I might be nuts for how much I love stories of people doing embarrassing things, but until we get 100% closed circuit camera coverage of the United States – you know, like they have in the UK – many of these things will go unrecorded. So you can use this thread to report them. What things have you done that would have made a great video?
-TomI can’t claim credit for this, but many years ago my family was celebrating the 4th of July on the patio. Someone lit a roman candle, and just as it was about to go off, our little dog Snoopy grabbed it and started running around with it. Balls of fire were shooting out of the end of it, and everyone started clambering to get anywhere higher than Snoopy’s head so they wouldn’t be scalded by whatever the hell comes out of those things.
We all wish to this day someone had had a camera rolling.
Well, this is something that I wish we would have sent in, because we did catch it on tape, and now the camera’s not working very well anymore to make the tape retrievable and saveable elsewhere on another format, but picture this.
As a Canadian family during winter with lots of snow, it’s quite common for kids to go out sliding out in their own driveways. We don’t live in too much of a busy street, which makes it safer. So, we’d build quite a snow ramp, and with enough pushing power, the thing would be wild.
Anyhow, this one time we were out sliding, we had our dog outside, and my Brother’s friends were also over playing. My Dog just loved humping even though he was neutered (What is up with humping dogs when neuteured anyway?). He also loved toques with pom-poms, which were popular throughout the 80’s and 90’s, especially bright red ones. Well, my Brother’s friend happened to have a bright red toque with a pom-pom, and it was his turn. I had the camera rolling (yay me!), and his friend went to sit down on the sled. Friend + height of dog + bright red toque with pom-pom = Hilarity. Next thing you know, our dog darts over to my friend and starts humping his head, also grabbing the toque and shaking it from side to side in his mouth and flinging it. We all convulsed into laughter. It was comedy gold.
There was also this time where our dog sat one our artificial Christmas tree one year, and we had it for decades. He was backing himself backwards onto the tree, and next thing you know, you hear a big crack and the tree starts to fall down. We had to support the tree with wire for the rest of the holidays as we didn’t have money for a new tree, but the next year my Sister got us a new one.
I had to look up what the hell a toque was… it’s a knit cap, or ‘beanie’, for those of us in the U.S.
Take off, you philistine hoser.
Yep, that’s our word for it up in Canada.
But we actually also use the word toque, in the US, but it refers to a chef’s hat here.
Aren’t half of those videos guys getting hit in the nads in some way? I’m sure most of us have had that happen at some point. If there had been a camera filming, we would all have a shot.
More seriously, we used to have a cat that LOVED the vacuum. She loved being vacuumed and would roll around on her back while we sucked the loose hair off of her. That might have made it.
As for me personally, probably the time I decided to skateboard down a winding hill road in a state park. I started to realize that if a car came, I would get killed, so I had to bail. Sadly, I was going too fast, so I lost my footing and slid down the pavement a bit. I still have a bump on my elbow from this event, but none of the scabs turned to scars, so that’s something.
I went to a petting zoo with my girlfriend and another friend of ours, and thought “Oh, I’ll get a handful of feed and give some to one of the goats, it’ll be cute.”
Apparently the smell of feed pellets makes goats go completely nuts, because I got absolutely swarmed. At first, one little energetic goat came up all head-butting me in the leg like “Gimme some food, human!” - and then his entire extended family came out of the woodwork charging like it was 8am on Black Friday in a rural Wal-Mart. Down I go under a stampede of adorableness as these rather small farm animals decide that I must be hiding these little pellets on my person, and begin chewing on my clothes.
It took me about two minutes to escape the goat swarm, and the first thing I see is two zoo employees literally bent over with laughter. I smelled like lanolin for the rest of the day.
I was on a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach with my fraternity back in the 80’s when this happened. We were drinking pretty much non-stop (duh), and I got a hankering for some cinnamon poptarts. The beach house we rented had pretty beat up appliances, and the toaster refused to expel my warm and tasty treats. Well, no toaster was going to defeat me, so I reached for a handy steak knife to dig them out–or to commit toastercide; my memories of that day are a bit fuzzy so I suppose it could have been either. Bright blue sparks exploded around my hands as I shorted out the entire house. Fortunately, no fraternity members (myself included) were harmed in the making of this video.
Wow, that’s crazy. One of my dogs is absolutely terrified of vacuum cleaners. When he was a nine-week old puppy, I decided to clean near him without giving it a second (or first) thought. The poor guy put his tail between his legs and charged under the coffee table while peeing like mad. Nine years later, he still hides whenever the vacuum comes out of its closet (though the peeing part hasn’t been repeated, thankfully). Motorcycles, many airplanes, fans, and any other growling mechanical contrivance have the same effect. I think I traumatized him for life.
I don’t know if it’s just mundane, or a little bit nuts, but I’ve always wished I had a minute or so of video clips of the wipeouts I’ve taken rollerblading or road biking.
There’s that split second where you leave the ground (or the bike) and have the moment of realization about what’s about to happen. Time slows down. You’re horizontal and you remember again just how hard the earth is (I never manage to wipe out in the grass on the side of a road).
I’d like to see the look on my face when this happens, I imagine it’s pretty comical.
Another funny one that comes to mind is when I came around a corner slowly on my road bike near an intersection where a Good Humour truck parks and sells ice cream during the summer. There was a young couple sitting at a picnic table there, 10 feet away, and, no other way to put it, the young lady was very hot! I failed to pay attention to the post they had put in the middle of the bike path, ran into it at about 5 miles an hour, toppled over and laid there helplessly (toe clips on road bikes can make it hard to free yourself). It was obvious why I wiped out to the 10 people in the vicinity who observed this, and nobody came to my assistance (I didn’t exactly deserve it). I got back up and slunk off into the sunset. Be careful with your girl watching!
I know Tom didn’t want to hear, necessarily, stories where people got seriously injured, I never did (the ground truly is hard, but I got over it).
First time I ever biked with toeclips I stopped for red at a very busy intersection, slipped out my right foot to hold the bike and toppled so very slowly to the left into the street.
Hans, you are so very right. It’s easy to forget you are using them (you have to think about it a few seconds in advance and we are trained from youth not to use them which makes it difficult). I’ve since graduated to a more complicated set which should be easier to use, but early each year, invariably, I do the same thing you described, leading to a moment of panic and I either wipe out, or get lucky and disengage my foot in time.
When I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, my best friend Jim was over. We had been playing out in the front yard for most of the evening, but dusk had given way to night, so we were picking up all the stuff and putting it away in the garage.
We lived out on a rural road running through the base of a valley. The driveway at home, maybe forty yards long, climbs a gentle slope from the house to the street. I was standing at the top, Jim was down in the garage putting the baseball bat (or whatever) away. I looked down the street and saw three sets of headlights approaching. I decided, for whatever reason, that it was time for me to make a statement and impress Jim.
“Hey Jim! Watch this!” I shouted as the cars approached. Gaining his attention, I dropped my pants from waist to ankles and thrust my bare white ass at the passing cars. My triumphant grin quickly turned sour as the flashing lights of the sherrif’s car went on. I watched in terror as it slowed, stopped, and then (horror of horrors) backed up to my location. It was my first run-in with the law.
It’s kind of hard to explain, but I was in a conference room, and opened the door to leave. Somehow, I opened the door inward a bit too hard, stepped into the doorway with my left foot, then the door bounced off my right foot and came back and hit me in the head. I still don’t know how I did that.
Also, one time during a tennis match I managed to straddle a bouncing ball and caught it square in the nuts. That wasn’t quite as funny to me.
I don’t know if it’s quite fair to post twice in this thread or not (certainly ignore one of mine if need be), but Nathan, your story about the tennis ball incident reminded me of two I wish I had on video, one would be safe for American’s Home Video (mostly), the other not.
Scene 1, I am playing doubles. My dad is my partner. John S is playing us with his dad as his partner. John is serving, his dad is at the net, bent over, he’s a pretty tall dude so he has to bend over considerably. John completely muffs his first serve, hits it into the ground about half way to the net with an unmeasurable amount of topspin applied to it. It leaps foward, and sticks directly in the crack of John’s dad’s ass, wedged in there pretty good. Nobody got hurt, which are always the best stories.
Scene 2, more an Oedipal thing. I’m playing singles against my dad, at the net. He tried to lob it over my head. I hit an overhead smash as hard as I possibly could which catches him straight in the nuts (family jewels, for you squeamish sorts). Dad is laid out, writhing in pain, for at least five minutes while the four ladies playing doubles on the court next to us ask, delicately, over and over, “Is he going to be ok”? I suppose a psychiatrist would have a field day with me over that one, and I do have my reasons, but I had the conflicted emotions of being mortified, feeling terrible that I had hurt him, and also being deeply satisfied that I had nailed him so badly (in my defense, he once hit me, causing my head to hit the corner of a table, which caused a lot of blood, left a scar, and gave me the opportunity to cover it up and almost make him pass out from guilt by screaming “my eye! my eye!” over and over again). Yes, we have family issues but I never wanted to sleep with my mother.
Well, I have no embarrassing stories involving hits to the nuts to relate (or else I’ve simply suppressed them all), but there have been a few incidents I’ve been involved in that probably would have looked good on video.
Two of them involve my old dog, a very powerful, very sweet, yet very willful Newfoundland. When he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him.
Like the time I was walking him, early in the winter, and he spotted a cat (or some such small, furry creature). Unfortunately for me, it had recently snowed, and the cars had packed the snow into the street so it was a solid, slick surface. The dog runs for the cat and I go flying, landing on my stomach, whereupon he proceeds to pull me down the road, into someone’s driveway, and under a (parked, thankfully) truck. I must have been 12 or so, at the time.
One summer, we took him out to our family camp on a remote lake in northern Minnesota. I was out in the pedal boat with one of my siblings, and the dog spotted us, decided he wanted to go boating with us, swam out to the boat, and climbed in the back. The addition of a 150-pound dog hanging off the stern caused the boat to dip below the water, flooding it and sending it to the bottom. As the boat slide beneath the surface, the bow rose up, like in Titanic, and I made a dramatic leap off the top; I wasn’t about to go down with the ship. Fortunately, it was relatively shallow, and we were able to reach down and drag it back to shore.
Way back when, my brother and a friend played a prank on me. I was taking a nap, shirtless. They take a spray bottle and fill it with ice water. They set the bottle to a fine mist, then gave the airspace above my bed 4 or 5 good pumps. In the next few seconds, I transitioned from full asleep, to groggy confusion, to flailing around like I’ve gone nuts, to giving the perpetrators the evil glare.
To this day, they have not revealed who the trigger man was.