I killed a lampshade.
Posted on 01 February 2010
This past Sunday my roommate brought his blowgun into the apartment. If you’re unfamiliar with blowguns, it’s a simple pipe that can be loaded with darts. When blown into, the air pressure fires the darts at lightning fast speeds at whatever you happen to be aiming at. The feeling of firing a crazy sharp dart across a living room and sticking the lamp shade is a feeling that every man should feel. For that split second, you are an ancient Eskimo hunting down the great woolly mammoth.
As it is bound to happen when you have a group of guys with a weapon, things escalated quickly. We decided that the best solution to avoid making millions of tiny holes in our walls, cupboards, furniture and television would be to construct a shooting gallery, along with a refined scoring system to determine who the master of the blowgun was. With the help of markers and tape, the kitchen became decorated with a collection of targets made of milk jugs, cardboard, pictures of cats, and a miniature Stonehenge (because who doesn’t feel the need to knock over Stonehenge?).
It only took a few shots to realize that it was possible for the dart to ricochet off certain targets and get scary close to our faces. With some minor improvements we made the targets ricochet proof, and spent the next few hours taking turns firing the gun.
Needless to say I dominated the competition; nobody stood a chance against my precision accuracy. After shooting all the targets, I got bored and shot a fly out of the air. Well……actually I was terribly inaccurate. I did the worst out of everybody, although I did hit a target once, maybe twice. Even though my score was weak, compared to the other guys, I had a mountain of fun.
After the day dwindled down, I thought about how I had spent it playing with a blowgun, this obscure thing. Nobody ever thinks to play with a blowgun unless someone else talks about it. There has to be other obscure things out there that I haven’t been introduced to, equally obscure stuff in the world that is just as fun as a blowgun. The question is: what is it?
Beekeeping? Magnets? The game of Risk? Unveil your secrets! I want to know what is out there!
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