Stupid and Dangersous School Crazes

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

this activity was wildly popular in the eighth grade.

1. crouch low to the ground.
2. breathe in deeply and exhale quickly, repeating this 20 times.
3. quickly stand-up straight with back to a wall.
4. have two friends push really hard on yer chest.
5. faint and collapse into yer friends arms.
6. come to some 20 seconds later.

for a couple of days we were all mad for this activity. there were kids passing out all over the place before the teachers banned the game of "blackout".

share some of the dumbass behaviour of you and yer school mates.

― Chris Radford (Chris Radford), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:39 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes, I remember an outbreak of this before it was banned. It kind of scared me in the same was as the 'killing someone with two fingers' thing did. I think some girl hit her head against the wall and had to go to hospital.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:44 (twenty-two years ago)

Some of my friends and I used to go around tying people's shoelaces together in middle school. That was sort of stupid and dangerous, right?

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:49 (twenty-two years ago)

We had a dangerous sports club, mainly consisting of climbing buildings. Breathtaking stuff when I look back on it. Two of my mates were expelled for it in the end.

― thoth (Jake Proudlock), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

We used to play Bulldog outside the biology block which wasn't that dangerous until some idiot couldn't stop and went through the window and again, banning ensued. Before that I managed to get through my whole class with only a torn off shirt pocket as damage.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:54 (twenty-two years ago)

In sixth grade there was a brief rash of girls sticking straight pins into each other...like running up behind someone and sticking them in the back and running away. I don't think they left the pins in though.

― teeny (teeny), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Girls are weird.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 15:58 (twenty-two years ago)

well boys go to jupiter to get more stupider.

― teeny (teeny), Sunday, 27 July 2003 16:00 (twenty-two years ago)

in the seventh grade the game of "Mash" was popular. this was ostensibly an inter-class fight. we stopped when we realised headlocks and judo slams were not fun to be on the receiving end of.

― Chris Radford (Chris Radford), Sunday, 27 July 2003 16:01 (twenty-two years ago)

So be on the doling out end you dum dum.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 16:02 (twenty-two years ago)

i tried N, believe me. but the headlocks would be ingeniously reversed and the judo holds too weak to be effective. in truth, i was a ten-pound weakling.

― Chris Radford (Chris Radford), Sunday, 27 July 2003 16:07 (twenty-two years ago)

bus surfing

― j0e (j0e), Sunday, 27 July 2003 16:23 (twenty-two years ago)

Teeny, LYLAS!!

― Texas Sam (thatgirl), Sunday, 27 July 2003 18:11 (twenty-two years ago)

Spraying deodorant on your hand then setting it on fire.

― Eyeball Kicks (Eyeball Kicks), Sunday, 27 July 2003 20:26 (twenty-two years ago)

lobbing marbles at crowds of kids, and that was just the parents.

― Matt (Matt), Sunday, 27 July 2003 20:39 (twenty-two years ago)

In middle school there was a 'pencil popping' craze. You'd grab your pencil from both ends and hold it in front of you. Someone else would would try to break it karate-style using a pencil of their own. Whoever's pencil breaks first loses.
Now this may be stupid, but it's not very dangerous. Nonetheless, the practice was banned. My school would ban anything that distracted students from work.

― oops (Oops), Sunday, 27 July 2003 20:42 (twenty-two years ago)

pulling the chair away when someone was going to sit down on it. Someone got PARALYSED doing that y'know

― isadora (isadora), Sunday, 27 July 2003 20:57 (twenty-two years ago)

there's always someone who ruins it for the rest of us.

― oops (Oops), Sunday, 27 July 2003 20:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah. People with brittle spines suck ass.

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Sunday, 27 July 2003 21:07 (twenty-two years ago)

maybe that's how their spines became brittle

― oops (Oops), Sunday, 27 July 2003 21:18 (twenty-two years ago)

We had a sequence of bizarre made-up religious cults, thee initiation ceremonies for which included violence of one sort or another. It culminated in thee cult ov "agador".(i think agador was a monster in dr who) being initiated into thee cult ov "agador" involved being kicked in the nuts. (we were all like 14 yrs old, so it was like no girlz allowed) Thee teachers crax0r3d down on it after one kid had to go to hospital. It was pretty fukcing stupid, but we were just kids, i suppose.

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Sunday, 27 July 2003 21:33 (twenty-two years ago)

awesome pashmina. I remember the pencilbreaking thing too, I think we had a different name but I don't remember it.

― teeny (teeny), Sunday, 27 July 2003 21:45 (twenty-two years ago)

The kiddos are still doing the pencil thing. I wish I could say was the most distracting things my kids do. They also do something that involves one person holding out their fingers while another person like pops them as hard as possible until the other person can't stand it. KInd of like the pencil thing actually, but with fingers.

― Texas Sam (thatgirl), Sunday, 27 July 2003 21:59 (twenty-two years ago)

Chicken burns were banned at my school. And rightly so. Fucking stupid.

― Dave B (daveb), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:03 (twenty-two years ago)

does anyone remember playing scabby queen? it was a card game wich consited of plucking cards out of a deck and i can't quite remember the rules, but the loser ended up having to hold out their right hand in a fist and have their knuckles rapped with the cards - if they withdrew their hand the rapping started again from zero, maning that you could be hit a hell of lot. now with a who deck of cards this is pretty much like having your fingers repeatedly whacked with a piece of wood. i have seen someone's hand get totally shredded doing this. of course, it was banned after thi particular incident. i also remember there was an actual fighting rota at my school for a while in which kids would have a prearranged punch-up, beating the living shit out of each other for no reason except the entertainment of everyone else... this pretty soon got rumbled though...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:14 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah we had scabbly queen but we didn't call it that. I don't know what we called it. Similarly, Mercy, which which just involves bending people's fingers back (is that what Sam is talking about?)

I was never very keen on these pain games. I don't know why people were.

My French teacher once called me back after class to tell me off for shining my watch in her eye. I had to hold back from giggling when she claimed that one could blind someone like that.

Chicken burns = Chinese burns, Dave?

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:25 (twenty-two years ago)

High school shop class:
* "accidentally" tipping alcohol burners over on the table and lighting the spill
* doing that stabbing the table between outspread fingers thing, with carving chisels
* dripping melted jewellery-casting wax on your hand. The harder waxes melted at a higher temperature, so using the blue wax meant you were the toughest or most stupid.

One morning a game appeared where guys would flick each other in the scrotum without warning (naturally the girls all thought this was incredibly childish, but that didn't stop me from laughing all day about this). By the afternoon half the guys were permanently doubled over in pain, the other half were walking around using books as protective shields, and the game was banned.

In elementary school however, people were merely content to spend winter breaktimes lining up en masse for the popular sled run: sheer ice from constant use, at least one huge bump built up at the bottom to ensure maximum airtime, a sharp-cornered metal power box halfway down the hill and two feet away from the run, and the whole thing patrolled by student volunteers who would wave each sledder down as soon as the last one was near the bottom, which required the first sledder to leap out of the way before being bowled over. With the ice and bumps and all, this was harder than it sounds. In later years the student volunteers were also in charge of bringing out a special padded cover for the metal box, which some of the parents constructed after a rash of related injuries.

― Poppy (poppy), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:26 (twenty-two years ago)

Lighting the gas taps. I never did this because I was convinced the whole school would blow up (weak-minded, I know).

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:31 (twenty-two years ago)

from 6-8th grade making fun of my friends and I with our big dorky glasses and musical instrument cases seemed like a pretty popular pastime among certain other kids. This was stupid and dangerous because eventually I got fed up and beat the living shit out of three of them.

― Millar (Millar), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Was it ever banned?

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:35 (twenty-two years ago)

we had a "scabby queen" named Dave

the Chinese must have taught the secret of twisting arm-flesh to the Indians in an ancient continent-crossing cultural exchange of weak-ass torture techniques

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Those darky fiends.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:39 (twenty-two years ago)

I remember when I was put into the 'gifted' class I was shocked at how it was considered cool among my table (we sat at a table, not at desks) to put vick's vap-o-rub in your eyes and then sit and weep all during class. Gifted, yeah.

― Mandee, Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Mandee is gifted!

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 27 July 2003 22:52 (twenty-two years ago)

wrestlers that I knew
stuck their dicks in mugs of beer:
drunk by osmosis

― Haikunym, Sunday, 27 July 2003 23:25 (twenty-two years ago)

in grade school we'd poke
kids in the gut really hard
yelling "PILLSBURY!!!"

― Haikunym, Sunday, 27 July 2003 23:30 (twenty-two years ago)

we did this, too! we called 'em "pencil fights."

― Tad (llamasfur), Sunday, 27 July 2003 23:35 (twenty-two years ago)

5. faint and collapse into yer friends arms.

variation for the amusement of the "friends": let 'em drop.
step 6 becomes
6. come to some 20 seconds later and announce "that hurt more than i thought it would"

― j. pantsman, Monday, 28 July 2003 00:17 (twenty-two years ago)

In high school, usually bored in chemistry lab: hold a pencil horizonally using three fingers - place index and ring finger on top, and middle finger beneath - then slam the palm of your hand flat on the tabletop as hard as possible, to try & break the pencil across the top of your middle finger. Then, of coure, if it successfully breaks in two, take one of the remaining halves and try to break it again - which is going to hurt more b/c you get less leverage. A friend of mine snapped some plastic ballpoint pens in half using this method but he was a bit of a masochist.
Oh, and the ever-popular bloody knuckles which is holding your fist outstretched while the other person hits it w/their fist as hard as possible, and keep repeating until someone wimps out.
In marching band when in uniform and waiting to march out on the football field, sneaking up behind others and pounding them on the top of the band hat (you DO see stars when hit in the head hard enough!)
Someone discovered that since the corridor walls in parts of the school were extremely abrasive painted-over concrete, you could walk down them w/a hand outstretched and scrape off pieces of skin..

I supposed all of this livened things up somewhat by scaring other students. man, high school was boring.

― daria g (daria g), Monday, 28 July 2003 01:43 (twenty-two years ago)

some crazy kids got into the illicit weapons trade in the eighth grade (seriously, what is it with this year level? all the bad asses come out of the woods!).

"Hey Adrian. What's in the bag today?"
"Nunchuks and a bowie! What are you after?"

― Chris Radford (Chris Radford), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Sitting on the top deck of the bus and persuading everyone to lean right over to one side when going round a corner, in an attempt to topple the bus. Shamefully, this was a stupid and dangerous craze that took place when I was at university.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:24 (twenty-two years ago)

We had stupid cult stuff too, based around the lift-up-with-two-fingers game (a girls night out party harrassed Alan and I to play this only weeks ago but luckily Emma came and saved us). Anyway the idea was that the cult leader would 'hypnotise' the initiate and say 'dead, dead, stiff as a board, light as a feather, you died on the' and put that days date in, and they would then lift him up and then bring him back to life. BUT one time the leader forgot the date and said the next days date, so the kid thought he had a death sentence passed on him and went home very scared and the next day a real actual EXORCIST was called into the school.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:30 (twenty-two years ago)

The kid didn't die by the way.

Also at boarding school there was a craze for gay sex but that wasn't formally banned.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:31 (twenty-two years ago)

I remember Scabby Queen, that was banned. The other really strange and pointless one I remember from primary school was the craze for "99's" - which basically involved rubbing an object back and forth across exposed flesh 99 times, the more damage caused the better you were - the real tough guys used bits of broken glass while the wusses just used their ruler. Bizarre.

― smee (smee), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:51 (twenty-two years ago)

they were called chicken scratches as our school. Loads of kids with nasty scars on over their arms, stoopid kids!
Oh & ouija boards aswell, which I was always too scared to go on!

― Pinkpanther (Pinkpanther), Monday, 28 July 2003 08:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Oooh I'd almost forgotten about the ouija board! When I was in about 3rd year, a friend of my mother helped clear out her wee old neighbours house, from it they retrieved a Crystal Ball, Tarot cards and a "genuine ouija board game" (in a board game box with little plastic pieces and everything). I go to keep the game. I smuggled it into school and didn't even get a chance to take it out of my bag before some sneak told our highly eccentric Religious Ed teacher. He went though my bag while I wasn't around and confiscated it. I was outraged and disgusted! I got sent to the headmasters office and got it back by lying and saying I was merely transporting it from one place to another and as I hadn’t taken it out of my bag they couldn’t pin anything on me – hah!

― smee (smee), Monday, 28 July 2003 09:08 (twenty-two years ago)

I remember a friend of mine had a proper one, it was sold as a came for ages 8-80. I always thought that was the weirdest thing. 1) it's not a game & 2) why can't you use it if you're 81?

― Pinkpanther (Pinkpanther), Monday, 28 July 2003 09:10 (twenty-two years ago)

It is a game!

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 28 July 2003 09:10 (twenty-two years ago)

That's not what our Relgious Ed teacher said!

― smee (smee), Monday, 28 July 2003 09:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Skipping 22 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

we also used to squirt amoeba's and parameciums in our science teachers water.

― Chris V. (Chris V), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:07 (twenty-two years ago)

oh how could i forget red hands. these were when people got out out of the shower and didn't have tops on, then you slapped them open-handed as hard as you could leaving a masive angry bright red, hand-shaped welt. they really, really hurt...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:09 (twenty-two years ago)

we called it 'base' or 'home base' or 'home'

― teeny (teeny), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:11 (twenty-two years ago)

in my high school chemistry class, this kid named er*c bl**t turned the wrong end of a bunsen burner, a big-ass flame came out. he dropped it on the floor before he could burn anything with it.

but he did that because he was a dumb-ass, not because he was trying to be cool or tough.

― Tad (llamasfur), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:11 (twenty-two years ago)

imagine if 'home base' actually was Homebase. Mind you, the staff would get pretty pissed off.

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:12 (twenty-two years ago)

i'd beat the shit out of them if they did it to me now - it was REALLY painful... and before i forget, one of our teachers used to smoke cigarettes with his head in a fume cabinet to get the smell out of the class...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:14 (twenty-two years ago)

we called them "glove guns" and were made exactly the same way as t's "condom gun". my neighbour killed possums with his.

― Chris Radford (Chris Radford), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:15 (twenty-two years ago)

My junior high and the high school I attended for 2-3 months had smoking sections in the outdoor part of the cafeteria. This was easily the greatest thing about living in Arizona.

― Ally (mlescaut), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:16 (twenty-two years ago)

there was a craze amongst the boys in 8th grade (there's that grade again) of using copious amounts of breath spray at one time. they'd be like, "15 sprays, *under the tongue*." like they were some tough shit. i mean, it did burn, but man, who comes up w/this stupid shit?

― praying mantis (praying mantis), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:19 (twenty-two years ago)

there was also a locker-room craze for spraying ralgex in people's underwear before they put it on... this hurt, too

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:20 (twenty-two years ago)

Also, there was "Nazi Poker": you held a playing-card over your friend's clenched fist and slashed his knuckles with it, but if he managed to pull his hand off before the card hit it, it was his turn to slash your knuckles. The harder the edge of the card the better, obviously, so our hands ended up looking pretty cut-up.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:22 (twenty-two years ago)

is 'bulldog' the same game as 'red rover'?

the one where you link arms and someone runs full speed at you trying to break through?

that was banned at my school.

and one of my religion teachers told my friend he was going to hell because he was gay. doncha love catholic school?

― colette (a2lette), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:31 (twenty-two years ago)

my religion teacher was having an adulterous affair with a fellow teacher...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:34 (twenty-two years ago)

Nazi Poker = Scabby Queen, no?

― smee (smee), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:36 (twenty-two years ago)

And here was me thinking "condom guns" and "Nazi Poker" were a local thing. Isn't it wonderful how these school crazes have the power to cross borders and spread throughout the world? The craze described in the first post is probably known throughout the Western world (we called it "oxygen high").

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:47 (twenty-two years ago)

My form tutor (and hence, Personal & Social Development teacher) was having an affair with my geography teacher. I think they married eventually.

― caitlin (caitlin), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:55 (twenty-two years ago)

one of my teachers who was the sun of a tv presenter had an affair with a pupil who went on to become a soft-porn model...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 14:59 (twenty-two years ago)

the son of a tv presenter - damn i am an idiot...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:02 (twenty-two years ago)

There was a serious craze among the girls in my high school for getting pregnant so that they could get better housing benefits. At first, all the guys thought it was great, a non-stop orgy, but 9 months later all the girls were all shacked up in their luxury penthouse apartments, poppin' out the babies left and right, and we were getting kind of lonely and sick of giving each other Indian burns. We were reduced to flirting with the 67-year-old vice principal, and she was seriously considering taking up several of the more mature boys on their lecherous advances. But at the last minute, the girls were convinced of the errors of their ways by a virginal internet troll and came back to school just in time for the senior prom.
~FIN~

― NA (Nick A.), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:02 (twenty-two years ago)

I got fifty lines.

Your RE teacher gave you cocaine???

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:06 (twenty-two years ago)

some crazy kids got into the illicit weapons trade in the eighth grade (seriously, what is it with this year level? all the bad asses come out of the woods!).

*puts head down, cries*

― Texas Sam (thatgirl), Monday, 28 July 2003 16:03 (twenty-two years ago)

You were a gun runner, Sam?

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 28 July 2003 16:14 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes! And I left it behind to become an 8th grade teacher. FULE!

― Texas Sam (thatgirl), Monday, 28 July 2003 17:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Been there, done that.

― oops (Oops), Monday, 28 July 2003 17:55 (twenty-two years ago)

Breath sprays are basically peppermint Schnapps, and the boys always wonder why this made them so giddy...

Girls, meanwhile, remember their own fad for same in like third grade.

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 28 July 2003 18:09 (twenty-two years ago)

this site is urgent and key here

― weft, Monday, 28 July 2003 20:45 (twenty-two years ago)

We had a cinnamon oil craze when I was in primary school. Cinnamon toothpicks, dipping little bits of paper in it and eating it, etc. It was eventually banned from school when a girl drank some and ended up with severe stomach burns.

― Christine 'Green Leafy Dragon' Indigo (cindigo), Monday, 28 July 2003 21:07 (twenty-two years ago)

I fear that Tom will use this thread as the basis for Saturday's Trig Brother challenges.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 28 July 2003 21:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Of course one can't forget the drag racing. There's a pretty long strip of flat, winding road right near my high school which has all of one traffic light and a giant hill at the one end. Kids would take off, peel out, and scare the living shit out of other motorists as they jockeyed for position all up and down this thing. After you got up the hill, if the light at the bottom on the other side was green, sometimes kids would accelerate DOWN the other side to the intersection. In the middle of the intersection there was a pretty good-sized lump which was a gentle enough slope at about 30-35mph - hitting it at 65-80mph, as was the fad, was like being launched out of a cannon, and a very simple way of doing massive damage to your suspension and/or losing control of the car.

Somehow nobody got killed doing this shit. Another boy did get killed with his cousin in an accident involving similar behavior on a winding mountain road after sliding out of the lane and into a giant tree. When I think about the driving behavior of myself and many of my classmates at this time in our lives it's amazing to me that we didn't have more casualties in high school.

― Millar (Millar), Monday, 28 July 2003 21:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Whoa Christine, we did too, I'd forgotten about that. We'd pre-soak the toothpicks in it, you could just stick the end into the oil and it would soak up into the wood. I made cinnamon ones, peppermint, and spearmint, and put batches into little screw-top bottles and... brought them to school (?!)

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 28 July 2003 21:14 (twenty-two years ago)

growing up in arizona = muy macho eating contests....red hot atomic fireballs, jalapenos, and saladitos were the ones I remember. Saladitos are dried plums (dried much more than prunes) preserved in salt and/or chili pepper. They are quite intense.

― teeny (teeny), Monday, 28 July 2003 21:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Chicken burns were a different order of madness from chinese burns; a kid would slowly scatch their arm until it scabbed over; this would then be scratched until the burnee had a shiny scarred piece of forearm. Madness.

― Dave B (daveb), Monday, 28 July 2003 22:03 (twenty-two years ago)

they had that at our school too. people used erasers/rubbers to do the scratch. I didn't understand why they did this but it was banned cos you can get hepatitis this way.

― dog latin (dog latin), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 00:25 (twenty-two years ago)

I love girls.

― N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 00:25 (twenty-two years ago)

We made "match guns" out of wooden clothes pins. You'd take it apart, cut a notch at one of the semi-circular inside cutouts, mount the spring on the outside and then wrap a rubber band around the resulting piece to hold it together. You would then cock with another pin piece (the leg of the spring held in the notch, stick a light-anywhere wooden match head in between the pieces, and push down on the coiled part of the spring to push the leg out of the notch, where it would snap forward, lighting the match as it ejected it 10-20 feet. Actually this was much safer than the other stuff described here, but technically interesting.

There was also an orange extract drinking craze (90% alcohol), kids would secretly swig it in class.

― nickn (nickn), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 05:30 (twenty-two years ago)

In fifth grade, I think, those snap bracelets were all the rage; but apparently they could cut you if you took the covering off, so they were banned.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 06:28 (twenty-two years ago)

yup, banned in my school too. they were just metal with some fabric over them.

― oops (Oops), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 06:41 (twenty-two years ago)

Another cautionary tale from the science lab: examining a leaf under the microscope was too boring from one classmate, who thought that it would be much more interesting to look at some human blood. Slashed thumb, copious blood, teacher goes mental. Fourteen-year-olds clearly know more about photosynthesis than hepatitis and other bloodborne viruses.

― gobemouche, Tuesday, 29 July 2003 14:35 (twenty-two years ago)

....which is interesting because my school also went ape over people cutting themselves in school, but it was still doing blood type experiments using the type of reuseble lancets that you can't even use in a hospital anymore.

― Christine 'Green Leafy Dragon' Indigo (cindigo), Tuesday, 29 July 2003 17:15 (twenty-two years ago)

six years pass...

it's kinda weird to think about how "crazes" like pencil fighting and cinnamon toothpicks were spread throughout the country (world?) pre-internet (both were HUGE at my elementary school in the early to mid 1980s). Like, did some kid move from one pencil fighting area and then pass on the rockinness of it to kids in the new school? Did cinnamon oil dealers travel the country to find new clients? And if they were rad enough to catch on under those conditions, why did they fade away? Or are there still places where the cinnamon toothpick craze is going or even just getting started?

― offshore "drilling" for (Euler), Saturday, 10 April 2010 06:56 (sixteen years ago)

we played wall ball, where the object was to throw a tennis ball at the wall and catch the ball one handed and then throw it as hard as you could at people as they scrambled for base.

― fuck in rainbows, ☔ (dyao), Saturday, 10 April 2010 11:13 (sixteen years ago)

I often think the same thing, Euler. I can only imagine a massive network of pen pals sharing the latest in crazy shit.

4th year chemistry (so we were probably 14 or 15) introduced us to potassium hydroxide, I think it was, with which we discovered if you used more than the experiment specified (I think the point of the experiment was 'make things burn brightly') you could turn the test tube into a rocket launcher. With a lax teacher who often wandered off, there were a lot of fireballs flying across that classroom. The teacher got suspicious when after every class there was a pile of melted test tubes left behind.

― FC Tom Tomsk Club (Merdeyeux), Saturday, 10 April 2010 14:23 (sixteen years ago)

xxpost - I think Iona & Peter Opie wrote about this stuff (and other people, too).

What happened to that guy who only wrote in haiku? That guy's awesome.

― bamcquern, Saturday, 10 April 2010 18:00 (sixteen years ago)

I haven't seen the type of cinnamon oil we used (which came in big containers and was colored red) on sale for a long time.

― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo, Sunday, 11 April 2010 03:26 (sixteen years ago)

xpost - I asked that very question - the whereabouts of haikunym, aka Begs2Differ, aka dimension 5ive - just a couple of weeks ago. He's still around, calls himself Cave17Matt now.

That fainting game was wild! A fine 20-second substitute for the drugs that my fellow 8th-graders avoided until high school. (My little clique was pretty straight.) Had no idea it was WAY more dangerous than any of the drugs we'd encounter soon enough.

― Half lies and gorilla dust (Myonga Vön Bontee), Sunday, 11 April 2010 07:17 (sixteen years ago)

Dangerous Laughter by Stephen Millhauser is about all of these things. More than that, too. Read it!

― ampersand (remy bean), Sunday, 11 April 2010 10:30 (sixteen years ago)

http://www.akron-novelty.com/ProdImages/StickyStretchHandToy.jpg

these were good if you wanted to take someone's eye out circa 1992.

― max arrrrrgh, Sunday, 11 April 2010 23:19 (sixteen years ago)

kids building crossbows out of meccano to shoot pencils out of was a good one as well.

― max arrrrrgh, Sunday, 11 April 2010 23:25 (sixteen years ago)

ten bux sez you never played "fag tag" at your school

― Fox Force Five Punchline (sexyDancer), Monday, 12 April 2010 00:21 (sixteen years ago)

For a while at my high school people entertained themselves by setting each other's hair on fire during science lessons. Bonus points if you could do it without the person noticing (for a while).

― Attention please, a child has been lost in the tunnel of goats. (James Morrison), Wednesday, 14 April 2010 00:10 (sixteen years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.