unreadable on an iPad in portrait mode.
2: a friend of mine used to do that in the desert, except picking it up and throwing it and trying not to set the desert on fire.
Some people play the game in 2 but for relationships.
3 is an awfully specific thing to be the best about the hyphen toast.
3: it's find until the right (ad) column fully loads. It is kind of impressive that someone launched a site that's so fucked on a mobile device in 2013, though.
7 gets it right. Nowadays it's more likely that a website gets changed so that it's ONLY readable on mobile devices, e.g. Sports Illustrated.
|| When someone says the word "ergodic," try to mis-hear it as "erotic." It's fun. |>
That seemed like the text version of Internet K-hole.
3, 7:
.single-post {
width: 120%;
}
The index views look fine, and the posts actually have wrappers with the right width. My guess is a typo.
That's it?! That's the extent of the mineshaft's teenage dirtbaggery?! Shame! Shame on you all!
On the OP, the most Dada example of our dirtbagness:
We would steal freshly delivered Jan 1. newspapers and deliver them a year later (while stealing the next round).
A bunch of friends and I were once at a demonstration (I have forgotten the nominal topic -- it was the late eighties, maybe nuclear disarmament? But there was a grab-bag of issue groups marching) and ran into the United Farm Workers contingent, who I kind of knew because I had, at my mother's behest, handed out grape boycott flyers for them before. Anyway, we were strong healthy teenagers, and they had a big sign that needed three people to carry it and they didn't have enough people, so we volunteered to carry the sign. And then we made up chants that were not the official UFW chants, and which the UFW organizer disapproved of, leaving him circling unhappily around but not actually reining us in.
(I wasn't much of a dirtbag.)
14 reminds me of my dad's story about getting a dozen eggs at the grocery store, taking them home, hard boiling them, then sneaking them back onto the shelf.
I'm not sure I'm clear on what constitutes dirtbaggery. Is it just assholish misbehavior?
I've been trying to imagine the origin of the term. Vacuum Cleaner?
I think it's a kind of scuzzy pranksterism or negligence that particularly enrages adults with its sheer stupidity.
20: Maybe explanation here? I assume you know that here it's referencing a song.
New Year's Eve 1993 my friend celebrated the stroke of midnight by putting a match out on my arm. The hell, guy?
I concocted a prank to turn my high school's big pediment clock into a Mickey Mouse clock, but lost my nerve and my friend J_____ had to rappel over the side.
We used to drive around opening fedex boxes in the middle of the night. They were always empty. One time my buddy tried at midday, but he got citizen's arrested.
My friend T_____ used to be convinced he could smoke weed through his ear.
I scored some fireworks, but the accidentally set off a rocket in my bedroom. My dad asked what the noise was. "I dropped a book," I said, as smoke poured out of my room. "Really? It sounded like a rocket." "No, it was a book."
We concocted elaborate, never-executed plans to break into the school and steal all the obsolete computers.
We out up signs all around my high school saying "Canadians are really dumb!" but had to take them down.
My friend J______ used to build bongs but he would never let anybody use them! because he didn't smoke weed and disapproved.
We tried to call the QE2 from a pay phone. "That call will be tenty-five cents a minute," the operator said. "Uh, yeah, we have a ton of quarters," we said. "We're sending in a team," the operator said.
We put up flyers all around town advertising an underground midnight dance party at a specific location that we had no intention of showing up at. The date was tied to some cult's prediction of Armageddon. "Armageddon' Funky!", they said.
I goaded Tweety into going and talking to McMegan.
Sc*mbag I know, I am from the cohort whose experience is mostly referred to in that article. If the song is the source for dirtbag, it's more recent than I thought. I hadn't thought the terms were synonymous, but maybe they are.
Douchebag, scumbag, dirtbag, I think "bag" is just a suffix.
I followed and then unfollowed Mallory Ortberg on twitter. And that was only a few days ago!
Our well-meaning school paper published instructions on when to clean needles and how to put on a condom. We published a rather more graphic companion on how to use clean needles and when to put on a condom.
I impregnated most of the babysplosion mothers last year.
We had these games we called "dumb games"; who can hold their hand out the window on the freeway the longest, in freezing rain. Who can eat the most powdered iced tea mix. I mostly won. The iced tea mix was the worst, a caffeinated cinnamon challenge.
I knew Sifu would be the best at this game.
21 is a very succinct definition of things I witnessed being hatched, and always excused myself from. No appeal.
Shit, the QE2 call was twenty-five dollars a minute. Oh well.
unfollowed Mallory Ortberg on twitter.
Is this your example of teenaged dirtbaggery? It does seem to be broadly in the right vein of "why did you do this inexplicable thing that hurts only yourself?"
At IHOP we always talked about creaming the boysenberry; empty a creamer into the thin space between the top of the boysenberry syrup and its lid, so that it remained invisible until that implausible day when somebody actually used boysenberry syrup. Mostly we didn't actually do it.
Is having a good answer for this or being too priggish to have one more in the humblebrag category? I wish I'd done my dumb earlier. I couldn't even manage to get drunk until I was 26 and trying hard, at which point I slept with someone I'd have slept with anyway.
When I was 22, I broke the hood ornament off the Mercedes belonging to the owner of a Roppongi nightclub. His bouncers set upon me immediately, and I was forced to enlist the help of the father of a student to arrange for its repair. But then an accident at the nightclub resulted in the deaths of several people and the imprisonment of the owner, so I was off the hook.
We shaved patterns into our leg hair, one time. I went for the Purina symbol.
We stole a banner for a shitty chain steakhouse off a parking garage. Our thought was we would decorate our house with it, but it was forty feet long and about eight feet tall.
We had a bong that was around three and a half feet tall that we called Nancy Reagan, because it was the same height as she was.
One time, after a party, we found a plastic vodka bottle filled with something or other. We sealed it with wax and called it the mystery liquid. Eventually somebody drank it, to no good end.
The dirtbaggy things I keep coming up with involve being stoned in public, say Denny's and diners, and being part of a super loud group that thought ourselves hysterically funny and made a seriously big mess in our wake. Which is an awfully conventional sort of dirtbag.
I helped a friend create a fake version of the daily bulletin that was read in front of class every morning in high school. I wasn't in the same class, so I never got the enjoyment of hearing it read. My main contribution was to structure it so that the first half sounded just like the previous day's - many items carried over from day to day - and then get increasingly absurd as you moved down the list. I can't remember any of the items now, though the style mimicked official style all the way to the end, no matter how crazy the item.
Nancy Reagan is known for being short?
I had some friends that printed out a bunch of "Student of the Week - Free Big Mac at McDonald's" fake coupons, which worked amazingly well for a very long time.
45 was really to 43 but it's so nice next to 44 that I'll just leave it alone.
We tried to call the QE2 from a pay phone.
You were calling the Fed?
We found a laminator and made up ID cards for our house. We all lied about our ages on them but they mostly didn't work as fake IDs because nobody believed that our house was authorized to issue IDs.
One year before Halloween we drove around the suburbs stealing pumpkins. We only stole them from people who had a lot, though, because we figured "they have so many, they won't miss one."
A later 'we' broke into the construction site of a fancy pants law school library and stole an OSHA sign that said "Be Careful Today", enacting a quasi performative contradiction as people saw us carrying it through school.
The earlier we was also a part of this scene (albeit a fairly shy, bookish and more ironically detached part):
http://www.magneticmag.com/2013/03/fever-it-was-beautiful-at-least-in-the-beginningbefore-things-got-out-of-hand/
Also, that article is really dumb. Don't read it. Just look at the pictures.
We tied a dead javelina to the back of a jeep and drove it around for miles until half of it was gone.
We set a sofa on fire in the middle of the desert with a propane torch; when a helicopter showed up we had to bail along a cliff with the headlights off.
We did a lot of driving around on acid.
We supplied a friend's mother with weed in return for her buying us alcohol.
We let a miniature horse out of its suburban backyard paddock to see what it would do. It ran away.
Over the course of a year we repeatedly stole the mailbox from in front of the house of a guy we didn't like. His family probably replaced it ten or twelve times. They went for a model cased in a concrete pillar, but we managed to dislodge it by ramming it head-on with the car. Finally they started carrying their mailbox inside it night.
We left answering machine messages at random numners about sex with animals. That one actually got back to my parents because one of the random numbers (a Sunday school teacher) somehow got the tape in front of someone who recognized my voice.
I'm now realizing that I wasted my youth.
One year before Halloween we drove around the suburbs stealing pumpkins.
So, the previous Halloween?
My girlfriend and I tried to have sex while driving down the highway (me driving.) That didn't work out so well though so we pulled over to get it done.
Several things through the school newspaper. Every year they have a banquet at the end of the publishing year. The year I joined they rented out a fancy restaurant and lied about being the alumni club so they'd serve drinks, open bar. A lot of underage people got puke drunk- puking on the tables, puking on the stairs. The alumni club was told they could not come back to that restaurant. Sadly it closed a few years ago.
The newspaper annually funded a joke issue, except one year we put something personally vulgar about one particular administrator in a draft to pass around the office and the draft accidentally made it into the print version.
When I ran the newspaper I used some of the slush fund available to the chairman to fund one of the relatively famous pranks at the school. A few years later they got audited by the school and the current treasurer tracked me down at grad school and had to ask for an accounting of a bunch of check memos that we somewhat cryptic. (I was actually a pretty responsible leader, though, we had a large surplus and some people wanted the newspaper to pay for all the staff to go on a Caribbean cruise and I nixed it.)
We used to call 1-800-USA-SEGA from the high school payphone and leave it hanging off the hook, I guess we thought it would give the game company a large phone bill.
Oh funny-- I was just looking up this guy to see how likely he was to be under a pile of rubble in Gaza. Hard to say. I was very distantly connected with these people and this scene. (The story I heard was that after declaring war on Burkina Faso, they had the not-too-bright idea of trying Israel, which if true is something I doubt anyone here can top.)
Totally at a loss to recall any pranks of my own, apart from what turned into a very friendly and lengthy informational phone interview with an exotic dancer, from what I guess was an official Girl Scout function... wait, actually, our degenerate Girl Scout troop did crash a citywide "sock hop" dressed as hippies and do a lip-synch to whale songs. I improvised some pious nonsense about the environment while the other girls lay on the stage and flopped. But we weren't actually teenagers yet.
We used to switch drivers while driving down the interstate. Actually I hated doing it, but my boyfriend would put it on cruise control and climb into the backseat, knowing I'd take the wheel and get over to the drivers side, whether or not I hated it. Finally! A thing I did!
One time I posted pseudonymously on a public website about stupid and/or illegal things I had done that were specific enough that people who knew about those things could identify me.
In HS I drove a 4WD SUV so to try it out some friends and I drove it up a set of steps that connected two parking lots at the school.
I remember feeling daring in high school, but I seem to only have been leaving the house in company.
I was charged with a felony once, but I might not have been a teenager anymore at that point.
I sure am lucky that (a) my parents could afford the (outrageous) bail, (b) my parents could afford a good lawyer, and (c) Jews cound as white these days because otherwise I would surely have been fucked.
You can't just say that and then not tell us what the felony was, neb.
We set a sofa on fire in the middle of the desert with a propane torch; when a helicopter showed up we had to bail along a cliff with the headlights off.
We used to do stuff like this too, and did actually get chased by a helicopter at one point.
I was around a lot of crazy stuff done by (not-very-close) friends when I was a teenager, but didn't really take the lead on anything.
I still look back fondly on the days of the giant Molotov.
Maybe Dateline snagged neb in a very special episode of "To Catch a Nosflow".
Maybe now we're realizing where we've seen neb's curls before.
I've had a chopper looking for me and my friends a couple times back in the early 90's. That shit is no joke these days what with the FLIR and all.
We tore up a bunch of aluminum foil, put the little pieces inside a model rocket, and launched it from the plateau near town. Fifteen minutes later some helicopters came over from the Air Force base.
We turned a stop sign or two upside down. Our parents told us the next day to put them back the right way.
We used a large signaling mirror to shine sunlight into drivers' faces who were down the hill from us. Don't know if anyone noticed.
One summer was bottle-rocket war. Made guns/launchers from PVC pipe and shot bottle rockets at each other on our residential street in the desert.
14 is totally great. I just ruefully told Bave as we unpacked some boxes that I had a newspaper from January 1, 2000 (well that's not the rueful part) and one from the morning after Obama was elected. If people took newspapers anymore it'd be funny to deliver that.
Oh this is a weird story of kid dirtbaggery actually. My cousin found out (in, what, 1982 or something?) that Coke had an 800 number so we prank called it in various ways, like asking in a nine-year-old's awful attempt at a Yiddish accent if Coca Cola were kosher. Yeah we had horribly tame/lame childhoods. This is why I spent my 20s being warm-hearted.
||
despite the doughty halfordismo, becoming the greys might be the winning strategy.
|>
After a night out in Flanders, we woke up to find that there was a forty-foot-long red carpet extending from the door of our billet all the way down the drive to the eight-foot-tall gates at the end. Who placed it there, where they got it and how they managed to haul it over the (locked) gates and unroll it down the drive while too blitzed on Belgian beer to remember any of it the morning after - we never knew.
I still look back fondly on the days of the giant Molotov.
It was pretty cool, especially when we completed the rest of the Council of Giant People's Commissars as well, but two weeks later he got destroyed by the kids from the next street, who had built an enormous Nikita Khrushchev.
There were a lot of stories from my teenage years. Quite a few of my friends were pretty dodgy, and I was often on the periphery, sounding the voice of caution.
Examples:
One of our mates borrowed a friend's motorbike to do a 'run' with a 9-bar to someone else, and also to stop at the chippy on the way back. On the way, he managed to crash into the back of a parked car doing about 70, only a few hundred metres down the road. Myself and three other mates were basically first on the scene, as we were following him on foot to go to the same chippy. He had gone completely through the parked car, and moved it about 20 ft up the road. When the ambulance arrived he was standing at the side of the road completely dazed, not aware that his leg was broken in 6 places. As the paramedics started strapping him down he was frantically unloading his pockets to the only girl among us, on the assumption she'd be less likely to be searched.
Police arrived, and asked the group of us who were there to help them put the bike into the back of the police van where they could take it to the pound for storage. They promised us a lift home once we'd unloaded the bike. But, when we got in the back of the van, the guy whose bike it was admitted to us that i) the bike was nicked [years ago, he'd inherited it, and i don't think even knew who'd originally nicked it], and ii) the plates on it, he'd borrowed from his brother's bike, without his brother's permission. So, while we were driving to the police station, I struck up a conversation with the police, while the other two guys took tools out of their pockets and stripped the bike of the plates, and any identifying stuff.
The police gave us a lift home, none the wiser.
Deek, the guy with the broken leg, was someone who made quite a lot of enemies. One time, he did a deal with the scary bastards from the local former mining village, to punt a load of speed on their behalf, then nicked the speed and claimed the police had confiscated it. I was there when they turned up in a van with a guy with a machete -- known as 'Junkie' because he was ... -- who was their psycho-for-hire looking for Deek. Deek was quite hard, but he wasn't going to fuck with the machete guy, so he paid them.
Similarly, a few weeks later, three other guys came looking for Deek, while he was still on crutches. Being your actual, rather than pretend, hard, Deek managed to beat up all three of them, before the guy who'd ran off to get help came back.
Another night, at the same guys house, a friend of ours, Coalbag* turned up with a load of prescription drugs he'd nicked from somewhere. The assembled crew all enthusiastically standing grinding and chopping the pills into powder, and everyone except me and one other person, did a load of lines. About 15 minutes later, they were all asleep as the pills in question were clearly not any kind of variety of 'upper'.
* so called, in less PC times, because although he wasn't black, he had very dark skin.
79: That's a pretty transparent alias there, LB.
I knew Irvine Welsh was all about voting yes, but I hadn't realised he was actually a sockpuppet for AS.
Some of you are into quadcopters, right? If so, please tell me which one my son should buy. He wants something that will be very simple to use and VERY durable. Also: not a gazillion dollars, please, as he's using his own money. (The reason this is not OP is that he'll surely do something stupid with his quadcopter.)
to which it was bolted with a 4X4 pickup truck.
Generally, bolts, 4x4 pickup trucks, and confederate flag representations stand in a different relationship to one another.
83.last: So you don't think he's going to mind his Ps&Ts?
Another one, the local park near our house had a big cast iron roundabout. The type where the roundabout is about waist height, like a murderous quarter ton spider's web, on a central spindle.*
About eight or more of us, drunk, lifted it off. Rolled it about 100 metres, then left it there. It would certainly have taken a crane, or a forklift and a couple of heavy set guys to put it back. Then, about 5 days later, we came along in the middle of the night, rolled it back, and lifted it back on.
* googling, it seems to have been a Wicksteed Joy Wheel. Only images online are tiny, though.
Yeah, Alex, there is no way I am going to google image search "Wicksteed Joy Wheel".
Urban Dictionary probably has something.
83 -- a cheap Walkera Ladybird (then about $60) was the standard recommendation here. IME these are pretty hard to use and come with remarkably incomprehensible Chinese language instructions, after sending the first one I biught into the impassable ravine above the freeway, I haven't lost the other but never figured out how to get it to just comfortably drone about in midair indoors and annoy people, let alone hover menancingly outdoors as part of a drone army, which was the reason I bought it (some of us are non-teenage dirtbags). If your kid can do better I may consider him for an operational role in my private Air Force, ps this is not creepy.
I feel like I told y'all all this already. specifically teenage scumbaggery I'd have to say fucking around in the national cathedral, having a bat-cave in the sub-sub-crypt, getting wasted on the blood of the lamb, putting peanut butter on the otherwise rather bland and bremner's wafer-like body of christ, making giant pentacles out of lighter fluid and setting them on fire in the apex. that's all pretty shitty and disrespectful, really. I mean, sure I made flamethrowers out of deep woods off and lighters and shot bottle rockets at my bro. did dumb shit with drug dealers, but not to where anyone got hurt. my past is pretty much an open book.
oh yeah! that was awesome! our friend lane had some semi-automatic guns he had converted to full auto (which is not in itself so awesome since you run out of ammo like instantly) BUT he also had a belt fed .50 gun that was meant to be mounted on a tank (or maybe an armored jeep? no, I guess jeeps were all light and wimpy and that's why humvees were weird). and shotguns. and everyone else had plenty of guns to bring. we went to this old quarry where we used to shoot a lot, and lane brought along this total beater of a ford (or else a dodge dart, but I'm pretty sure a ford), that still ran, and then we set it to run in park with the gas on, and fucking opened fire on that thing. we knew a car wouldn't just blow up for no reason because it got grazed by someone hitting it with a stray bullet from their 9mm handgun, like in the "A-team", but we sort of thought it would blow up if we brought enough force to bear. and alcohol. enough alcohol. so we shot at that damn thing while filming it, and I guess it was a video cassette, and I would love to see it for the increasingly surred and vituperative sound track even though it'd turn out to be kind of like warhol's empire otherwise, because I'll be damned if that car didn't just keep ticking over in the woods there, with huge holes tore in the doors and the windows and windshields just spider-webbed with glass at their edges. we shot at that car, and shot at it, and re-loaded, and...it didn't blow up. that engine block would have withstood fat boy.
I am too boring to have stories like this, but in the realm of bad decisions, shrooms at Comic-Con.
Jeeps were light and wimpy but you could still definitely put a .50-cal on one.
All those pickup trucks running around North Africa are carrying .50-cal (or rather 12.7mm) mounts. The ones that don't have 14.5mm or 20mm (insane), that is.
After junior prom, by BF and I ditched our dates and hung out all night playing basketball at the school near his house. Returning back to his place at dawn, we started to steal somebody's garden gnome, but that somebody happened to be awake and shouted at us from the upstairs window, so we put it back and went home.
My buddy and I commandeered the elevator adjacent to the freshman studios - we'd park it between floors, hang out with the doors open to the shaft, etc. It mostly only served areas already served by other elevators, so it wasn't as dirt baggy as it could have been.
For freshman studio, we tended to try to incorporate stolen items into our models; the one I remember most clearly was cutting some barbed wire from a power transformer enclosure (it wasn't my model, so I don't remember what the project was).
At the end of summer college (at teo's alma mater), we got caught tossing 48" fluorescent tubes out a 3rd floor window into a driveway below (I believe this was a post-allnighter hijink). May have been the same night that we used a fire extinguisher (water), but I think that was earlier. As it happened, my companion for the last 3 items was the same guy; he happened to go to the same summer college and uni that I did (he did not, however, graduate; last I saw, he was brewmaster for a microbrewery out west).
One time in HS, on Thanksgiving night IIRC, my buddies and I were driving around (in a bitchin' Camaro, as this was NJ) aimlessly, and randomly picked a car to follow. We ended up following it all the way into its driveway, at which point we realized we were probably freaking this person out, and so we took off.
We TP'd and forked the lawns of many a person, mainly guys my friends had crushes on.
At bonfires on the beach, we would burn anything and everything.
I used mouth spray and a lighter to burn a hole in the seats in the back of the bus.
We snuck into the movie theatre that I worked at after the janitors had left and had an early screening of American Pie.
We'd be the annoying people at Denny's, a la Heebie.
We used to go to parks in the middle of the night and then run from the cops when they showed up to oust us.
And other boring stuff!
I used to do the swap condiments thing in restaurants but with salt and pepper screw-top shakers. You make a little false top bowl in each with a napkin and have the opposite item in it, and salt comes out of the pepper and vice versa.
I got a handjob from my HS girlfriend behind a platform tennis court at a park in the middle of a sunny weekend day. Wasn't caught, but these days if you're caught doing that you get sex offender status.
Ok ok, I'd forgotten about this one during the old "worst thing you've ever done" thread, but a friend really enjoyed telling my wife about it recently, so now it's top of mind. This was, I hasten to say, something my cousin, who is truly psycho, liked to do, and one night, some other cousins were in town, and I was the youngest at 14, and went along--to my everlasting shame: it's almost better to be malicious than a pushover.
Anyway, there were four of us, three guys and a woman, and my psycho cousin had stolen a fire extinguisher from somewhere, and he drove, while my cute chick cousin sat in the front, and I sat behind her with the fire extinguisher. It was late at night and we'd drive up to people out alone, and she'd sweetly ask them for directions, and as they approached the car to answer, I'd douse them with the extinguisher.
I think we got four or five people, and I still cringe to remember their expressions. We actually got pulled over that night, and the cop asked about the extinguisher, but psycho cousin lied and the cop let us go.
These days, four Iranians doing that would probably be brought up on terrorism charges.
102:
"Honest, officer, they were on fire and didn't realize it! Thank goodness we happened to have this fire extinguisher in the car!"
I spraypainted New Trier Sucks on the sidewalk in front of New Trier High. Broke my parents hearts with years of lowlifery-- drugs mostly, but fires, beatings, thefts also. My poor mom.
I had dinner with an HS friend a few months back, found out that a guy who was thoroughly horrible then is now a pretty good dad and regularly visits his dad in an old folks' home. At the time, the poor father had basically been terrorized into living in a tiny sliver of the family's house.
I got busted for mooning cars on an off-ramp when it turned out one of the cars was a police car. Really, what are the chances?
I remember shooting off bottle rockets at 2 AM with a friend of mine (who later got pulled out of high school and sent to live with his dad/go to military academy), and through a couldn't-do-it-if-you-tried stroke of luck actually sending one into someone's chimney. Later that evening we hid in someone's back yard from the cop car that was going down the block looking for the miscreants.
So, I was having trouble figuring out the difference between dirtbag and other descriptors - slutty, heedless, trashy, and so on, but now I think I've got the hang of it.
Taking $20 "tips" for ourselves after collecting offering at church
Watching a group of friends bursting into chat rooms back in the dial-up days for Vietnam veterans to harass them or make light of flashbacks (ugh, Past Me, your taste in people sucked)
I had a boyfriend in early college from a family that was pretty working class. Our (better off) friend group noticed he couldn't stand to see money wasted and started literally throwing away their change from purchases just to needle him. It culminated in a birthday where we each chipped in $10 or $20 and changed it all to pennies. It was over $100, and we dumped it all over his room at school, his room at home, under the covers, on the floor, everywhere, knowing it was going to take forever to clean up and sort, but that it was too much for him to just ignore or toss.
So many blowjobs. Cars (moving and not), movie theaters, drive-ins, yeah. I'm kind of retroactively embarrassed. What on earth was I thinking?
Oh, and I got banned from a church once for playing strip poker at a sleepover at the church when I was 13. To my credit, it was the idea of a boy who attended the church, although he didn't get banned. Not to my credit, I had a crush on him and no idea how to play poker.
106: on a hot day after h.s. graduation, a bunch of mild-mannered friends and I were kicking pebbles in a gravel parking lot while we waited for the others to unload our picnic supplies. Scuff, scuff, scuff-- suddenly one of the pebbles flew up, went "ping" against the corner of another car's rear windshield and, as we watched in horror, shattered it into thousands of pieces. It took about five seconds for the cracks to shoot out from the point of impact across the entire pane of glass. Crunnnnnchhhhhh.
My friends wanted to run away, but I convinced them that partial cowardice was best, and we left a very apologetic unsigned note explaining what had happened. Then we ran like hell.
we left a very apologetic unsigned note explaining what had happened
Awesome.
"We are very sorry, but we broke your windshield with a rock. Sincerely, the people who broke your windshield with a rock."
We have broken
the windshield
that was on your car
and which
you were probably
saving
for seeing through
Forgive us,
it was with rocks,
so little
and far-flung.
No no no, you assholes. It said "We are very, very, very, very, very sorry we broke your windshield with a rock. We don't even understand how rocks work. Good luck. Bye."
What on earth was I thinking?
I gotta assume that blowing the moving car involved some kind of death wish. Or pentathlon.
(Aside: I cracked up seeing a sign for a "Run-a-thon" at a school where I will probably not send my kid. "Hey Susie, what do you call a triathlon where there's just running? 'Run-athlon' sounds stupid.")
I self-censored all my genuinely awful ones.
We used to hang out at this one shady drug store where they let us play Keno underage.
116: Yep. If it's worse than putting glue on a caterpillar it's right out.
Thoughts about a quadcopter for a kid, Spike? Thanks!
106: scuff, scuff, scuff-- suddenly one of the pebbles flew up, went "ping" against the corner of another car's rear windshield and, as we watched in horror, shattered it into thousands of pieces.
Had a similar one in Jr. High. A group of us sitting around on the curb in front of school after track practice. Someone was idly chucking little pieces of pavement gravel. One of them hit the door and it crazed. So freaking unbelievable that someone tried several more, and sure enough got another one to go. And then we beat it. No plausible defense for there being two of them. It was a fairly new school at the time. Was somewhat nonplussed to see them tear it completely down recently and begin work on a new replacement. I guess it lasted longer than Three Rivers Stadium.
to see them tear it completely down recently
Or maybe some kid had chucked a pebble at *just* the right place.
I left out the genuinely awful things people I knew did.
115: Yeah, it is. I thought it fit the "dirtbag" prompt since it's teenagers being awful in ways they probably cringe to remember. I was a late bloomer in the human decency department, and I'm still probably a little stunted.
Not on-topic but vaguely relevant: As a kid, I never was one to have any kind of concrete image of me as an adult, but I can say that it most certainly didn't include 60-year old me trudging up a steep hill to my home in Pittsburgh listening to "Anarchy in the UK" on a combo phone/computer while carrying another computer in a knapsack.
Just an idle thought I had.
There are a lot of small micro-quadcopters out there that are more or less interchangeable. I'm quite fond of the Walkera Ladybird 2 for cruising around the apartment. Halford seems annoyed that you crash into things, but, that's really a necessary part of the learning-to-fly process. There are newer ones out there than the Ladybird these days, including ones with cheap video cameras that record to micro SD cards. Those are cool, as long as you recognize that the video quality is going to be crap.
Don't buy a HeliMax. I've had 2; the electronics are shoddy and they just aren't very good at not breaking.
You will also need to buy a lot of spare parts to get through the early crashing stages... particularly propellers, but also "canopies" - the light plastic shell that covers the electronics.
This recommends the Hubsan X4, which I have heard good things about elsewhere.
I got to fly a DJI Phantom not long ago. It was like butter.
I guess I did sneak into a golf course with some people on the cross country team one night to slide down fairways on blocks of ice. It wasn't actually very interesting.
Re: 107.4
That is bad. I've been on the receiving end of a different version of the same sort of taunting at high school, and at least the people involved weren't friends. Violence, I found, worked quite well as a riposte.
I broke my Walkera Ladybird in some strange way I haven't been able to debug.
Uh, that's not a dirtbag thing.
Come to think of it, I'm about to head back to Calypsonia this weekend and I didn't stock up on parts for all my broken quadcopters during my vacation. I've got 18 hours layover tomorrow in New York City.... where in NYC does one go to purchase that kind of thing? Is there a quadcopter district?
121: Kids taking confirmation classes were required to do stuff on Sunday mornings. Light candles, collect offering, etc. I don't remember exactly, but after a service ended, we were supposed to get the plates, separate checks and cash (in a small, closed room), put them in zippered cloth envelopes, and give them to the secretary. I got paired with the kid who shoplifted and stole hood ornaments, and he suggested we pocket a little of the cash.
124 to 129 as well.
I drank a fair amount of bong water in my youth. Before I realized it doesn't actually fuck you up.
107.3 (maybe that's the one Knecht meant) about breaking into the Vietnam Vet chatroom is the one that I'd like to know about.
||Is this thread winding down? Would it be a good time to ask if anyone else has noted that Samuel Beckett Motivational Cat Posters is perhaps greater than all other tumblrs combined?|>
Oh, and 134 made me gag a little bit, just the thought of it.
This tonic has gone flat. Vacation really is over.
Friend of mine swiped a case of All Star Ballots from Oriole Park at Camden Yards one year. We spent the spring poking out chads to stuff the ballot box. You would look back at the Computer Science classroom as we headed over to the lab, there would be All Star Ballot chads all over the floor.
My nephew has been howling for the past 30 minutes about how his mama isn't in the house. I am not quite close enough to his parents to go over and pick him up and say "If you'd like to carry on, please stay in this bedroom, and you can come out when you're done with this tantrum" but goddamn is he getting on my nerves.
Fuck it. I'm going out for a paddle board.
Oh thank god, grandpa put him elsewhere.
142: I would think an eighteen-year-old might be a bit heavy to carry around like that?
There is still too much cajoling back and forth between "Do you want to cuddle? Or time out?" for my taste. Stop making a ceremony about it and just act.
145: Are you thinking of Jammies' brother who just found out about the Holocaust? He's 25.
I, uh, just intervened. Grandpa seemed like he was losing his grip on the situation. Now screaming three year old is parked on the deck in a chair, and he can control when he'd like to rejoin the rest of us. I may not have the patience of a saint.
Gee, he calmed down quick. I win.
Winning against children isn't everything, it's the only thing.
139.2 clearly started Knecht on a lifetime of consultancy work.
In high school me and my friends kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
WHAT, I JUST WANTED TO FIT IN WITH YOU PEOPLE.
135: Eh, we were all hanging out in one guy's basement, and several of the guys decided to log onto AOL and basically troll chat rooms. I was doing something else (watching a movie?), but from what I heard, they'd either just type offensive all caps racist obscenities or ask how many babies everyone had killed or something. I suspect they had other favorite chat rooms, but that's the one I was there for. It was just brutish and mean and dumb, but they thought it was hilarious (because 14 year olds can be strange) again suggesting the "dirtbag" label to me. There was some overlap between this group and the penny group. (Seriously, I bet they're all lovely adults now, but this is why I have no friends in my parents' town.)
I'm going to name Ydnew and Lourdes as the sleeper scuzzy hits of the thread. But other nominations are welcome.
ydnew @ 107: don't worry, I went down on my passenger one time while driving. Well, she took the wheel. It's pretty much amazing we didn't die.
For non-moving cars, who cares? Hopefully you got even in a karmic sense.
At least no one has admitted to sexting in a moving car.
This miniature president has done that. Also shot guns whilst drunk. A lot.
To clarify: while I was driving. Down I-5. In the Central Valley somewhere.
AOL chat rooms were fucked up. I remember that they were capped at something like 22 participants so there was teen chat 13, teen chat 14, etc. up to high number at peak times. (I think I didn't quite officially qualify for teen chat, I was maybe 12.) When it wasn't a continuous age/sex check (12M! and were any of the Fs really legit?) there were perverts sending out kiddie pron using the send image to all participants function.
For non-moving cars, who cares?
It's like you never read The World According to Garp.
156: Christ knows it excuses none of the scuzzery to say it was sort of a Southwest thing, but... I think teo gets it. Actually, if Gerald Ford(?) is still considering a move to Tucson after all this time, the presence of dirtbags like me is perhaps a factor to weigh.
I nominate snarkout's happenstance bottle rocket.
I had sex in the bathroom of a 737 one time, somewhere over Germany.
164: Airbus 380, somewhere over the Atlantic. Also lots of oral on various domestic commuter jets under blankets. Not likely very convincing to the flight attendants.
164: Airbus 380, somewhere over the Atlantic. Also lots of oral on various domestic commuter jets under blankets. Not likely very convincing to the flight attendants.
Lifted like 3 or 4 portraits of Carl Karcher from a few Carl's Jr's in my hometown. There were several Italian Job-like exploits involved. Tried to ransom one back once. It didn't work.
Also, lots of hanky-panky under the watchful-and cholesterolic gaze-of Carl.
Christ.... what have I done?!
...
Further to 101- my first handjob from that person was under a blanket in the back seat of a bus filled with boy scouts.
168: don't worry, you still haven't topped "in the back of a cop car, while cuffed".
Essentially no-one ever has exceeded our erstwhile(?) commenter, JFLK,
Fortunately prayers to Carl Karcher only are effectual in a spiritual, not material sense.
I'm honestly still afraid to post these things here, though I guess statutes of limitations really have run.
This thread appalls me. I had been addressing you as "reprobates" ironically!
Geez, I was declared a juvenile delinquent but it was only for boring shoplifting. I certainly drank and drove drunk plenty in high school, and we did unsafe things with firecrackers. Oh, and I shot my buddies little brother in the ass with a BB gun once. But you people make me feel like a piker.
174: I never broke any rules ever. You beat me in the reprobate race.
If you get the chance, you should really find someone smaller and weaker than you and shoot them in the ass with a BB gun. It's a stitch.
Teenage dirtbaggery lives on. (Although actually it sounds like at least some of those kids were preteens.)
176: There aren't that many adults who are smaller and weaker than I am.
Children are ideal for the purposes of dirtbaggery.
Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus is still a good song.
