But was it priced right? "Live WWII-era Grenade Discovered Inside Donation Box at Goodwill Store in Wisconsin".
Woman sleeps with her pet snake; almost winds up as meal. "Woman Sleeps With Snake Every Night, Until Doctor Shows Her What’s Inside".
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Goodwill story: Live grenades and human skulls. What won't people keep at home?
ReplyDeleteSnake story: Here, hold my beer.
I don't "get" people who keep fish. Whatever you say, they are not pets. But unless you have a tank of piranhas and like to swim with them, they're not going to eat you.
ReplyDeleteCuddling up with a snake. Yeah, call me a bigot, but there's something not right with that person. Something very extremely not right. In this case, Darwin was thwarted.
Facial tattoos and excessive piercings are usually a sign that the person is not too tightly wound.
ReplyDeletePeople of today's America do not understand the world isn't a playground, its normal state is horrible.
We spent a million years getting to the top of the food chain and today's geniuses are doing their best to undo all that work.
From trying to pet bison to sleeping with snakes, stupidity will out.
I was thinking "grizzly whisperer" but "petting a bison" is up there with sleeping with a snake"...it's all stupid. Blame it on too many Disney movies.
DeleteIf it hasn't got fur or feathers, I don't want it.
ReplyDeleteA Goodwill - or opportunity shop, in the local parlance - is not a place I'd expect to find an expert on old munitions. Had I opened the box, I would have said 'Thanks arseclown for donating junk' and thrown it in the bin.
ReplyDeleteWho knows, I might have survived the explosion!
Yeah, about that grenade... we lived on Guam in the late Sixties. Less than 25 years after liberation (there actually were still some Japanese holdouts in the boonies then). And the Navy EOD guys would come by the schools about twice a year to give a presentation concerning unexploded ordnance.
ReplyDeleteYears later I figured whoever created the presentations must never have been a kid... or at least an adolescent boy. One time they told us of a kid about our age who found an old grenade and started playing with it. There was a partial detonation - and the kid lost his hand! Dum dum DUUUUMMMM!!!!
Anyway, every boy in my class had the same reaction: COOL!!!! And we spent the next two weeks frantically searching the boonies for old grenades. We never found one. My brother did find a Japanese light machine gun though. It was pretty solid rust, but he spent some time with emery paper and 3-in-1 oil and got the selector switch to move. He kept it wrapped in a blanket beneath his bed, and when we transferred off the island he gave it to another kid.
I like to think that to this day the machine gun still exists, being passed from kid to kid in the Navy community on the island.
Stephen: Good story. When I was in fourth grade, one of my classmates brought a grenade to school which he said his father had brought back from either WWII or the Korean War. We passed it around trying to pull the pin out of it, but couldn't remove it; then our teacher saw us fooling with the thing, and confiscated it. I imagine the grenade had been defused or neutralized of whatever you call it, but who knows?
ReplyDeleteAnother time, we found some blasting caps in the glove compartment of Old Paco's official government car (he was, as I have pointed out on many occasions, a revenooer with the ATF, and their work included blowing up stills). My friends and I spent a futile morning hammering on the things, and dropping heavy rocks on them, but nothing ever happened. My father told me later that you had to detonate the caps electronically for them to work.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if my survival, thus far, hasn't just been a huge accident.
Probably not so much an accident as an abundance of luck (the Big Guy upstairs had a plan for you). In either case, we are grateful.
DeleteMy friends and I spent a futile morning hammering on the things, and dropping heavy rocks on them, but nothing ever happened. My father told me later that you had to detonate the caps electronically for them to work.
ReplyDeleteElectrical blasting caps are subject to accidental detonation, from both shock AND applied current (e.g., static electricity). I'm more than a little surprised that one of them didn't go off.
As teenagers, this fellow with a prosthetic right arm was in my social circle:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/P2UqnWU8d8o
Caused by the usual boyhood escapades with explosives. 'Hook' we called him.