The Magic Of Household Items: A Rainy Day Fun Guide

Hey kids! Is it raining outside? Are you cooped up in your boring old house due to an irrational fear of pneumonia? Is there no one else around because you have no friends and your parents are uncaring workaholics who leave you alone so much that you are only able to find comfort in the familiarity of this site's recycled jokes about video game characters and entomology? Was that sentence really long or what? Well don't worry! The weather might keep you from the average youngster's schedule of playing croquet and partaking in drive-bys, but I've got some really fun stuff that you can make in your own home with everyday objects. That's right, plain old stuff you can find in every home! Although it might not seem like it, your house is actually a veritable goldmine of useful items and dead miners.

Entomology is the study of insects. Let's get started!

Wacky Pirate Hat Made Of Paper

You'll need:

1 redwood tree (minimum of 300 years old, preferably older and with some historic significance)
1 industrial sized wood chipper
1 stainless steel vat (with AT LEAST a 3,000 gallon capacity)
30,000 cups of scalding water
1 pneumatic press
1 authentic Babe Ruth 714th home run baseball (slightly hard to find, probably hidden in your dad's gun cabinet)

Step One - Insert the tree into the wood chipper, being EXTREMELY careful not to bump the tree into any windows or expensive-looking vases. The best way to do this is get really close to the enticing roar of the chipper's hungry maw, as the closer you get the better you'll be able to guide the tree in.

Step Two - Mix the resulting pile of wood chips and your scalding hot water into the stainless steel vat. Stir thoroughly until they form a slurry of sorts. Pour this slurry onto the loading surface of your pneumatic press and activate it. At this time the machine will flatten the slurry and squeeze out unwanted moisture. This flattening/drying process can take a long time, so take your authentic Babe Ruth baseball and bounce it against the wall for a while.

Step Three - Once the process is done, you have a sheet of paper! Wow! Fold it up into a damn pirate hat.

Ham Sandwich

Hungry as well as bored? This fun snack will fill you up quickly, and is an ideal project for beginners since it's the easiest one to complete.

You'll need:

1 perfectly preserved dinner plate from the Ming dynasty
1 actual food replicator from the fictional television series Star Trek: The Next Generation

Step One: Insert your Ming dynasty plate into the food replicator.

Step Two: Set the replicator to "ham sandwich" and power the device up, making sure to jokingly say "make it so!" immediately before becoming overcome with shame.

Step Three: Enjoy your sandwich, trying not to think about about the fact that a replicator converts matter from the area around the device into food and that common household dust is mostly comprised of dead skin cells.

Time Machine

You'll need:

1 refrigerator box with a hole cut into it for a window
1 flux capacitor
4 stem cells from stillborn identical conjoined twins (preferably both hermaphrodites)
1 8-track player manufactured within the past month
written permission to time travel from your future self at the age of 18
1 philips head screwdriver

Step One: Assemble.

Step Two: Get inside.

Step Three: Travel through time.

I designed this time machine myself, and I must say it's quite amazing. You'll be able to travel forward in time at the exact same speed as the rest of the universe. The whole universe. Now that's precision! Imagine being able to see what happens a minute from now... in like a minute! The concept might be hard to wrap your mind around initially, so you simply have to experience it for yourself.

I've been inside my time machine for seven years now, and I have borne witness to countless incredible events that the future held. From my cardboard vessel safely situated outside the slipstream of time I have seen wars begin, historic moments in daytime television, and the world outside of my house getting light and then dark a bunch of times.

The beauty of the machine is that it allows you to watch history unfold without tampering with it in any way. You will truly be an unobtrusive observer who yells for people to bring him food from time to time.

That's it for today since kids have short attention spans, and not at all because I thought the idea for this guide was way funnier before I started to actually write it! I totally didn't come up with this concept last week then wait until the last minute to get started since I was so confident in its awesomeness, then realize that I wasn't at all enthused and should have written about a much more engaging topic such as "anything else".

In some cultures, it is customary to read a daily dirt when it is offered to you. Refusing to do so may result in the loss of a hand or the unexpected gaining of a hand, depending on the region you are visiting.

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)