Here's a few more.
In the 70s I was living in an area that had miles upon miles of housing, but no commercial stuff that you could get to without a car. As I was still three years away from even having a learner's permit, there wasn't a lot for me to do most of the time.

(Bad planning on someone's part, really- if kids can't walk to stores or movies or other places to amuse themselves, they invent their own amusement which can often be quite destructive. But that's another rant altogether.)

The usual things were done, of course- firecrackers in the snowbank to see how big a crater we could make, playing with fire, all the things teenage boys do- but there were a few things that jump out in my memory.

You know the sort of sling that David was supposed to have used to kill Goliath, the sort with two strings and a little pouch that you whirl around over your head? Well, we discovered that you can make a very nice one of those out of drapery cord and a Handi-Wipe that resulted in a pouch big enough to hold a rather large snowball. With a bit of practice a thirteen year old Loon could launch a snowball at least 80 yards and have it be pretty accurate.

The apartments down the hill were built about fifty yards from the edge of the woods, and had these porches on them that had aluminum siding on the inside that sounded like a cannon when hit with a snowball launched from an improbable distance away by a kid who could duck behind a large tree.

We also discovered that 10 gauge sheet steel makes a pretty nice shuriken when cut with the shear in metal shop. With a bit of practice we got to be quite accurate with those as well from a pretty good range, as they act like a little frisbee.

They stuck nicely into wooden siding underneath a second story bedroom window at night, and the firecrackers that we taped to them usually blew them off of the side of the house so we could collect them later.

And back in those days they tended to wire houses so that a large portion of the house was on a single breaker, rather than splitting it up into zones. So if you took a plug from a lamp, cut the wire to an inch long, twisted the two leads together, put on a wire nut and held it securely on with black vinyl electrical tape, you got a thing that you could stick into the outside electrical outlet on a house and cause an instant blackout.

I made one and gave it to a friend, but warned him not to hit a certain house because I had almost gotten caught last time. So what does Numpty do?

Sorry, Hal. You really should have listened to me.

So if domestic terrorism will earn you a spot in the flames, I'm well on the way...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 15 Dec 2008, 20:01, Reply)