Do Not Try This At Home
Download | Duration: 00:03:17
April 3, 2009
Dear Loyal Readers,
Thanks again for your patronage.
Because this week MPR is on a fund drive, we didn't produce a commentary. So, instead, we're putting on one of the favorites from this past year, about the unbelievably stupid and dangerous games we used to play as kids. Hope you enjoy it.
Thanks also to many of you for coming down to the "Last Lecture." It was great to see you, and speak in front of a decidedly "home crowd."
See you next week.
-John
Do Not Try This At Home
When I was a kid, we didn’t spend our summers in a van going to travel team soccer games. The only rule we had was to be home when the streetlights came on. We took advantage of this lack of parental supervision by inventing our own games. Like the Baloney Game. This became popular when my friend’s mom started working. We would go to Dave’s house for lunch, then grab a slab of Oscar Meyer and whip it toward the kitchen ceiling. Whoever’s slice stayed stuck the longest was declared the winner of Phase One. But even the best tosses had to fall to earth sooner or later. Thus, the second leg of this lunch-meat biathlon: The Catch. As the baloney peeled off the ceiling, we craned our little necks skyward and opened our mouths to take a bite out of the falling pink disc. If we failed, our ceiling time, no matter how long, was disqualified. That’s why all the other kids would circle the last player, screaming at him to miss. We were not there to learn sportsmanship. We played this game for months, until Dave’s mom noticed a constellation of dark circles on her newly painted ceiling. Fortunately, at about the same time, Scotty’s folks bought an automatic garage door opener. It was amazing! You just pushed a button, and voila – the garage door went up by itself! Can you believe it? We couldn’t. Our little nostrils flared with the possibilities of something far more dangerous and parentally unacceptable: The Garage Door Game. The rules were simple. See how far away from the open garage door you could push the remote control, take off running and still make it under before the massive metal sheet cut you in half. No cheating, no ties, no crying. As we moved farther from the door, we thought we had reached our limits until Scotty himself pulled off a James Bond under-the-door roll on the concrete driveway. We were very impressed – certainly more so than Scotty’s mom. The Garage Door game was also short-lived. But not long after that, Scotty’s parents thought it was a great idea to give him a few BB guns. They must have been on drugs. The catch was, none of us could shoot accurately enough to do any real damage, so we did what any 12 year old boys would do: Invent the Triangle of Death. In this game we took turns shooting the kid to our right. It went like this: “Ready?” “Ready.” (Bang!) “Ow!” Incredibly, three decades later, two of us have jobs. Or all three, if you count whatever it is I do as a job. Next came the Sour Milk Game, the Evel Knievel Game, the Make a Towering Inferno Out of the Oreo Package Game – but the Triangle of Death pretty much marked the end of this golden era. Today these same friends put fruit in their beer, use “interface” as a verb, and insist their four-year old sons wear OSHA-Approved protective helmets to ride their tricycles up and down the driveways of their gated communities. Yes, our games were totally unorganized and unsafe. But here’s a stat for you: We all survived. So, as for me, Give me the Baloney Game, or Give Me the Triangle of Death.
Copyright © 2009, Michigan Radio
Here's a moment of unbelievable stupidity and a good laugh at my expense...
My circle of friends and I grew up playing hockey. We didn't know much about the rules of other sports. Throughout elementary school, when we would mess around and play baseball at recess, we never knew you had to tag someone to get them out.
Instead, someone would pick up the ball in play and throw it as hard as we could at the other player. If we beaned the other player with the ball before they got to the base, they were out.
Moms and dads were always fussing about the 3-4 inch round welts all over our backs and sides.
Reply to this
Chris,
I believe that's the way the game should be played.
And, in fact, that's how we played Wiffleball up north at the cottage. We didn't have enough players to hunt the runner down to tag him -- so whipping it at his mid-section was fair game.
A nice red welt also resolved any debate over whether the runner had been "tagged."
Ah, for the old days.
-John
Reply to this
Thanks for sharing this podcast
Reply to this