Monday Morning List Updates
Hooray my computer is repaired.
Which means I have access to my big ass pile of new list submissions.
And so once again we have Monday Morning List Updates.
(Submitted by Robert Brown)
Skippy
Just had to drop you a line and say how much I enjoyed your list.
As ex-UK military working in the Middle East I have to say that a sense of humour is probably the best weapon for the job.
Here are a few from my own experience.
1) Never squat to take a dump in a clearing in the forest, in the dark, if your colleagues possess night sights and 3 Megawatt halogen spotlights
2) Never play a joke on a colleague and convince him he may have radioactive contamination under the follow circumstance
A He scares easily
B He has violent tenancies
C There is the slightest chance that he might meet the Station Commanding Officer while he’s sprinting off site to spend his last remaining hours with his loved ones.
3) When instructed by the Engineering Officer that the tower is not to be climbed, “so why did they put an F’ing ladder up the middle?” is probably not the best response.
4) Never paste a photograph of your German Shepherd onto your ID card, particularly during live maneuvers
5) No matter how much you believe it, never try to prove the strength of a trash can by placing an explosive charge in an upturned bin.
Note: Standing on top of a bin does not increase it’s tensile strength.
6) Never set off an explosive charge in a small room (even if that charge is placed in an upturned bin)
7) Never witness the above incident at the above location without adequate ear protection.
8) No matter how short of funds the government may be, never agree to taking part in a military exercise where the opposition have blanks and you have to say “Bang”.
9) Never throw Brussel Sprouts at a member of the SAS believing that it’s only a vegetable and he’s not allowed to react.
10) Never try to convince a disciplinary hearing that Break Dancing on the roof of the Communications Centre while listening to “Billie Jean” on your Walkman does not constitute “breaking Cover”
11) Never practice for the upcoming inter services shooting tournament on an operational site without a having written permission & making sure that the MPs are aware of what you’re doing
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August 3rd, 2009 at 5:11 am
Hahaha, wow, those are some good ones.
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August 3rd, 2009 at 6:27 am
On the subject of things that go bang…
During my misspent youth, we took a bunch of fireworks out into town on the half-term just before Guy Fawkes. That part of the city had these semi-circular benches, backed with 6ft brick walls. We’d had a few near-misses with mini-rockets, so we decided to let-off a banger on this bench, and use the wall to baffle the sound a bit.
We found that there was already a spent casing to some sort of firework in there, and decided to blow that up with the banger. My mate lit the fuse, dropped the banger into the casing.
The effect is what the educated, or experienced, among you might expect. The casing contained the blast, for a fraction of a second. We saw it exit the semi-circle on a ballistic trajectory. The racket was reflected by the curved wall and focused, Deathstar-style, across the street. Only parked across the street was not Alderaan, but white saloon car emblazon with the decor of the county constabulary. We peered out, slightly stunned from behind the wall as two cops heads poked up from the car. The bang had obviously made them duck and investigate the footwells. So with that, we did what any right-minded teenagers would do…
…We legged it.
captcha: amoebic public’s – you know who you are!
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StoneWolf reply on August 3rd, 2009 7:38 am:
My buds and I had an incident that involved illegal fireworks at night in the woods. We were attempting to use them as incendiary rockets and accidentally used them as signal flares. When the cops rolled around my friends found out why I always wear brown and olive drab on these little stunts. They were wearing white and bright orange in the woods at night. Guess who didn’t get caught.
On the upside all they got was a stern talking to by some very amused cops, as they rather enjoyed the impromptu show.
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Leon reply on August 4th, 2009 1:27 pm:
As part of our usual Victoria Day fireworks blow-off, a friend shaved off a couple of hundred sparklers into a metal can. He stuck a single sparkler into it to act as a fuse. Half of us doubted it would ignite, half thought something “neat” would happen. It fizzled for a bit and then produced a blinding light when everything ignited and melted the can to partial slag. Next year we’re likely to try a larger can.
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August 3rd, 2009 at 1:50 pm
The oilfield uses shaped charges to blow holes in the side of oilwells to allow a path of oil to get into the well. In the mid-seventies I worked in remote parts of Canada doing just that. The shaped charges are fired with blasting caps and primacord. When bored you can cut down a tree by wrappingit with primacord and detonating the primachord. Surprisingly large trees. Here’s what I learned :
1.) Don’t use primacord to drop trees around the oil lease.
2.) If you do, make sure none of the trees lands on the doghouse (the shack where the drilling crew relaxes), this will make them unhappy with you.
3.) Also, don’t drop a tree on your pickup truck, disabling it, because the after (2) the drilling crew won’t give you a rid back to civilization. It’s a long walk in 40 below weather.
My big mistake was probably going after multiple trees instead of just one at a time
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August 3rd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
As a young man I was fascinated with things that go BANG! Still am for that matter.
I learned that taking a roll of paper caps and dropping a large rock on them got a nice loud Bang!
So, taking the stick of caps, 5 rolls together, and dropping a large rock on them gets a satisfying louder bang.
Taking the stick of caps, dipping it in the gasoline from the lawn-mower and then dropping the large rock on it gets a nice loud boom, and an ass whipping by my father who was not amused…
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August 4th, 2009 at 3:55 am
Several of my friends and I went through a ‘Let’s-make-some-loud-booms’ phase as well.
A few of the device construction methods we attempted scare me to remember them now. I really wonder how we kept all our digits.
After a little while we settled on various types of pipe bomb as a more reasonable, less dangerous form.
Most of us would fill the pipe, compress the powder(or whatever) and then cap the pipe. One guy came up with thinner pipe so he could fold the ends down in a vice.
On one of his attempts he was able to fold one end over four times. But could only fold the other twice.
The wiser folk out there are probably already smirking and saying “But that means that in stead of really exploding, it would probably just suddenly ‘unfold’ the less folded end, turning the ‘bomb’ into more of a rocket.”
As it turns out, you’re right. That’s exactly what it did. He put it under a stump, hoping to blow the stump loose. In stead it shot out and disappeared eastwards..into a neighbors crowded pasture.
The good news is it didn’t hit any of the neighbors animals or equipment,
The other news is that there was a coyote in the pasture, apparently investigating the cattle. The shooting segment of pipe hit and very definitely killed the coyote, before continuing on to disappear into obscurity.
There were all kinds of stories circulating about mysteriously slaing animals, UFO’s, aliens, government cover ups.
Seriously, the weird factor in that neighborhood made the X files look like a documentary when I first saw it.
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WMDKitty reply on August 14th, 2009 11:50 pm:
It’s the same way up here in NW Washington — weird stuff abounds, though most people choose not to acknowledge it and go about their daily lives like everything’s nice and normal.
CAPTCHA: “shaping judg-” What, did somebody say Candleja-
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August 4th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Funny enough, it was never the boys in the family that went through the things-that-go-boom phase.. It was me. When I was quite young, probably 7 or 8, I decided to launch my younger brother’s army men into ‘space’ via tying them to bottle rockets and setting them off. He was not nearly as amused as I was about watching them explode.
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August 4th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Got a couple of stories.
1) When i was in high school, my dad brought home a few pounds of dry ice and he and my brother and i decided to make some dry ice bombs (20 ounce bottles) in our backyard. We dug a hole and set one off, nice bang. We then found a 2 foot long pipe that was just bigger aroung than the bottle and set one end in the hole and shored it up with some bricks. We then got the brght idea to set an empty soup can over top….I can attest to the fact that you can get a Campbell’s Tomato Soup to fly about 400 feet vertically with only 5 ounces of dry ice and some water.
2) My grandmother and her older brother had access to some blsting caps and black powder (their dad was THE power company in the small town they lived in and had to have explosives to remove stubborn stumps/power poles/whatnot) Anyhow, their mom wanted them to get rid of a murder of crows in one of her trees but did not tell them how…They proceeded to find a nice 2-inch diameter pipe and turn it into a cannon that fired whatever scrap metal and nails they could find. After the ungodly boom; the crows were gone from the tree, but on the ground below was all the blenderized carcasses plus a fair amount of leaves and branches of the now stripped-bare tree. Neither of them could sit for a few days after the hiding their mom gave them.
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M. Simmons reply on August 5th, 2009 3:35 am:
My brothers and I used an M-80 to launch a tin can off the end of a piece of chain link fence pipe. At least I thought we launched it. We never did find it after it went up.
My youngest brother played with matches and an M-80. He would light the fuse, pinch it off, light the fuse, pinch it off. . . at least until he dropped the damn M-80 with a lit fuse inside the bedroom. Woke everybody up.
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August 4th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
What is it with men and explosives? Obviously a substitute for…oh, never mind.
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August 7th, 2009 at 3:46 am
filed under ‘should have known better’
Have you ever wondered how much white smoke is released by a model rocket engine at the top of its flight before it burns out and parachutes back to earth? I can’t tell you precisely how much, just that it’s more than you need to make a normal bedroom fill up. I had two or three of the rockets sitting on my workbench and was using an X-acto knife to open them up and remove the powder: one pile for grey, one pile for back. So I’m making powder designs on my work-top when my ‘little’ flame reaches the BIG pile of grey powder…it proceeds to flash and set one of the rockets off… it careened around my room for about 3 seconds and then WHOOSH white smoke. I could’t see anything, so what did I do???? Open the window, climb out, enter the front of the garage, grab box fan, take box fan to window, plug in and start sucking the smoke out of my room. All was well and good until the neighbors called to say that my room was on fire! IIRC, I only got a stern talking to.
The other trick we used to pull, after having moved from the country to the city, was throwing Calcium Carbide into puddles in the street and setting the acetelyne on fire. Cool blue flame from a puddle….
Captcha: Carolina frackman – barbeque that I wouldn’t eat.
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August 16th, 2009 at 12:56 am
When I was a kid, my friend and I got hold of some rockets and decided we would go down the park at midnight and launch them. Then we had the clever idea to stand opposite from each other and have a firework war.
Nobody took a direct hit – thankfully – but my left shoulder still bears the scars from a very near miss…
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February 25th, 2014 at 7:12 pm
I never did anything like the rest of you did, but I DID go through a “Blow things up” phase. One day when I was 10, I found my dad’s stash of firecrackers. Now, I have a 64 cubic foot sandbox, with a large “Mine” in the center. Instead of Tonka Trucks, I use about 1:22 scale trucks with Lego figures in the cab. Not content with digging my hands in the pile and throwing it up to simulate blasting, I decided to use an M-80. I dug a hole about two inches deep into the side of the “Blast Zone”, and used a piece of string as a longer fuse. When the thing went off, there was a hole about 5″ deep. As I moved in to examine my handiwork, I was promptly chased by hornets that had set up a nest.
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