Ever Had a Stupid Idea?

[Moonface]

Just saw a social media post of someone claiming they could run a whole marathon without any training, and it reminded me of a time when I watched Run Fatboy Run and got into my head that @Mr EliteL and I should enter the London marathon. I'm pretty sure he told me at the time I was a lunatic but that movie did for a hot minute make me think we could do it.

[Mr EliteL]

Why don't I remember that?Ah probably because of what it was, a stupid idea. I'd have given up within the first 10-15 minutes, and if I absolutely had to finish I'd walk whilst periodically jogging a short distance every now and then, but be dead at the end.

Something similar although it wasn't me, but I knew I could the 14-mile walk that I do that does not include walking to the starting point, going to a place to eat, then back to the car, but another has joined us who probably could do it, thought about adding more distance to it. Actually it wasn't one person rather two but with different destinations included, and any more walking in that time I know I can't manage because my legs are almost dead by the time the "ordinary" distance is over.

Now an idea that I have had, well I'm sure I've had a few but can't think any at the moment. Other than the idea of proving I was wearing a t-shirt I received in the Winter/freezing cold weather by taking off at least two other layers and proceed to continue standing there after my photo was taken while waiting for the train to turn up. That I thought wasn't stupid because I felt fine probably because adrenaline or something, but trying it again after the train ride was done I admit may have been, because the cold hit me like a truck and had to keep my other layers on. However I would not shy away from doing it again if I felt the need to.

Yes I hope more previous silly ideas I've had resurface, or any new ones so I may post about them.

[Moonface]

Why don't I remember that?Ah probably because of what it was, a stupid idea. I'd have given up within the first 10-15 minutes, and if I absolutely had to finish I'd walk whilst periodically jogging a short distance every now and then, but be dead at the end.

If I recall correctly, I brought it up during a trip home from London Comic Con after watching the movie the night before. I know we were coming home from somewhere and it was late, and I can't think of anything else we'd be coming back from late in the day. It would also make sense for you to forget the whole thing given it would have come up in the midst of a much more interesting event.

Now an idea that I have had, well I'm sure I've had a few but can't think any at the moment. Other than the idea of proving I was wearing a t-shirt I received in the Winter/freezing cold weather by taking off at least two other layers and proceed to continue standing there after my photo was taken while waiting for the train to turn up. That I thought wasn't stupid because I felt fine probably because adrenaline or something, but trying it again after the train ride was done I admit may have been, because the cold hit me like a truck and had to keep my other layers on. However I would not shy away from doing it again if I felt the need to.

Yes I hope more previous silly ideas I've had resurface, or any new ones so I may post about them.

Heh, I had just referenced that moment at Stratford station a few nights ago to @ShiraNoMai. If you've not heard, the weather in areas of Canada is sitting at like -50F (-45C) and I said I bet EL would consider going outside wearing a t-shirt if the idea got pitched to him.


I don't like to call this stupid myself but that's only because it worked, plus I expect most people would read this and think this is a really bad idea. So like a couple of weeks ago I got so tired of the lightbulbs in the fixture on our stairs being blown out for over a year without being replaced, and decided I was finally going to do whatever it took to replace them. Here's a photo of the fixture in question:



It isn't really shown in the photo but that is a stairwell that U-turns halfway down. Furthermore, this light fixture doesn't give you access to the bulbs from beneath, you can't remove the cover, and the only way to reach it is with a ladder except the stairs prevent a ladder from being placed due to the obvious lack of large flat surface. I decided to grab our stepladder and a dining room chair, and put the chair on one of the larger steps that make up the U-turn part so that I could place the stepladder with one end on a step and the other on the chair. Now I have a flat surface for the ladder, but it just barely fits on the chair so I have to get @ShiraNoMai to hold the legs on that end of the ladder to make sure it absolutely does not move while I climb it. Oh, there's also a bulb that had exploded in the fixture so there was broken glass from that plus the broken bulb, but the one smart thing I did was put on a thick rubber glove to prevent cutting myself, especially since I have to reach over the top of the cover and I can't see in there.

So I get two of the bulbs out because they're just blown, but the third one is the exploded one. I try unscrewing it but the broken glass still on the bulb itself has absolutely no strength left in it so it just keeps breaking more every time I try to grab the bulb even lightly. So I can't get it out by hand, so I decide I'll use pliers to grab the inner part of the bulb and unscrew it that way. Now we think we've turned off the breaker that supplies power to this light, but as I stick the pliers in a spark comes out to tell me no, you didn't get the right breaker. We flip some others off thinking now it's definitely not getting power, and I see no spark this time so I assume it's good. After I got that bulb out and put the first new one in, it immediately turns on so the entire time I was grabbing the inner parts of a lightbulb with a pair of pliers the power supply was on the entire time.

On the bright side, no pun intended, I got new bulbs put into the fixture and also discovered I can release two of the three chain hooks holding the cover to let me move it out of the way to get to the bulbs from underneath. I'd still need to do that crazy ladder setup but for as risky as it looked and sounds it did actually remain pretty secure. XD

[Mr EliteL]

Probably, knowing people take freezing cold bath, showers or dip themselves into icy lakes, being out in a t-shirt in cold weather seems like nothing. Just as long a I am in near proximity to warmth of something to put once I find it unbearable.

The...the power was on the entire time. Ah, I was expecting something did go bad but it seemed to have went well, just not having easy view to see what you were doing. Good you discovered a proper way to get to the lightbulbs on the fixture itself, just not so much the way you have to actually physically get near it, but that worked too.

[Moonface]

Probably, knowing people take freezing cold bath, showers or dip themselves into icy lakes, being out in a t-shirt in cold weather seems like nothing. Just as long a I am in near proximity to warmth of something to put once I find it unbearable.

Oh man you mentioning freezing cold showers reminds me of a really stupid idea I had at Disneyland Paris the second time I went there.

So I forget what year it was in exactly, but we went during Christmas and the weather was extremely cold; so cold in fact that the entire river along the walk to Disney from any of the hotels that aren't right next to the park was frozen solid, and inside the park all of the waterfalls in Adventureland had frozen solid and large areas of the body of water they fall into was also frozen over while in Frontierland the water level had to be lowered to remove the water from the section of the Big Thunder Mountain ride where part of the track is slightly underwater so that the brakes on the train wouldn't end up freezing up. Like, it was genuinely horrible how cold it was for this entire trip. If you haven't figured it out yet, the stupid idea I had was to take a freezing cold shower with the thought that if I'm cold then when I go outside it won't feel as cold to me, because if the room is colder than the shower temperature is you always get cold when you step out of the shower so surely the opposite would work right? No, no it doesn't.

The...the power was on the entire time. Ah, I was expecting something did go bad but it seemed to have went well, just not having easy view to see what you were doing. Good you discovered a proper way to get to the lightbulbs on the fixture itself, just not so much the way you have to actually physically get near it, but that worked too.

Yeah I'm not sure if I got lucky, if it was because I had a rubber glove on and the pliers have rubber grips, or because the voltage level in the US is only 120v compared to the UK's 240v. My dad was working on a plug socket one time without turning the power off to it and accidentally touched the earth wire with the screwdriver he was using and sent it across the living room. Somehow he was fine so I'm not sure if maybe he dropped it and then it hit the wire which would make the most sense as to why the screwdriver got yeeted so easily.

[Kyng]

Yeah, I had a really stupid idea recently.

I was looking for the 'About' page on a certain YouTuber's profile. After a couple of minutes of being unable to find it, I thought, in all seriousness: "He's Canadian, so he might have an 'Aboot' page instead of an 'About' page".

Needless to say, I couldn't find that either...

[Moonface]

Yeah, I had a really stupid idea recently.

I was looking for the 'About' page on a certain YouTuber's profile. After a couple of minutes of being unable to find it, I thought, in all seriousness: "He's Canadian, so he might have an 'Aboot' page instead of an 'About' page".

Needless to say, I couldn't find that either...

I was curious if I could find it, and the About section for a YouTube profile is found by clicking on the description for the channel located under their channel name and statistics.

[Kyng]

Yeah, I had a really stupid idea recently.

I was looking for the 'About' page on a certain YouTuber's profile. After a couple of minutes of being unable to find it, I thought, in all seriousness: "He's Canadian, so he might have an 'Aboot' page instead of an 'About' page".

Needless to say, I couldn't find that either...

I was curious if I could find it, and the About section for a YouTube profile is found by clicking on the description for the channel located under their channel name and statistics.

Thanks a lot!

Weird that they put it there... YouTube likes making weird layout changes all the time for no obvious reason :-/ .

[Moonface]

Technically this wasn't a stupid idea but only because I didn't actually know up front the idea I had wasn't going to work out as expected. 

So as a kid I loved setting fire to things and would take old cardboard packaging to make little basic streets of houses or whatever and then start a fire in one of them and watch it spread. One time I did this on a metal table at the back of my parents garden and set fire to an empty burger box, which caught fire a lot more violently than I expected because I didn't know the cardboard had some burger fat/grease in it that had been absorbed while there were still burgers in it. What made things worse was this table had an umbrella attached to it that was open and the flames were getting big enough that it would've set it on fire if not for my mum sprinting down the garden with a bucket of water to put it out.