Recently widowed old woman who lives next door to mum and dad asks me to look at something in her garage (she's selling house so packing stuff up).

Once in, she opens a drawer and asks what I think "this is". "Hmmm...." I say, "...I've seen enough episodes of The A-Team' to say that it looks like a grenade to me. Yup. Your husband worked in South Africa a lot didn't he? Are all these guns his too? Yeah, you might want to call someone, Mrs"

Nothing like a grenade to brighten up a house move!

A live grenade was found in the chemistry department at my school while I was there. The bomb disposal team turned up and detonated it in the middle of the playing field.

When we told my father (who had been at the same school 42 years before me) about it, he said "we used to have that in our classroom, everyone assumed it was dead".

...and talking of grenades, there was a good episode of Mythbusters the other day. They demostrated that falling on a grenade is likely to save your comrades and that dropping it in a bucket of water will probably save you and your comrades.

When I said they detonated it I meant that they destroyed it using "a controlled explosion" (the phrase the British press likes to use for such events). But it was a live grenade none the less.

Pieter: Ken, it has been great to see you.

Ken: Yeah, it has been a long time since Katanga. We should get together more often.

Pieter: And we aren't getting any younger, eh?

Ken: No we're not...hey, that makes me think...maybe you have some thoughts...

Pieter: Eh?

Ken: Well, it's Annie.

Pieter: Annie? Is everything alright?

Ken: Oh, yes, yes. It's just that...Annie is in great health...but I wonder: What if something should happen to me?

Pieter: Well, you have insurance, right?

Ken: Yes, yes, Annie would never want for anything. She'll be well taken care of.

Pieter: So where is the concern, old chap?

Ken: Well, it's all of my munitions in the carriage house.

Pieter: Oh, Ken, no worry. Just do what Inge and I did! One call to UXB of Omaha did the trick.

Ken: UXB of Omaha?

Pieter: Yes, UXB of Omaha's Black Cross plan will guarantee that Annie will never have to worry about so much as a blasting cap....and you can sleep soundly. Rates are very affordable, no inspection is required, it only takes 10 minutes to sign up, and, if something should happen to you, UXB of Omaha will put all of your munitions beyond use.

Ken: UXB of Omaha, you say? I'll make the call.

.......

Jim, you quite possibly have crafted the funniest and most enjoyable post in memory with that.

Huh ?

I think I must be missing some US-centric cultural reference

You probably are... In the US, we have all sorts of scummy "life insurance" companies that pay out just enough to cover your funeral expenses. The cost is high, but they guilt trip the elderly into "thinking of the huge expense you'll leave for your children". The commercials generally involve one gray haired person talking to another about the great life insurance plan they just signed up for, and how much more secure they feel.

There are of course, some advantages to using these plans in a few outlieing cases, though mainly the "prepaid funeral" variety. These can be useful because some government benefits are only paid out if your net worth is below a certain threshold, and a prepaid funeral is not an asset.

Matthew

Yeah, and they're all located in Omaha, Nebraska, or it seems that way.

Great stuff as usual, Jim.

One of my friends works in a courthouse in a small town in Michigan. A few weeks ago, some guy brought in a package to the police station (same building) and goes 'I just inherited a house and found this in the attic, I don't want it any more'. He then left it on the counter and left. It turned out to be a WWII mortar shell that was rusting through. They (eventually) got the bomb squad there and took it out to a field to detonate.

You can find all kinds of dangerous things in old houses.

When I was a kid (13) me and a very good friend used to hang around Risley MoD base near Warrington. It had been closed for years, but it was still littered with all sorts of stuff. It was damn dangerous (flooded underground boiler house, collapsed barrack rooms, self closing blast doors on bunkers) and we could easily died there. But HEY, we're kids! We're gonna live forever!

One day we came across a full propeller assembly leaning against a hanger wall: another time we came across three rusted out trucks loaded with steel boxes. Great place!

So we unloaded a box and found all these grey "sausages" inside them (work it out for yourselves), which we proceeded to burn in a heap outside. Nothing happened, so we walked home bored. Phew.

So mate Phil comes in to school one Monday with a secret "thing" in his school bag, one of about 20 he found in a pile over the weekend (we didn't always go together). Looked real cool, even if it was a bit rotten-looking. It had four alloy fins on the bottom and weighed about 6 pounds, with big rusty holes in the side showing greasy-looking yellow stuff. After the initial excitement, the other kids started playing "chicken" with it in the yard next to the science block - I wasn't so sure about it and didn't join in. Jimmie Dean, the Physics teacher for our year, watched the increasingly crazy long distance throws of this hard-to-see-at-a-distance object until he realised what it was and decided to stop the silly game.

We all got the rest of the day off as it turns out it was a corroded British Army mortar round, vintage 50's, that contained a rather nastily unstable explosive. The Army bomb squad was called in (this was in the early 70's before the IRA were really giving them something to practise with) and the area co-ordened off. Oh! such a jolly laugh! If we'd dropped it it probably would have killed the lot of us. Phil was pulled up in front of the beak, given a warning, and taken to the base to recover the rest of the pile which disappeared soon after.

There's a housing estate there now. It's been there for a few years. Who's going to tell them about all the buried Amatol and other stuff (including, purportedly, a few tons of buried 108mm shells)?