<p>Well, I don’t have girls either, so I don’t know if they have the same propensity as boys to get it into their heads to seek new uses for common household objects, to “try something” before thinking it all the way through. As in: let’s bring the pogo stick into the pool and see how far we can jump out of the water. No. 27: Pogo sticks don’t like swimming pools.</p>
<p>Okay, for girls:
When your daughter dyes her hair pink, she will also dye the grout in the shower. Pink. And the grout in the bathroom floor. And her fingers.</p>
<p>Sanka coffee was actually served on the Titanic (photo of a menu in Walter Lord’s narrative – “A Night to Remember”)!</p>
<p>What’s the difference between a preppy and a redneck?</p>
<p>I give up. What’s the difference?</p>
<p>hehe agree to number 80 :D</p>
<p>Also, it’s a fact that (nearly) 13 year old boys who, when home alone for a couple of hours while their younger brother and mom are at said brother’s tennis match (lo, these many moons ago), can often get into…um…mischief.</p>
<p>and, when these (fictional, of course!..ahem…) boys decide to light a match on a dry windy day in March, OUTSIDE on the WOODEN DECK and then drop the match to the DRY GRASS BELOW…the result is</p>
<p>that a FIRE will occur! And it will</p>
<p>burn the grass in your yard and the neighbor’s. And all of the neighbors will come out of their houses with fire extinguishers to help put out the blaze even before the big fire truck comes and the big ANGRY firemen arrive…</p>
<p>And then that fictional boy will be called “Sparky” by the neighbors for a long, long time…</p>
<p>But your grass will be very green and nice-looking later that spring!</p>
<p>Churchmusicmom – Sure glad that one is fiction! :)</p>
<p>Ahem, yes. Me too ;)</p>
<p>Equal opportunity for the girls: ;)</p>
<p>When you decide to invite a ‘few’ friends over while your parents and younger siblings are away on vacation, there’s a good likelihood that at least one neighbor will notice and kindly inform your mom when she gets home.</p>
<p>If, as a five year old, you go to play at a friend’s house for the afternoon and decide that you should both go exploring the neighborhood on your bikes, the chances of getting lost are good. The chances of the friend’s mother (who wasn’t the best at supervision, obviously) freaking out and calling the police? Also good. The chances of your mom nearly fainting when the police arrive at the door while she’s having a ‘break’ that afternoon? Excellent. Oh, and the chance that you’ll ever be allowed to go to that friend’s house again in the near future? Zero.</p>
<p>It’s a given that if you put a (seven year old) friend in a headlock while playing a ‘cops and robbers’ type game, he will more than likely bite you.</p>
<p>If a classmate brings a hamster to school for show and tell, and explains that said hamster often bites, it’s probably a good idea not to scoff at that, saying ‘oh, he won’t bite ME!’ (another day when mom almost fainted when she saw the blood stained shirt and shorts).</p>
<p>And, one for the boys, who lived next door to me as a kid:</p>
<p>When you fill a decorative cannon which sits on top of the television with 1000 match-heads then light it (to see what would happen!), it will definitely blow a hole through the wall of the family room.</p>
<p>jazzymom,</p>
<p>Answer - Preppies pop their collars.</p>
<p>Shifting an automatic transmission from drive to neutral and back again (in an effort to imitate movie trick driving, we think) while driving on the freeway on a 90-degree day will blow a hole in the engine. No injuries, just bye-bye to the summer job paychecks.</p>
<p>This just in…boy (age 16) and friends entertain themselves yesterday by backing said boys truck down a boat ramp, covering truck bed with a tarp and proceeding to fill truck bed with water from lake (by the bucketful) to see if they really could make a mobile swimming pool!</p>
<p>And then there is the story about a slightly older (and drunker) bunch of guys who decided to make an ice skating arena in their basement by flooding the basement and turning on the air conditioning.</p>
<p>Re the “explorational” boys heading to engineering school, here’s a true story I heard from a good friend at MIT:</p>
<p>Kids in an MIT dorm were allowed to paint their rooms as long as a neutral color was restored in May. At 2 a.m. one Wednesday, my friend and her roommates had colorful paint, and they had firecrackers, and they wanted to use the firecrackers to get the paint onto the walls. They needed a substance that was solid enough to grip the paint, but fragile enough to break into small pieces during the explosion and light enough to travel to the walls.</p>
<p>Someone had a brainstorm. “How about rotten fruit?”</p>
<p>So they started knocking on people’s doors and asking if they could borrow some rotten fruit. A few doors down, a kid said, “Sure, I’ve got some,” and handed out a nice bowl of rotten fruit.</p>
<p>It worked like a charm. The fruit splattered the paint onto the walls, and when the (waterproof) paint dried, they washed the bits of fruit away with soap and water.</p>
<p>So it looks to me like those experimenters DO end up at MIT…</p>
<p>Hanna:</p>
<p>Maybe I’m missing something. Did they dip the rotten fruit in the paint first, then send it against the wall? By firecracker? Sounds like MIT is the Mt. Olympus for the “what if” experimenter.</p>
<p>It wouldn’t be MIT if they had just used a rollerbrush. The one thing that brought the whole Science Team together was Mission: Impossible whiose job it was to build a Rube Goldberg contraption. My S’s bottle rocket should have been fired off outdoors, but the team captain wanted to use it to launch the contraption. That’s how the bottle rocket made a dent into the gym’s ceiling. The team captain is now at MIT.</p>