Some from my youth...
Aged 7-ish: "What happens if you short the live terminal of a plug to earth?"

Now, I do not know what part of this seemed like a good idea or even why I did it. But after learning to wire a plug I must have wanted to know what happens if you fuck it up. The tales of shit flying across the room and embedding in walls etc seem to me, exaggerated at best. My experience involved simply a fucking great spark and a shower of smaller ones from the now nicely fucked up screwdriver, a fairly stern bollocking, and not nearly as big a shock as I imagine I deserved.

Aged 13: "That silver stuff in French bangers... it's not gunpowder. What is it, and how do I make it?"

Those in the know, will know I am referring to flash powder. As it's name would suggest, it doesn't fuck about and is used to make some truly loud, frightening salutes. In sufficient quantities you can blow a hole in the moon with it. There are many variations on the ways you can make it but the simplest involves potassium chlorate and aluminium powder. Not too hard to get your hands on if you know where to look, so I got myself a shitload and let the experiments begin.

Hands trembling with excitement, powders were mixed by rolling them around on newspaper, poured into film cannisters, bound and taped and fused... and pretty soon I had an arsenal of almighty uber-bangers. The experiment was a resounding success as I have lost neither my fingers or my hide, and they were fucking great fun to play with at the old quarry. I was a god to my friends for a little while. Many other formulas were tested over the next few years.

Aged 18: "What would happen... if we tried to make a POT noodle? Geddit? POT?"

You already know where this is going. Waste of a good filthy noodle slag-snack, waste of a henry of block, and tasted fuck-awful. Although it probably wouldn't have improved had we left the hashish out of the fucker. It failed to get us wasted. We failed.

Aged 23: "How many chlorphenamine tablets does it take to make you hallucinate?"

Studying side effects of various meds while briefly working in pharmacy, I used to "test the limits" of certain drugs that I knew would not poison/kill me, just for the curiosity. And partly so I could say to patients "don't take too many or you'll go out of your fucking box!"

A pack of piriton was all I had. And it was more than I needed. For some reason they don't make me very drowsy but they do make me go loop-shit in sufficient quantities. I felt like I was watching myself from outside my own head, hearing odd noises like broken fragments of conversation, and a noticable time lag between doing something and realising what I'd done. All this accompanied by a general feeling of silliness and confusion. You know when you go in a room and you're like "why the FUCK am I here?" well it was like that for about 6 hours.

I did not feel very clever afterwards, but at least curiosity was satisfied. It's probably a good way to commit suicide, because after enough you'll probably accidentally fall over arse over tip down the stairs and die, without any nasty liver failure if you just nod off instead! Win.
(keyboardman, Sun 27 Jul 2008, 16:57, Reply)