By:  Joseph R. Ellis

Oh, the things my hoodlum friends and I did!  It is a wonder we didn't:

1. Blow ourselves up
2. Get ourselves maimed
3. Get ourselves seriously burned
4. Get arrested or sent off to a juvenile detention center
5. Get our families sued
6. All of the above

In this blog, I will recount some of our escapades.  But first, some background history.  Strike that.  First, a disclaimer:  THESE ESCAPADES TOOK PLACE DURING A MUCH SIMPLER TIME, WHEN KIDS WERE LEFT ALONE BECAUSE OUR PARENTS DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE.  AND PEOPLE WEREN'T NEARLY SO LITIGIOUS.  DO NOT ATTEMPT ANY OF THESE ACTS IN THIS DAY AND AGE.  PROFESSIONAL DRIVER ON A CLOSED COURSE.  DO NOT ATTEMPT.

Okay, now the background history.  First of all, I got into plenty of mischief on my own, so I am not trying to blame anything on my "hoodlum friends".  Remember bobby pins with the rubber tips?  When I was just a little tyke, I wanted to know why nothing happened when I shoved a bobby pin into the electrical outlet.  I had two older sisters, okay?  Bobby pins were always lying around the house.  Upon closer inspection, I noticed the aforementioned rubber tips.  So I peeled them off and repeated the experiment.  Much better!  Huge sparks!  Smoke!  Soiled underwear (just kidding).  Rather than get electrocuted, you may be more likely to suffer a burn as the cheap bobby pin metal is superheated into a few drops of molten alloy.  But usually all that happens is you blow a 15 Amp fuse and leave an ugly black smoke stain on the wall.  Then your mom yells at you and junk.  But I did manage to shock myself hundreds of times during my childhood.

Okay, so it is evident that I needed no help when it came to getting into mischief.  But some mischief just requires a partner.  Sometimes it requires a whole room full of partners.  I was going to describe one of our earlier escapades, The Car Trap.  But the background history about the bobby pin experiment reminded me of another electricity-related incident that happened several years later.

Show & Tell:  The Hot Dog Cooker

It was the 6th grade.  Due to my interest in science and electricity, I checked out a book about "cool science experiments".  It may have even been a book by Bob Brown, a kind of "Mr. Wizard" author who never failed to teach me useful things that I could twist into mischief.  The hot dog cooker was simplicity in itself.  All you needed were two nails, a plank of wood, four bottle caps, four tacks and an old electrical cord.  Take the four bottle caps and tack them onto the bottom of the plank of wood, at the four corners.  This makes a nice set of feet for the hot dog cooker.  Next, you drive the two nails through the bottom of the plank, about the distance apart of a standard hot dog.  Don't drive them all the way flush with the bottom...leave enough room to twist the bare wires from the electrical cord around the nail heads, then drive them the rest of the way down to hold the wires in place (one wire is attached to each nail).  When you turn it over and set it on its nifty bottle cap feet, you should see two pointy nails sticking out of a board.  Where does the hot dog come into the picture?  You grab one out of the fridge and impale it across the nails.  Oh yeah, be sure the cord isn't plugged in yet.  Maybe I should have stated that earlier.  My bad.  Anyhow, once your hot dog is properly positioned, plug the cord into an outlet and stand back!  In just 60 seconds, you will have a cooked hot dog!  Sometimes you can even see smoke and sparks coming out of the hot dog where the nails enter the "meat".  So unplug the cord and grab the hot dog (warning, it is hot).  Funny side story.  I told my friend Andy how to make one of these years later, but forgot to tell him to unplug it before grabbing the hot dog.  He said the hot dog shocked him and he threw it across the room!  Back to the 6th grade story...put the hot dog on a bun and add the condiments of your choice.  Notice the pleasant metallic aftertaste - you can't get that at Weiner King!

So what do you do after creating such a useful household appliance?  You take it to school for show and tell!  I didn't bother bringing an actual hot dog, since it would have smelled up my book bag.  I just described how it worked and left the rest up to the other kids' imaginations.  Then the teacher left the room (teacher's break?).  I think it was common and we knew she would be gone for several minutes, although we usually posted one kid as a lookout. 

So now the fun starts.  By the 6th grade, boys like to show the girls how tough they are by doing things like, oh I don't know...electrocuting themselves with a homemade hot dog cooker.  You know how it goes...the dare...the double dare...the double-hot dog dare.  It was so cool as one by one the guys got up the courage to grab both nails and see how long they could stand to run the current up one arm, through the chest cavity and down the other arm.  Then, being the budding scientists that we were, we decided to make a human chain.  One kid grabs the first nail (which is harmless since it is an incomplete circuit).  Then the first kid holds hands with the next kid, who holds hands with the next, and so on and so forth.  The last kid grabs the second nail, completing the circuit.  We actually kept doing this until we had the whole class involved - girls and boys alike.  We made some interesting discoveries.  With the whole class daisy chained, the shock was much less, due to the increased resistance.  We also discovered that the kids in the middle of the chain didn't feel any shock at all - only the ones grabbing the nails felt it.  However, if the chain was broken in the middle while the nails were still being touched, the people who broke the chain felt a mild shock when they released their handholds.  Fascinating!  And incredibly stupid!  I could see the headlines:  Teacher returns to find room full of smoldering students in apparent mass human chain hot dog cooker electrocution suicide pact!

How did we ever survive our childhood?

Remember to check back next time for the Car Trap story.  This invention started in New Mexico and was later perfected in Charlotte, NC.