Ooooh, good point!! And now it pains me to think of how many times we came up with amazing ideas, only to never remember them again after the next morning... So sad... And we probably solved the worlds problems many times over...
I can picture it now; a bunch of us sitting around the Road Closed sign, using a wire spool as a seat, wearing empty beer cases on our heads trying to solve for the uncertainty principle...
Ok, the chances of us discussing the uncertainty principal were probably pretty slim. Without the internet our knowledge of quantum mechanics would have been pretty minimal. On the other hand, we would have been supporting his German heritage and drinking lots of lager...
I used to watch theoretical physicist lectures on PBS when I would stay home from school. That's because we only had 5 channels and 3 of them would have soap operas and the other one was in Spanish. So it was either learn Spanish or determine how the Universe works. Needless to say, I know next to no Spanish...
We only had four channels until dad put that monster antenna on the roof that could pull in signals from Alpha Centuri. (Seriously, we could pick up stuff from Providence, Boston, and NYC, and on good days, stuff even further away)...
There was no way we could get an antenna since we rented, so more time was spent outside or playing with Legos...
Oh, I didn't have Lego growing up and I felt left out. But we did play outside a lot. There were lots of kids so besides the "organized" sports, playing army was a popular past time. At first it was "bang" you're dead. But after too many arguments that "no way, you missed me!!" it graduated to real bb guns, bows and arrows, and of course the hand grenades were just rocks and sticks. There was no mistaking when you were shot...
We did the same thing with our little green army men. We used dried clumps of dirt as the "mortar explosions". You definitely knew when you were hit. We didn't have the BB guns, but we did have firecrackers and bottle rockets...
There was one particular storm drain in the neighborhood. It always took a few months to grow that layer of algae that made it easy to slide, plus it was about two feet in diameter so you could crawl through on your hands and knees until you got to the section under the road. From that point it was straight downhill until you almost got to the creek. You lie on your back, head first in a rain storm and catch the water flowing by and just slide. It's perfectly pitch black in there and was better than any ride at Riverside.
Mom and Dad were pretty upset when they found out years later. What if there was a clog down at the bottom and the water was pooled up. There's no way to turn around and we would be head first in that pool. Yeah, I guess we were pretty stupid when we were younger...
Needless to say, the shirt and shorts on those days were done after that trip...
We never encountered any CHUDs but when that siren went off you knew you only had a few minutes before this...
Oh come on, it couldn't be that bad. Kinda like a combination Space Mountain / Log Flume ride at Disney...
You'd think so, but I imagine it would be more like getting in that one car that's balanced just right that gets into a death spin for the entire ride...
That ride with the death spin for the entire three minutes was always a goal, and never realized, no matter how hard I tried...
In those instances, having two heads is better than one...
There's something to be said about incorporating redundancy in any system...