Be Excellent To Each Other

That has to be the world's least convincing photograph.

Not had that happen yet. I did have a cheap chinese CFL sort of go on fire a bit though.
Also, eye-lacerating deadly-mercury-tipped-shards FTFY

I've heard of this one, and always wondered how you can be scared of buttons. What do these people expect them to do that's so bad? Or is it seeing/feeling them a 'nails on blackboard' kind of feeling for them?

Either way, they're mental.

I have a massive phobia of bees and wasps (Myoptika will attest to this, as he mocks me for it regularly). I am allergic to them. Not to the point of dying from being stung, but to the point of swelling up a ridiculous amount and needing to see a medical professional every time it happens. Which is a colossal annoyance.

My phobia was multiplied many times when I was dirnking outside, and ended up with a mouth full of cider and wasp (which had crawled into my can while I was looking the other way). I felt it bouncing around in my mouth, debated swallowing, and instead spat it out. There was the wasp, desperately trying to sting the air and get itself the right way up. ad I chosen to swallow the cider/wasp combo, I'd quite probably be dead... unless my brother is better at tracheo-thingies that I expect.

When Lightbulbs Attack!
with Greg Evigan

I had a light bulb explode on me once because a couple of huge spiders were fighting/eating a moth on it. I'm not sure why it happened, but it's apparently spiders and moths are the main things that cause light bulbs to explode. I got covered in glass and bits of spider and had some nasty scratches on my cheeks and forehead. I'm glad I was wearing glasses, otherwise things could have been a lot worse, but wish I'd had my mouth shut. I got a bit of a cut lip, but luckily no glass actually went inside my mouth. Picking a spider leg out from between two of my teeth was not fun at all, though. And I swear I could smell moth dust in my nose for weeks afterwards. I had to have my friend Nick check all around inside my mouth to check there weren't any more bits of creature inside. Which would have been nicer if he wasn't an alcoholic clown, still in full make up after a show. There I am, bleeding and in shock, with his huge clown face inches from mine, his fetid gin breath seeming to slowly ooze up my nose and down my throat, his big comedy gloves, not washed in thirty years, holding my mouth wide open. And all the while he was cackling on and on and on and on... and did I mention this all took place right on the edge of a huge cliff, with the wind blowing hard, lifting my coat tails and making me feel like I was going to be blown over the edge?

Post of the week there Rev.

Doesn't that apply to most of these though, no Spider you'll find in the UK wild is going to do you any serious damage either for instance.

From also knowing a lad with a button phobia, I believe it's due to the feeling of being constrained and fumbling with buttons when you are trying to remove something. My friend thinks it is down to when he was at primary school and needed the loo but couldn't undo the buttons on his dungarees, and the more he struggled and panicked, the more he fumbled, and he ended up wetting himself.

Spiders bite, and that can be annoying.

Malc

I suppose so, but they can annoy you a lot more than a button, due to being alive (and possibly dirty). For instance, I have no phobia for spiders or flies, but being asked to put my hand into a bucket of dead flies would be minging. Less so for buttons.

Yuck. We had several weeks' worth of accumulated recycling (our bin went missing) so I duly hauled it all to the 'civic amenity site' yesterday, and got swarmed by wasps as I tried to throw the bottles into the bottle banks. I was literally seconds away from screaming 'FUCK THIS!' and just dumping the rest of the stuff there and leaving. Instead, I managed to finish, and at this point, one wasp decided it REALLY LIKED/HATED me and followed me... which was tricky as I had to get back into the car without it coming in too.

I think I can co-win the thread with Teh Rev by combining all your phobias.

When I lived in London, all the lights in my room were in wall sconces (or whatever you call those things that go on the walls). I'd regularly have bees, wasps or flies get stuck between the two panes of glass in my window (as a cheap alternative to proper double glazing, the land lady had put in a set of 'inner' windows to compliment the normal single glazed outer ones). One of these wasps then somehow got into my room one night, and after terrorizing me, flew to the light coming out of the sconce. I seized a can of Raid and sprayed downward into the sconce, hoping to kill it. There was an almighty bang as the room went dark, and I panicked and ran out, closing the door behind me.

I slept on the sofa that night. The following day, I discovered that the cold of the Raid's propellant and the heat of the lightbulb hasn't agreed, causing the bulb to explode, spraying shards of glass everywhere. Somehow I hadn't stepped on any glass during my escape, and the corpse of the wasp was in the middle of the floor, no doubt having been flung there by the blast.

I love buttons. My mum had a big Quality Street tin full of buttons, and I used to love sticking my hand in it and swirling them around.

9.1/10 - no clowns.

I hate clowns, if that helps.

When I was a baby, my mother knitted me two cushions. One had a steam engine on it (and I loved it), the other had a clown on it (and I hated it).

My grandmother got some sort of baby supplies-storage thing. It was shaped like a clown, and it hung on the wall and was a place to store things like wipes and powders and so on.

Apparently, baby me would crawl up beneath it and and then sit, gazing up with hatred and trying to work out (in my mother's words) 'how I would GET that clown' as it was out of reach.

My mum had a similar tin of buttons but if you raked around in it like that there'd be a good chance of your hand ending up with several sewing needles pierced right through it.
Presumably in there by mistake rather than as a deterrant.

My best mate recently had an incident which I will describe below. If this happened to me I think I would genuinely, actually DIE.

He and his wife came back from honeymoon, and after a while they found that their bathroom was starting to smell funny... they twigged that it was a smell of burning. This disturbed them, especially as they'd had people in doing some work on it. So they looked around, and couldn't work it out. Was it coming from behind an appliance? From the boiler? Had a mouse got stuck and burned on some pipes?

Eventually it got bad enough to call the Fire Brigade. They came over (in the big fire engine), which aroused interest from the neighbours (they live in a terraced street). They came in, searched around a while, and one finally decided that it seemed to be coming from the light fittings they had recently had installed. So they unscrewed it.

Out poured loads and loads of dead, burned wasps! And some live ones too! While they had been away, the lights had been re-done as part of renovations. Wasps had gotten in, made a nest, and then been sealed inside by the workmen! The lights had then been installed, and when they were turned on they simply cooked the wasps in the nest!

I'm feeling sick even thinking about this...

When my mother was little, HER mother accidentally sewed her finger with a sewing machine.

That is to say, the needle went straight through the fleshy bit on the side of her finger next to the nail. She (grandmother) fainted.

And my dad has a craftman's knife with a non-retractable blade. Quite how none of us ever sliced ourselves digging around in his toolbox with this lethal fucker sitting in there, I'll never know.

AND AND in school we were making mini log cabins out of twigs and small branches... except the only tools they'd gotten for us were X-Acto knives, which were possibly the least suitable tool for trying to cut damp branches we'd just brought in from outside. And sure enough, Jenny Kim sliced her finger open while fruitlessly sawing at the branches and had to be taken to hospital for stitches. The teachers, understandably, bricked it.

That baked wasps thing is horrible.

Made me laugh after feeling down from a harrowing phone call to a mad conductor trying to get overdue scores back off him, so ta for that.

I love spiders, really don't like earwigs or centipedes though - so I freaked out a bit during the insect pit scene in King Kong. I also can't watch razor blade/thin blade cuts in films or TV. Whenever hero-protagonist is shaving and thinking about stressful things, I turn away, 'cos I just know he's going to cut himself by gripping the razor too tightly and *ugh* pushing.

Odd, as I don't have a problem getting straight razor shaves from barbers, I just can't watch is all.

Playing football (inside) at Cubs ~24 years ago, the ball hit an overhead light, the strip came out, bounced off a mate's head and exploded on the floor with a deafening boom and sensation of walking along a beach on a windy day. That was fun.

That is nothing. My grandmother did the same thing when she went to work early one day to work on a wedding dress for a very important client. She was the manageress so wet to work a couple of hours early that day to get started. Anyway, she sewed through her hand with the industrial sewing machine. Bad enough when you have to turn the advance wheel to raise the needle out of your flesh, BUT my nan only has one hand, so there was no way she could do this. he only hand was stuck under the needle. She had to sit for two hours until one of the girls came in to set her free.

Yeah, the insect pit thing ruined the rest of the movie for me... Twat Jackson put it in as a homage to a deleted scene from the 1930s original in which the same thing happened, and it horrified the test audience so much they ignored the remainder of the film.

I hate cutting scenes in films... I remember immense relief in that scene in Layer Cake when they fight in Chief O'Brien's fish-gutting hut and he DOESN'T use one of those ugly knives to fuck James Bond up.

I also hate eye-pressing scenes in movies. I can't watch the end of 28 Days Later because of Cillian Murphy doing it to the solider (why did you discard your rifle, you twattock?) nor can I watch Blade Runner... not just because of the finger-dislocation scene but also when Rutger Hauer presses Tyrell's eyes in a few scenes earlier.

A gym teacher in high school told us the tale of a kid who lost his nadgers after being smacked in the crotch with a soccer ball.

I have a very specific phobia of creepy crawlies - basically pretty much anything armoured (I think it's the chitin stuff they have, or whatever it's called). It is a proper phobia too, not just fear. Spiders I have a fear of, in the sense that if I find one in my room before going to bed, I'll need to collect it with a glass and put it outside, but faced with an earwig, or beetle, or centepede or anything like that and I go proper fucking mental. Even thinking about them *shudder*. Seriously though, I lose control when confronted with these creatures. I even have to turn away if I see a cockraoch or scoropion or something on the telly, they absolutely turn my stomach.

I'm fully aware that none of these creatures (at least none of the ones found in the wild in the UK) could possibly cause me any harm, but I can't deal with them all the same. The only explanation I can think of for this is two earwig incidents. One clamped itself to my big toe when I was playing on a beach once when I was about 5 years old and it took mum and dad a while to pull it off. Another was when I was preparing to play the recorder for a school concert once at junior school. I hadn't used my own recorder for a while and it wasn't making the right noises when I tried to play it. I eventually took it apart to discover a disgruntled, spit covered earwig inside it.

Even typing this has given me the heebie jeebies.

Edit: similar to Nervous Pete then it seems, because non-armoured creepies, like spiders bees and wasps, don't bother me even half as much.

A lightbulb exploded on me as a child while I was in the bath. Being coated in shards of glass was terrifying.

But I deserved it because I'd been squirting water from an empty bubble bath bottle, seeing how high I could make it go. I denied everything.

Aw man, don't watch 28 Weeks Later then. Seriously, there's quite a gratuitously bad bit in there and you just reminded me of it.

Soccer ball? it's a football, man!

My friend was accidentally kicked in the crotch at a football match and one of his testicles shot up inside him and he had to have it recovered at the hospital.

My granddad used to have a fishing boat, and he and his men would hand-bait these huge long lines of hooks. Apparently fish hooks would go right through peoples hands / fingers / fleshy bits of arms fairly often. If that happened, you then had about 30 secs to cut yourself free before you got dragged overboard by the weight of the line they were dropping over the back.

What about that guy who was climbing and fell and got his arm trapped under a rock and then had to choose between dying of dehydration or hacking his own arm off to escape

I hate injections as well. It was weird - I was supposed to give blood recently for a medical research doohickey I had been coerced into doing by my daughter and when the nurse stuck the needle in my arm I was fine, but there was no blood forthcoming (made of stone, eh!) and then about 30 secs later I could feel myself becoming chilled, going light headed and starting to sweat. It was weird feeling it happening even though I don't have a particular phobia about blood or needles, but it was like my body was going into shock just because someone was trying to nick some of my plasma.

Also, top this you lot - when I was about 9 I was walking home from school for lunch and a wasp flew up my right nostril and got lodged there. Being a kid I tried picking the little fucker out while panicking about getting stung, or worse having a wasp stuck permanently up my nostril (I was 9, afterall) until common sense prevailed and I blocked the other nostril and snorted the stupid critter out.

Surely just cut your throat and die relatively quicker?

That man had balls larger than Comical's.

You injectophobes will like this one. I was started on a medication that I had to give to my self, via subcutaneous injection in the belly. A nurse came round and showed me how to prepare the medication and inject myself in the right place. She was telling me about one of her patients who was incredibly skinny. When he did his first injection, he stuck it right into his hip, snapping off the needle on the bone.

There was a mental up in the Valleys who declared in his local pub that he'd cut his balls off if Wales won the rugby. Worryingly, in the same town I live in.

Unfortunately, he made the mistake of declaring this when Wales were utterly demolishing everyone in the Six Nations a few years ago, and, when they won, went home to make good on his promise.

He then returned to the social club, waving his severed nadgers.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-Ne ... 8513297624

"Police revealed he has a history of mental problems."

Welsh rugby fan there.

Good lord.

Actually, I don't mind beetles (in fact I think beetles are cool) or millipedes. So I guess its pincers + chitin that I don't like. I believe Spore will subsequently be something of an ordeal as well as a pleasure.

I had a terrible phobia of pylons when I was a kid, which is commemorated in Dimrill's toppo avatar he did for me. I thought they were tripods, and would scream if taken near one. This was problematic for my mum, as her best friend lived near one.

What about maggots. Eurgh. Someone here had them coming out of their ceiling, didn't they?

Yeah, I don't like maggots either, but I wouldn't necessarily class that as an irrational fear. After all, you usually find them around dead animals, etc, generally places and things we should avoid for health reasons. I could perfectly believe that a fear of maggots is an entirely normal, healthy (and possibly even genetically imprinted) thing for humans to have.

Oh sure, I was thinking we'd broadened the scope to include rational fears as well, since there's more gruesome stories to be had that way.

Eurgh.

And yes, cheers Peter Jackson for those as well. You clod.

Anyone who's ever fished quickly gets over the maggots thing. I once, at the end of a fishing trip, attempted to fling the rest of my maggots into the river. I didn't take account for the lip of the container, so instead of going into the river, the whole lot went all over some guy's boat. Sucks to be him.

Did you warm the maggots in your mouth to make them more 'lively'?

I know someone who did this, much to my disgust, but then he wasn't afraid of anything.

"Score! Free bait!"

No, in cupped hands though.

It's not the wriggly slimy body that horrifies so much as the lipless, soft, silent, pursing, sightless mouth. If it had vocal chords it'd be a terrifyingly pitiful mewling noise. Brrr.

How unnatural! A mouth without any eyes in it.

I've had a tour around a passanger plane that was in bits for a refurb. Literally holes in the floors, the whole cockpit ripped out, etc. There's not a lot to them really.

They are very very complicated, but that metal sheeting is quite thin for something that could impact the ground at 500mph.