While I had to laugh at this too, I quickly stopped because I too did something equally foolish as a child. I took about 2' of lamp wire which I shorted one end by twisting together and put a plug on the other. I laid the wire flat on a polyester carpet (which fortunately was black and grey colored) and proceeded to plug it into a wall receptacle. In my head I was trying to "see if I could make the circuit breaker blow" not realizing that a short circuit doesn't "arc" probably would create that pulse of high current that'd flip a breaker, I heard that distinctive omnipresent HUMMMM and say …