Solar Eclipse

Today, there was a solar eclipse in China. Just in time for the Olympics. They say that eclipses make animals go crazy for a little bit, and humans just go crazy. Maybe I can blame my craziness on an eclipse I experienced in 4th grade. I went out on our patio. They told us to watch it either with a pinhole in a shoebox or with majortime dark glasses. Of course, I couldn't get the shoebox to work, and we didn't have the required dark glasses, so I watched the eclipse as a shadow on our patio. It was kind of neat to watch the patio get dark in the middle of the day. But, I knew it still wasn't the same. So, on a dare from my neighbor Bruce Campbell, I briefly looked at the sun and saw the partial eclipse with my eye. Bruce thought it was funny, and I thought I was going to go blind. We both went a little crazy. Bruce and I used to do a lot of crazy things. We got walkie-talkies that had a pretty good range. We would play army in the backyard and use the radios. We found out that the frequency was the same as some private airplanes, so we staged a plane accident. We talked his sister Patti into providing screams. We told a pilot that we had crashed in a swamp. I don't know if they believed us. They probably thought we were just kids. At least, I hope so. Bruce and I, along with a couple of other kids, threw crabapples that would bounce up under cars going down the street, and the drivers would think that something was wrong with their cars. That was a lot of fun, until we did it to a police car. We didn't do that anymore. I think the best thing we did was the prank phone calls. We did the normal calls like--is your refrigerator running, but we did a classic. Totally at random, we called a woman named Mrs. Smith. She was an older lady. I identified myself as an employee of the phone company. I told her that we were having trouble with the line and needed to test her phone. She agreed. I asked her to tap the mouthpiece. I heard tapping. I then told her to unscrew the mouthpiece and tap at the plate inside the phone. I heard her unscrewing the mouthpiece and then tapping. I then asked her if she was in the kitchen, and she said yes. I asked her to boil water on the stove. She said that she had boiling water already, as she was making tea. I asked her to place the receiver in the boiling water to purify her phone. I heard a crackling sound and then the line went dead. It has been 40 years since this incident, but if Mrs. Smith is still living, I'm sorry we hurt your phone. But, us kids had a laugh. I blame it on the solar eclipse.