Metals expand and contract due to heat. One can configure a metallic street light such that a circuit is closed when two bits of metals shrink when the sun sets, thus turning on the light. Of course, these bits of metal must lie in relative closeness to each other as the expansion and contraction due to heat isn’t going to be excessive.
In fact, I learned just how closely juxtaposed these bits of metal were as a child. If one took one’s skateboard and smashed a metal streetlight at the proper position, the bits of metal would connect, thus turning on the street light. One of my favorite pastimes as a child was running around my block, smashing metal street lamps with my skateboard, making the lights turn on in the middle of the day.
One day, a neighbor, the mother of the family who had ten kids – who had turned in my mother to Child Protective Services for some trumped up reason or another – drove by in her van and was watching me bash a street lamp for a few minutes. After the light illuminated, I nodded at her and sauntered down the street towards my next victim.
I once built a go-cart with the steering intentionally reversed so that when my mother “made me” let her drive it, she would crash. During my first test-drive, I forgot about the intentionally reversed steering and plowed into a street lamp, breaking my front axle, yet turning the street light on. How this is Karma at work, I have no idea.
Imagine, if you will, a baseball. Now, change the color to orange. Then, change the material to sponge. Next, enlarge the thing to be approximately four feet in diameter. Finally, scoop out a chunk and you’ve got an giant orange sponge chair. Imagine your son finding this on the side of the road. Imagine your son squealing in delight and rolling the dirty, nasty thing home. Then he puts this chair on the front porch. A neighbors unleashed dog decides to make it his home. The dog and chair remain on the porch for years. My mother let me do this. I have no idea why.
That giant orange sponge chair was, at one time, turned into a go-cart. It never turned off a street-light.
My mother met my father after he stole a shirt. She said he looks cool. He was a Jewish biology-nerd, she was a WASP from the Gold Coast of Long Island. They were married when I was borne, divorced by the time I was five. He took his PhD on the road, she raised two kids by herself, no alimony.
My mother once built her own kitchen table. It was shaped like a capital letter J.
Under the upper bar of the J was a two-door cabinet, locked, to keep me away from the TI-99/4A computer. Where the J curves, there was a “drawbridge” so that one could lift it and walk through the table and sit inside it. The entire table was made of particle board, the cabinet covered in paneling, the counter topped with plastic laminate that she assembled with a router and contact adhesive. She built this table to fit in a specific spot in our house. When we moved, she disassembled it and brought it with us. She installed it in the new house, modifying the house to accommodate her table. She did all this at the age of 30.
She once wrote a game for the TI-99/4A called “Hunt the Wumpus” that somehow got deleted. To this day, I believe she still thinks I deleted it. I swear on her life I didn’t.
My fourth grade teacher was a man who once pitched for the Cincinnati Reds. My mother sent me to school with pumpkin and a huge carving knife to make a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. He sliced his hand in half, requiring something like 40-50 stitches. For Valentine’s Day, she made him a huge heart-shaped cake, fashioned a plastic knife out of Formica – her skills at making tables being put to good use – and wrote a page of instructions of how not to eviscerate oneself using it.
My mother builds her own computers. The latest one I saw had seven CD-ROM drives, because she needed access to seven CDs at all times. She has a wireless computer network, but it doesn’t work if the phone rings. She has written her own calendar program and every operating system she considers buying must be able to support her calendar.
My mother once dropped her Zippo lighter down the toilet. She took the entire toilet off the floor, hammered out the concrete sub-floor, and somehow sliced up the cast-iron waste pipe, until she recovered her lighter.
My mother once entered a contest that was sponsored by a local hard-rock radio station. She posed in her homemade bikini on her multicolored blue VW bug. She won the contest, getting her car a free black paint job and “WKQQ” emblazoned on the sides in orange.
My mother drove me, my sister, and our dog 1000 miles when she decided to move back to Long Island. The clutch stuck so she had to lift it with her toes once she changed gears. The car wouldn’t go over 70 miles per hour and loathed going uphill.
My mother knew how to adjust the dwell and timing on the engine on that VW.
My mother installed an “OOOOGGAAH!” horn, a CB radio and a huge whip antenna on that VW.
The day after I joined the military – I was a live-at-home college student – she took a two-week vacation to St. Lucia. When she came back, she cleaned out my bedroom, turned it into her office, and built a deck with a hot-tub. Within a year, she was remarried and built an extension on the house.
My mother has an IQ of 179. I got all my engineering-skills from her.
My mother is nuts, and I say that with love.
Wow… she’s amazing! And thank you for the pile of ROTFLMAO’s too
Haha You’ve real got a cool mother ^^
It’s amazing how much love I feel in this post, for your mother. She sounds like an amazing person, and she raised a great son.
So since you didnt delete the game… what really happened to it?
And is it due to the pumpkin, that the teacher USED to pitch?
Interesting post!
That’s an awesome overview of mothering there
Reminds me a lot of my mom. 2 sons in her case. I am an engineer myself (chemical in my case) and I swear she still builds homemade things better than I ever could lol.
Awesome! So when are you going to post that pic of your mom in the bikini?
What’s better than good crazy mothers? I consider myself extremely blessed to have two, my own mother and my mother-in-law. Cheers to them!
Your mother is bloody awesome.
I say with totally and complete honesty I hope to be a little like your mother. With perhaps the exception of cars new paint job.
“The car wouldn’t go over 70 miles per hour…”
Is there something wrong with obeying the national speed limit now?
Great story. Your Mom sounds like loads of fun. My Mom converted my room shorlty after i moved out as well…i still dont ave a place to sleep when i come to visit.
Dude, seriously? Your mom wrote Hunt the Wumpus?!?!?! I was ADDICTED to Hunt the Wumpus back in my TI days!!! It took me forever to figure the damn thing out so that I wasn’t just wasting my arrow on random shots (what Hunter in his right mind only takes one arrow, anyway?) but once I figured it out, THE GAME WAS AFOOT! Before we pulled all-nighters playing Smash TV or Street Fighter, we pulled all nighters hunting the Wumpus. In fact the nostalgia of this makes me wanna run out and tame a pet in WoW and name it Wumpus.
Great googly moogly! Your mom could BRING IT!
Hunt The Wumpus was an awesome game, but it pails into comparison with the sheer awesomeness of your Mom. Somewhere, on a yet to be identified WoW Realm, a Hunter is trying to create a Guild called “BRKs Mom is Teh Awesome.”
Dude
/bow
we are not worthy -:)
Holy crap. Your Mother is a FORCE OF NATURE.
Your mom sounds bad Ass!
It looks like someone stole the game from your mom?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
Someone needs to go in there and fix the name of the person who created that game
and another piece of the puzzle falls into place.
Dude, your Mom rocks!
@Merckx: PRECISELY what I was thinking. Inspiration and creativity (=talent) never exist in a vacuum.
DUDE!! My favorite hunter bloggers MOM wrote my favorite game from when I was a kid? ROCK!!!!!! I *LOVED* that game.
That sounds like a pretty awesome mother (on the good points you mentioned at least). XD
Fun stuff, though.
TI99-4A?! That machine was so, so awesome!
It was my first computer – learned the basics (in BASIC) of programming on that thing. The thing was awesome to program for because it that the self-controlled sprites that you could move around and stuff.
I wrote so-many pseudo-games for that thing (when I was like 10, so it’s not like they were good), and saved them all on the cassette tape drive (an adventure all its own – LOL).
I still have that machine somewhere around here – I’ll have to fire it up and see if the thing still works!
Great stories – thanks!
That explains a lot, and in a good way! Does Mrs. Howell feel intimidated by your mom?
Your mother, sir, is absolutely amazing. I need to be a parent that epic for my kids one day. Then my life will be complete
WOW! and I mean the amazed version, hat off to your mom mate, she sounds like a mad inventor
sweet… just sweet ^^
^5 (high-five) to your mom! she rocks ^^
Utterly wow!!
Hmm, makes me want to whack a street lamp.
Your mom is so awesome and so is mine ^_^
If this post is to celebrate her bday, then Kohaku wishes her happy bday. If not, eh >_<
I hope that your son would feel fondly about you and Mrs.Howell like you do about your mom.
Kohaku
O.O
hahaha it was such a nice day on li today if she till lives here i bet she was on your gokart
Well this explains a lot
That was the best story I’ve ever heard with a mom as a main character. I didn’t grow up a lot with a mother, mine died when I was about 2. My dad remarried and divorced, this lovely woman who I still live with while I go to college. She has no ties to me, and yet I am included in her family. Mothers are awesome, more mother stories please.
I’ve got a friend with a ’73 bug
he got it going 87 on the highway the other day
I was just looking to see if the Big Red Kitty site had ever had any added to it and ended up here from the link near the top of BRK site. I read the post about your mother and almost fell out of my chair when I got to the part about the VW being painted black with WKQQ on the side of it. This was the WKQQ Street Fleet and there were a total of 10 cars that got the same black paint and the decals.
Mine was the 1969 Cadillac Coupe Deville that I drove at the time.
“This was the WKQQ Street Fleet and there were a total of 10 cars that got the same black paint and the decals.
Mine was the 1969 Cadillac Coupe Deville that I drove at the time.”
NO WAY!!! It was the most humiliating ride on the planet. Let’s not forget that we moved in that car to the Gold Coast of Long Island. Here come the fresh transplants from Kentucky!! YEE HAW!!!
Wow. Your mom rocks, totally. Has she ever thought about running for president?
only one of such awsomeness could spawn that of which is Daniel Howell…
You have an amazing mother, Daniel. I’m sure you’ve inherited more than a few of her traits – notably her charm.
Thanks for sharing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
“Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the People’s Computer Company journal in 1973, again in 1975 in Creative Computing, and finally in 1979 in the book MORE BASIC Computer Games.”
She probably took the original BASIC version out of one of those books and figured out how to make it work on TI99 BASIC. Very impressive for a mom. My mom is scared of computers. I’m jealous.