A part of a kid’s (almost exclusively boys) emotional makeup consists of sadistic manifestations and outward overt acts at times. Hey! Another statement that sounds like it came out of a Psychology 101 textbook. However, I didn’t just read this in some textbook; I can site empirical evidence from actual events in our “kid history” to verify this! One particular area I will highlight is our “bird bushwhacking.” When we were around 14 or 15, on most Friday nights during warm weather, Tim, Tom, and I would go out to hunt birds to assassinate. This was especially “down and dirty” because we would assassinate them in their sleep! We would wait until dark, then grab our BB guns and a flashlight and go outside and quietly walk under a tree. We shined the light until we found a sleeping bird (almost exclusively a Sparrow), usually we would look first for the ones on the lowest branches, making a “sure shot.” When the flash light holder saw one, he would whisper, “There’s one.”  One or more of us would “get a bead” on the illuminated target and squeeze off a round. The dead or mortally wounded bird would then tumble to the ground. If one were hit in the head just right, it would become a rare “Popeye.” A “Popeye” was when a bird’s eyes were bulged out from, I assume, the inner pressure of a BB hitting in just the right spot. If that happened, the first one to run unto the “corpse” would yell, “A Popeye”!!!!  If, after shooting 5 or 6 birds, and not getting the elusive “Popeye”, one of us would stomp it which usually resulted in a “Popeye”.  One time one of us shot a sparrow and it must have been killed instantly because it tipped upside down and hung there! Its feet must have been “frozen” around the twig it was roosting on. We were fascinated with this anomaly of a dead bird hanging upside down on a twig (after we spend some time in uproarious rolling-on-the-ground laughter).  When it was too cold or we wanted another diversion from outside “bird bushwhacking,” we used to go up to the barn after dark and ply our stealth bird (and bat) homicidal trade.  Two of us would each brandish a thin piece of wooden board and climb up the ladder and cover each of the 2 “barn windows”. In order to do this, we had to sit on the bottom ledge with our backs to the outside. This took intense concentration and agility because if we fell backward out the window, it was about a 50 feet fall! (In spite of the almost 30 year ongoing argument I’ve had with the other engineers I’ve worked with in my past and present, I always use “feet” when it’s more than one “foot” since it’s plural, hence “feet”!) Maybe I’ve arrived at this rationale from my foreign language studies in the past. For example, the Greek word for a man is “anthropos .” The plural is “anthropoi ” (i.e. man and men ((more than 1)) respectively)! Whoops, back to the “barn window”…  One time Len almost did fall out! Another time he climbed out the window all the way down to the ground on the lightening rod ground cable! Even Tim and I didn’t have the “guts” to do that!  After positioning ourselves on our precarious perch, with a “bird basher paddle” in one hand, one of us would start to shake the old hay loader rail back and forth. The rail runs lengthwise and hangs just below in inner roof peak the whole length of the barn (see pic below). It would start to get “wavy ” and hit the roof rafters resulting in a “Clang Choom” noise. This rousted the sleeping birds (the survivors who no doubt felt invincible after eventually fleeing the outside trees around our house). Birds and bats would start flying back and forth trying to get out through the “barn windows.” When one would fly toward us, we would whack them head-on! One night Tom brought his Custom-Homemade-Serrated Edged-Tack Pointed on both sides-Bird-Killer-Paddle! (See sketch below). After we eventually grew out of this “Bird Homicidal Bushwhacking Phase,” the birds started multiplying and singing again and raised prolific healthy families of bird offspring unencumbered with psychotic and paranoid behavior. (Only Tim and I continued with these behaviors, overtly manifested in other areas)!