Tell me your best story that didn't actually happen to you but instead happened to a friend, family member, or acquaintance.

See The Rest Of ILX for details.

Hmm... There was this one story involving Bingo...

there was this guy on a train in China...

There was an Enlgishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman...

hey watch it you!

stevem already stole my train story so I'll have to tell a different story. One time my mom was in a bar. This was a long time ago, when she was still a young nubile chicky and not a mother of 4 beaten down by life or whatever she wrote on her friendster profile. She was sitting with her girlfriend, having some girly fruity cocktails when in walks a man. A man with a chimpanzee. He proceeds to come in to chat with the girls and they are a bit dumbfounded by this. They are a bit blowing him off, considering he is a man with a chimpanzee in a bar and obviously insane. He leaves them in a huff, but suddenly his chimpanzee runs back over and plops himself right on my mom's lap. This chimpanzee proceeds to pick up her girly fruity cocktail and consume it himself, fruit and all. My mom is horrified but cannot do anything because the chimp is stronger than the 90lb woman and really refused to let her get up until his owner came back and then offered to buy her a new replacement drink (and proceeded to still refuse to leave her alone).

I'd like to end this story with "and that is how my mom met my dad" but that would be lying.

nope, sorry. you have to call me in order to hear The Manzi Story.

there was one time some dude once asked on an internet discussion board for people to tell their best story that didn't actually happen to them but instead happened to a friend, family member, or aquintance, and for some reason no one bothered.

You don't seem to have any chimp in you from the photos.

oh allyzay just did.

when my mum was a kid she once saw a crippled man and thought it was funny so she went home and stood on a sofa walking around pretending to be crippled, and fell off, and broke her leg.

The real story of how my parents met is much stupider than the chimp story, they worked in the same department store, my mom in the pet department and my dad in the sporting good department. From afar, she found him to be an intolerable asshole whose jokes made no sense and avoided him until one night they were doing stock and he just like tried to make out with her. She punched him in the face and told him to fuck himself but apparently I guess that just made him want to ask her out even more. I still to this day am not sure exactly why she decided he wasn't an intolerable asshole with nonsense jokes, cos as far as I can tell he's pretty much still a dumbass.

Ken C.'s tale about his mom is like a lost O. Henry story.

My best story is here:

Should Poo Sink or Float??

I refuse to click that link, Dan.

Come on! It's the Butt-Naked Puking Boy story!

That story is horrifying and also I think I know him.

thats a good story. its happened to me too.

My Mum was at a Crazy World of Arthur Brown concert when she was at college. After the gig she was in the toilet when who should walk in but Arthur Brown himself. His chatup line "I am the god of hellfire, and I give you, my dick" did not work on my mum who promptly kicked him in the nuts and walked out.

Might as well lock the thread now. That story's too good.

random thought that suddenly occured to me:

apparently while hanging out/recording with Steve Albini, the guys in Rye Coalition heard the original mix of In Utero, which they described as "the best thing ever!".

also, a buddy of mine once got to hang out with Robert Hays(dude from "Airplane!") & his wife for the majority of a day at Disneyworld. Said he was the funniest man my buddy ever met.

a colleage on a date with a girl. at her place he noticed a bowl with sweets. the contact did not go well so out of boredom he began to eat them tho hhe thought they were of rather weird taste. it was only after the last sweet he noticed the bowl was this design ashtray and the sweets he had that evening were no more than discarded sigaret-butts.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away ...

this morning my neighbour was having a bath and suddenly the plug shoots off and a whole lot of sewerage comes bursting through.

So one time my friend Nick (a semi-plausible pseudonym) was kinda drunk. Well, he was more than kinda drunk. Let's just say that his blood-stream was coursing with many, many non-naturallly-occuring (in the healthy human body) chemicals.

It was late fall. In Baltimore. And bitterly cold. And sometime after midnight. And Nick ran-out of his favorite tobacco product.

So he called his buddy Tom (another plausible pseudonym) and suggested that they venture out into the mean streets in hopes of procuring some marked quantity of said tobacco product.

Now Tom had also been inbibing many chemicals. He therefore concluded that a late-night jaunt was an appropriate use of their time.

So they ventured forth into that dark night.

Their chosen path led them into the more unseemly parts of the city (think of the area described in The Corner for visual clues).

After procuding the already-mentioned tobacco product, Nick and Tom decided that the night was ripe for a venture into an old cemetary.

Now this cemetary was really old. And was situated right in the most crime-ridden portion of the town. And was surrounded by a high wall.

Nick and Tom, being the brave, masculine men that they are, determined that it was best to scale the aforementioned high wall.

Once inside the perimeter, they wandered around, looking at gravesites and making fun of the more ostentatious gravemarkers. They also told ribald jokes about the inhabitants of the crypts. Occasionally they burst out into raucus laughs.

Then they began to hear voices.

Quite voices. High-pitched voices. Voices of wonder and fear and laughter and braggadocio.

They looked around. They could not determine the source of the voices.

Fear began to affect their thought processes.

Nick and Tom exchanged glances. Somehow they both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: the best thing to do would be to remove their clothing and run around the graveyard, flapping their arms and calling to the spirits.

They proceeded to do just that.

Then, as they approached one of the more dismal parts of the cemetary, they started a group of ragamuffins, obviously up to no good.

The ragamuffins looked up at the spectres that had appeared from the darkess. They screamed in terror:

"They're spooks! They're Spooks! They're come to get us!"

And they left the area, clambering over the high wall, and high-tailing down the streets of the neighborhood.

Nick and Tom collapsed in gales of laughter. They dressed, climbed back over the wall, and went home.

To this day they keep hoping to run into one of those young ragamuffins, who will tell them the story of the night they were haunted by the naked spooks.

Oh for fuck's sake, Ms. Laura, you had to use "Nick and Tom in Baltimore" as your psuedonyms?

As opposed to Vito and Guido in Jersey or what?

*laughing really hard*

You know, that was completely Freudian or something. Apologies.

Okay, Vito and Guido will be next. Thanks, Ned.

It almost seems like when I started this thread, I had a story in mind to tell, and then I forgot to.

Part II of "how my parents met":

After a few months, my parents broke up. My mom immediately took up with a man named T0m 0'Br13n. He apparently looks like David Bowie, so I've heard. He was also one of my dad's best drinking buddies. My dad's response to this is to MAKE UP A GIRLFRIEND, a redheaded non-existant girl named Anna, and pretend that she was always out of town. Everyone found out, obviously, that this girl was non-existant.

So then my mom dumped T0m and started dating my dad again, cos she thought that was some kind of hysterical shit.

I'm not entirely sure why but they were engaged two months later.

At an ice cream parlor, my sister and her friend were waiting in line. In front of them a small child was on his toes trying to get a look at the different flavors.

My sister's friend then decided to pick the child up an place him on her hip so he could see. The child then turns to her and, in a very low, gruff voice, ask, "what are you doing lady?"

It was a dwarf.

I don't care if you're lying or not, that's a fucking amazing story.

Another contribution:

The BRAND NEW ILX comp II Thread, NYC FAP thread, and INternational Telepaths thread

My co-worker Jenn W walked up to a table of seven guys to do her spiel, the special was Norwegian Salmon, she introduces herself, drink specials then "our special tonight is Norwegian semen" at which point she runs into the back and starts crying hysterically.

I don't know if that's funny to anyone else, but thinking about the look on her face when she told me cracks my shit up every time.

My mom went on a date with Dustin Hoffman

My mom's older sister used to sneak out of the house after bedtime when she was in high school and go down to the south side of Chicago to jazz clubs (the family lived in Winnetka at the time). This was in the late '50s/early '60s. She saw lots of people, but she developed kind of a crush on John Coltrane. She read somewhere that he liked cookies, so one night she made a batch of chocolate chip cookies and took it with her when she and her friends went to the club. She asked the waiter or whoever to take it backstage, with a little note telling him how much of a genius he was. He came on and played, and during the break he came out to talk to this table full of little white suburban high school girls, and told her thank you for the cookies.

I guess the story would be better if he invited her back to his hotel or something, but if anything like that happened, she ain't say it. I still think making cookies for John Coltrane is cool enoguh.

my dad went to visit some friends during a college break, and they greeted him with ripple, a great new strawberry-flavored fortified wine just introduced to the market. they had a few ripple ice cream floats, and also smoked a bit, then decided to go see the just-released 2001: a space odyssey. during the opening credits, dad started to feel queasy and excused himself. he became violently ill in the men's room, and spent a while drifting in and out of consciousness and groaning in agony. eventually he felt a bit better and staggered back into the theatre. he asked what he had missed, to which one of his pals replied, "the whole thing." the house lights came up. the end.

A friend of mine, C. was outside while a high-school boyfriend was mowing the lawn. She and his brother went inside the house and when they returned he was writhing in the grass and bleeding, and lying next to him was the spinning lawnmower and one toe. She calmly sticks the toe in a baggie in an igloo picnic cooler and drives him to the hospital, checks him in, etc.. They're waiting and she and his brother finally ask what happened. He replies "Well, uh, um, I was having a race with the lawnmower down the hill." C. and the brother start laughing hysterically, and the boyfriend starts whining: "You guys, You guys. It's not funny. I don't have a fucking toe! I don't have a fucking toe." She tosses baggie with the toe at him and says, "Well, that's your own fault now isn't it. Serves you right if they can't reattach it in time."