Crowning Moment Of Awesome - Television Tropes & Idioms

Describe a personal Crowning Moment Of Awesome here while thrashing a thief into submission with a spork in nothing but a grass skirt in the middle of a snowstorm before you help a stranger deliver her baby by successfully performing a crude Cesarian section with a blade of frozen grass and your trusty spork before you propose to your unrequited love at the airport before they get onto their plane to a faraway country to convince them to stay with you, twisting a diamond into the spork and melting it into an engagement ring with a match.

Add your examples at the end of the page. One example per person, please.

As with all Crowning Moment pages, Your Mileage May Vary.

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Academic achievements

Not all that impressive I guess, but throughout elementary school this troper has often corrected her teachers, been called a genius by her teachers, and read at high school grade levels.
This troper's sister counts as this. In fifth grade she went from high level reading to around no skills in it do to dyslexia. She had to go to a special school. Many people were not sure if she would ever really bounce back. But, in just the three years of middle school, she managed to be able to got to the local high school with english at Honors level. She was able to do this through plain hard work and willpower. She is consistintly on the honor roll with at least a 3.7 average.
This troper was elected Homecoming Court at his school. For reference, this is my profile pic on MySpace.◊ It was a Crowning Moment of ROW ROW FIGHT THA POWAH.
- That, sir, is two Crowning Moments of Awesome in one.
- Nice shades.
- Was your election slogan "Who the hell do you think I am!?" ?
  - Sadly, no. We didn't do election slogans or anything.
  - Am I the only one who doesn't get it?
  - Nope.
  - Oh, come on, folks. He even potholed it for you!
Minor but Awesome, This Troper once took her Geometry finals with out a calculator (it was dead) or reference sheets (highly recommended by the teach) and not only proceeds to get 103 points out of 100, but gets the highest score out of ALL the geometry classes in the SCHOOL.
This troper attained his CMOA on the first day of preschool. I came home complaining that the other kids were pretending they couldn't read. (It's all been downhill since then.)
Very, very small compared to most of these, but this troper, at a very young age (in preschool, she believes), was in the car with her grandmother, and stopped at a light. She looks out the window. "But Grandma, that says no stopping or standing!" Grandma returns her to her mother: "She can READ!" Mother: "Well, yeah."
This Troper's CMOA comes from high school, sophomore year. Health class was a required class, and most kids took it their freshman year; so taking it this year meant I had a fairly small class. Ten people, total. Among them was one girl who almost always channeled The Bitch. This is the one that, at one point, I got in a book-throwing match after she used the phrase "Your parents should be in prison for not having aborted you." Yeah, that kind of girl. So a week after that incident, the class gets the assignment to create a Public Service Announcement on some issue, and perform it in front of the class. I... either forgot about it, or didn't give a damn, and had nothing prepared. So I got up after everyone else had gone, and began improving the whole thing. "Hi... my name is John..." I spun a story about how my sister was killed by a drunk driver... me. It was supposed to be a 60-second presentation... I went four minutes before I finally ended with, "When they say Don't Drink And Drive, they're not saying it to keep you safe. They're saying it so you keep others safe. Wish I'd known that." The room was completely silent, and as I walked by the Bitch's desk, she took my hand, looked up at me with wide eyes, and said "That was amazing, John... erm, Troper..." Pity I get stage fright... apparently, I can be one hell of an actor.
- ...That story about the drunk driving was made up, right? If not, I'm so sorry for you.
- I'm not.
Not particularly impressive considering some of the other entries on this page, but nonetheless: When she was in grade five, the teacher set This Troper 's class up in a series of five-minute debates. One topic was "Do bears have as much as a right to life as humans do?" (or some such thing, her memory is a bit fuzzy. And it was in French, just for the record.) Anyways, This Troper was on the "no" side of the debate- the only one on that side, and some of her classmates were giving her reproachful looks. The teacher called on her to present her argument first. Her explanation was, "Bears don't have as much as a right to life as humans do, they have MORE of a right, because they don't go around driving other species to extinction." Everyone crossed over to her side of the room, without fail. And for the record, This Troper is HORRIBLE at public speaking, and she was even worse back in grade five.
In the middle of this Troper's first year of school I had figured out the reading thing and spent the reading lessons, well reading. Unfortunately the teacher felt that all students should pay attention to the teaching being done. The teacher decided to check if I was paying attention and asked if I could repeat what she had just said. After saying "before you asked me to repeat what you just said, you said" and quoted her last sentence back verbatim, I was not bothered in my reading again. Being able to multitask like that is pretty nifty. And I did manage to follow the story I was reading while also being able to hear, understand and remember what the teacher said.
This troper has just finished writing the first draft of his economics dissertation. He has referenced Rush, Green Arrow, Transmetropolitan, Discworld and CSI...*remove glasses*...Miami.
- YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HHHHHHHHHHHHHH
My uncle had a Crowning Moment Of Awesome when, in highschool he was told to write a creation myth for English. What did he write?
Nothing sat throughout no time
and became bored
and said "let it be"
and it was
and nothing became all.
- I don't get it. Please Elaborate.
- The person who doesn't get it must be overthinking things. It's almost impossibly simple!
A buddy of mine in high school got his varsity letters in wrestling and judo. Why is this a crowning moment? He has cerebral palsy affecting both his legs.
My friend had one in our senior year of high school. Russ was in calculus and would often sleep in class. The teacher didn't really care; Russ aced all the tests anyway. But that wasn't enough. One day, Russ spontaneously woke up, corrected the teacher, and went back to sleep.
- My best friend who usually sat next to me used to do this all the time, only in Chemistry. It was awesome.
This troper has an academic CMoA from eighth grade. The top ten participants (Who go on to the state level competition) in his local area's MATHCOUNTS competition consisted of nine people from various upscale private schools in his area...and him, from a, let's generously call it not-that-upscale public school. The actual crowning moment came after that particular competition had ended. The director of his Academically Gifted program (Whose participants were the people the public school sent to MATHCOUNTS) asked the directors of the gifted programs of the other two public schools in the city "So what happens now?". The response: "We don't know. We've never actually had anyone make it to the state level before." He was the first person in his city's public school system to get that far.
In Core Humanities 201, one of the assignments involved a four-page essay about Euripides' Alcestis, featuring a discussion of how the play dealt with the Greek themes of eros, philia, and agape. Trouble was, after reading the play, I couldn't help but think of all the ancient tropes at play in the work. Alcestis gets sent to Hades, Hercules (inexplicably) shows up, goes down to kick some guardian-of-hell butt on behalf of Alcestis' husband, returns her to him, everyone lives (mostly) happily ever after. So basically, the titular character was nothing more than a Mac Guffin, right? A Plot Coupon, perhaps? I spent four pages writing a deconstructionist lit-crit, pointing out tropes as I went, and my Works Cited page? Item one was the translation of the text I'd used. Items two through fifteen were TV Tropes articles to explain all the TV Tropes inside jokes I'd used in the text. I got an A on the paper and the professor remarked "Original, insightful, but VERY cynical!" Even better? On the last day of class I got a chance to talk to the professor about my writing (at his request) and he asked me, "I still want to know what compelled you to write that piece about Alcestis." My answer? "Because if I played the assignment straight I knew I wasn't smart enough or insightful enough to get anything better than a C. I figured I'd save us both the exercise in mediocrity. I was raised on Screwy Squirrel cartoons, for what it's worth." Said the professor: "Well, it worked. Not to disparage any other students, but when I read their papers I think 'I've read this paper a thousand times.' When I saw your name, I knew I was in for a different take. You're a very talented writer. I hope you keep writing." I was on cloud nine for the rest of the day and the burst of confidence had to have helped in my other classes during finals week.
At the elementary school of This Troper,(who is now using first person) we had a math league going on when I was in 4th grade (For those who have never had one, it's when math geeks get into teams for their school to see who does math quicker while still being correct). Back then, I had absolutley ZERO social skills, and there was a contest in my gifted class to warm up the math team. It was the math team against everyone who was not on the math team. However, about halfway through, I got frustrated with how slow my team was, and decided to join my own team. I never kept track of the score, but my mother got a call after school telling her that I'd beaten the entire class.
This math-dumb troper once managed to solve a math problem that even the teacher couldn't do. Sure, she was just using one of the varied techniques to solve it that the teacher had overlooked (it was one of THOSE math problems, you know what I mean) but she still did it. And is still the type who has to count on her fingers.
This Troper's crowning moment of awesome came during an examination in school for musical analysis. This troper got the second highest mark in the class. Why is this a C Mo A, considering this troper (Guitar Bizarre) is known as a musician? Because it was a one and a half hour exam. To which I arrived 45 minutes late.

Close Academic achievements

Standing up to thugs and thieves (and the Mafia)

This troper still remembers a day in Year 8 when she was sitting next to the window of the school bus. She was waiting for the teacher to come back so she could go home and glanced out the window to see a student from the neighboring school threatening her head-teacher with a knife. Dozens of kids were staring at them and some other teachers were holding back the primary kids. The Head simply gave the knife-wielder a Major Death Glare and took out his mobile. "I can call the police right now. But if you don't put that knife out of my students' view this second I'm gonna make you wish I had called them." The kid laughed and said something like "You're bluffing." and stepped closer until the knife was just twenty centimetres away from the head-teacher's gut. But he was totally calm and just repeated his threat. And you know what? The guy with the knife ran away.
Personal real life Crowning Moment, when this troper and his roommate were robbed and assaulted in their own house a few years ago, he managed to nick one of the assailant's hands in a (vain) attempt to fight them off. Then, after a couple agonizing years of the trial for them being delayed, the robbers were finally forced into a "no contest" plea with the single most damning evidence against them: DNA evidence from the very knife he nicked them with. There was also the fact that he was able to use his previous experience with escapology to free himself and his roommate and get help after the crime was done, but that didn't kick as much ass.
- Hey, it kicks more ass than staying tied up.
This troper's former boss at Blockbuster had hers when she punched out a customer. She's a large African-American woman who is built kind of like a steel girder, and when one guy tried to shoplift from us, she calmly waited until he started to head for the door, then stood between him and the door, said, "Give me back my fucking tapes," and then before he could say anything, she punched him in the face so hard he went down with just one punch. Then she called the cops on him.
This troper had a classmate in a night class, and the two students often walked the same route after class was over. While walking home one night, a man jumped out of the bushes in the park with a knife, demanding money. This troper's friend, after telling him her wallet was in her backpack, reached back like she was going to get it, and instead whipped out the steel t-square poking out of her backpack and nailed him in the side of the head with the same motion. It was like watching a fucking sword draw in the movie. And then, for good measure, she hit him again before the two students ran off to get the cops. Fucking. Awesome.
This troper's karate instructor had a crowning moment of awesome 34 years ago. When he was a senior in college someone broke into his apartment to get drug money. The guy had a 12 gauge shotgun and bottle with some liquid in it. To make a long story short my instructor disarmed the dude, the bottle broke during this in which contained acid as a result lost his left eye when the acid got on his face and still beat the living shit out of the dude. My instructor punched the dude so hard in the face that he busted the guys skull even after the acid got on his face, but the dude had so many drugs and such in his system he didn't feel anything or very little. My instructor only regret in this deal is that he didn't kill the dude when it happened.
This Troper has been practicing martial arts all her life, and has a habit of wearing combat boots when out and about. She was walking home from a school function late one night when some bloke about a foot taller than her and built like a Mack truck sneaks up behind her and puts a knife to her throat, demanding she hand over a real Prada handbag she'd gotten for her birthday. The idiot then used the hand with the knife in it to grab the bag. This Troper proceeded to snap his wrist like a toothpick and then when he came back screaming for blood she planted her boot in his lower jaw. He went down like a rock. The best thing about it? Right across the street was a cop, standing there like a deer in the headlights, with his gun halfway out of its holster.
This Troper's great-grandmother was robbed when she was ninety in her apartment, what did she do? Beat the ever loving snot out of the robber with her cane, by the time police arrived the would-be thief was begging to be taken away.
- Was she wearing a house coat?
This Troper's father has one of these moments under his belt, and it is quite a good one in my (biased) opinion. The moment? His father managed to save a house full of people from being killed, raped, or at least horribly wounded...with a broom. The tale starts as such: this troper's father and mother were staying in a house where a large number of bikers lived. For this reason, one of the people who also lived at the house decided to shoot his mouth off and tell one of the people in the town, basically, 'If you want a fight, come to so and so on so and so street!' along with multiple insults, to get him and his family to come over and fight. All well and good, right? A gang against a massive bunch of bikies, not a problem... except the bikies weren't there. So, a house full of women and relatively scrawny men were, that night, beset by a gang of around 30 people who had violent intentions. A massive brawl was staged, and, my dad, in an attack of desperation and sheer balls jammed a broom under his arm, screamed, and ran down the hallway, causing the gang to flee when they thought he had a gun. The police, after the fact, told my father that if he really did shoot the main attacker they'd have given him a medal. The thing that tops it off, in my opinion, is that the man who HAD started it by mouthing off was curled up under a bed, with a gun, waiting for people to shoot. He got justice, though...quite a few of the women in the house were in a relationship with various bikies who did not take kindly to the fact that their significant others were going to be either raped, killed, or maimed, and therefore beat the everliving crap out of him.
This troper's grandfather got one a long time back, when he was manager of a bank in Vancouver. One day as he's walking back to the bank after lunch, three large men with guns and sacks of money come booting out of the bank about half a block ahead of him. He takes off after them. Now, even in his prime, Granddad was not a big guy, and his opinion of marshal arts cannot be repeated in polite company. He managed to bring down all three of them before they got a block's distance, and kept them from trying to take off again until the cops showed up through raw balls.
This troper knows a 65 year old guy, short and pudgy, who caught three burglars in his home one night and proceeded to thoroughly trash them. With his bare hands. In his undies. Of course, this guy is a former marine and hells angel, but still....
Only one by hearsay, but this troper's mother went to visit a family friend to find the friend's early-twenties son - a short, slender, fragile-looking young man - looking rather shaken and wan. On some trip away from home he had been ejected from his hotel due to a lost credit card, a misunderstanding about his attempts to sort this out, and a bastardly hotel manager. Finding himself without money or transport in the middle of the night, he had decided he had no option but to try to sleep on a bench at the railway station. He woke up to find a couple of men trying to take his clothes off. They did not, however, know about the short, slender, fragile-looking young man's extensive martial arts training. He let them go as far as taking his jacket off so as to take them the more by surprise. Supposedly he explained that part of the reason he looked so shaken was, as he said, "...and when I was bouncing their heads off the platform I realised I was sort of enjoying it..."
This troper once won a fight with three guys who were all larger than he was, so quickly that his best friend's father, who witnessed the event, couldn't even tell what happened.
In this troper's home state, a four-year-old in a Power Ranger costume startled a pair of armed robbers into fleeing from his home. They held up his mother and one-year-old sister at gun point before he came to their rescue.
This is second hand information, but heard from this troper's sword maestro, who shouldn't have any reason to lie on the subject: two of his former students had walked from a SCA gathering late at night wearing their gear, including chain mail shirts under their coats, since it's easiest to carry that way. Passing a dark alley, near the railway station, one of them was stabbed in the back. The flimsy knife shattered on his mail, and while they ran away as fast as they could without looking back, you can believe that somewhere there is a very confused assailant. It's only a pity that they never saw his face.
Long before this troper was born, her mother was single and living by herself. A guy tried to get through Mom's window one night. Mom had a gun next to her bed. She picked it up, aimed, and hit the wall right beside the window. She then warned the scared shitless guy that if his foot made contact with her floor, the next bullet would be between his eyes. He jumped down and ran. However, Mom's dad wasn't pleased; in his opinion, she let the guy get off way too lightly. Later, Mom, still single and living alone, has another unwelcome visitor. She repeats her earlier perfomance, but then, to make her dad happy, runs outside and chases the guy, gun still in her hand, for several blocks. Hell to the yeah.
- Just in case that didn't come out properly: She meant to hit the wall. Mom is a freaking excellent shot.* One CMOA, not This Troper's but one he observed, was in his PE class. An obnoxious Smug Snake pitcher on the other team yelled at the current batter of the troper's team "JOHNNY CAN'T SWING!" on his first pitch. That threw off Johnny, the batter, a rather great amount. The ball bounced upwards, landed on home, and rolled back to the catcher. The pitcher repeated this on the second pitch. Johnny slammed the ball all the way to the fence. He proceeded to jog the bases at a leisurely pace after stopping to yell, "(Pitcher's name) can't pitch!"
This troper is a surviving victim of attempted rape... she managed to escape (and her legs were duct taped together) while the guy (in the nude) was likely injecting himself with crack in another room. Of course, the encounter left her scarred for life at 13... but if anyone else ever tries that, he has a karate student with nearly 4 years of experience to deal with.
- Well done, you.
  - Seconded. We only hope that you'll be able to overcome the issues that bastard caused you.
This troper is the descendant of a truly awesome individual - a church servant in Sweden. While his job was relatively humble, he still kept doing it until he was 70 years old. That's 70 years old, in a time when the average lifespan was 50. But that's not the CMOA. That would be when the church was attacked by Cossacks, and everybody fled for their lives. Everybody, that is, instead of my ancestor. The 70-years old church servant was the only guy to stand up to a fuckin' Cossack raid. He was armed with his walking stick. Of course, he was beaten to death, but still... He is now something close to a patron saint for that church. The same Norwegian troper also has a great-granduncle or something who has his own day of celebration in a US state as a Civil War hero. He's celebrated as a war hero by a state that likely has more people than this troper's home country. But it still can't touch the church servant's pure awesome.
- Not that it lessens the badassness of your ancestor, but the reason the average lifespan was so low back then was because of high infant mortality and large numbers of death by disease, not because people lived much shorter lives. If someone lived to fifty, it was not unreasonable to expect them to live to seventy.
This Troper's father works at a liquor store, and once, the store was robbed by a man with a knife. Dad chased him, tackled him, and held him down until the police arrived, despite getting stabbed twice and bitten hard enough to leave a wound that lasted for months. He was 54 at the time, had semi-recently recovered from cancer treatments, and obviously takes his job much more seriously than I do.
Solarn This troper's 70-year-old grandmother was once attacked by a particularly violent purse snatcher who threatened her with a knife when she didn't let go of her purse. Her reaction? Stab him with the pointy end of her umbrella and keep hitting him until he ran away. And then she calmly walked home, made some tea and phoned her daughter about the incredible thing that just happened to her.
This Troper's CMOA was when he was mugged by 2 guys on the streets, I informed them I was a 2nd Dan in taekwondo, they didn't listen, they both got a butterfly kick to the balls and turned in to the police station.
During a brawl outside the front doors of his school this troper saw his 50-year-old art teacher in the lobby tackling anyone trying to join in. Nobody got through. For the record, this man used to be a lumberjack.
This Troper, who shall remain nameless, has something of a reputation for cracking his neck very creepily when nervous. (1st person) However, it was only recently that it saved me from a jackass mugger. While out with friends, some guy jumped us without warning and got me in a headlock. Now, he was considerably stronger than me and I knew I couldn't break out, so I jerked my head to one side, cracked my neck and went limp. The mugger dropped me quickly, thinking he'd broken my neck. Now, I could've just left it at that - He was freaked enough that he would probably just run - but, riding high, I got up slowly, head lolling, grabbed my head and cracked the other side. Then started grinning and laughing as evily as I could. "Whats the matter, freak? Can't take a JOKE?!" The guy ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction, screaming bloody murder as he went. I'm now known as the Joker.
- Why so awesome??
This Troper was eating in an French restaurant when a guy came in with a handful of magazines and started to bother a man sitting next to me who was quietly doing some office work on his laptop (open air restaurant btw). The man refused the offer to buy several magazines, and suddenly noticed that the bothersome fellow was trying to pick his pocket. He shouts at the would be thief, who runs away and around the corner. Manager comes over, asks him if he's ok, gets the guy a drink, and minutes later, the thief returns with his loser friend, now both wielding large machetes. As they storm into the little shop and begin to shout threateningly at the staff (one of whom sits down and cries, poor girl), one of the waiters pickes up a cake and HURLS it straight at the offenders, nailing them with two pounds of chocolately goodness *cue terribly frightening glare from waiter*. This scares the larger, stronger, more numerous, and better equipped men that they run away like BABIES. Waiter got the rest of the day off, I went back to my lunch.
This troper has a best friend who used to ice skate. Said best friend is a legendery badass, and you will soon see why. Ok, so she's hanging around by the concessions stand at her skating rink, watching some friends do a synchronized skating piece. Said friends are 13 or so. Now, some big hockey players are also hanging around. They start messing with the concessions stand girl (who was 12). This troper's friend (henceforth known as T) nicely asks the guys to stop bothering the girl. They stop, but then start a very crude discussion about how hot the skaters are (the THIRTEEN YEAR OLD skaters) and how they'd like to bang them. T gets pissed and gives them another warning, saying "You pervs, they're thirteen! Shut the hell up!" One of them says "Hey, baby, don't be like that" and grabs her ass. Now, keep in mind, T was wearing her skates. Freshly sharpened skates. She turns around and kicks the guy straight up in the nuts. Did this troper mention that the guy wasn't wearing any padding? He goes down. Even better, the owner of the skating rink SAW what happened. The guy and his mother complained, but the owner of the rink said "Well, he deserved it."
This troper was almost robbed a year ago on a sunday evening when waiting at the university for her father to fetch her, who had mixed up the times. The guy came from behind and threatened me with a knife, demanded my purse, but because my cloak was damaged and it stuck to its bag, I couldn't get it out and feared this would end my life. Now I live in a country which has racism problems and now let me tell you why racism and nationalism is bullshit: The guy who threatened me spoke highly fluent German with no accent and as far as I could see him, he was light skinned and blond. Who saved me was a turk on a bike who scared him away and then lend me his cell phone to call home. He didn't want anything neither for the rescue nor the phone call, although I offered him, he just moved on his bike and went away far to quickly, I don't even know his name. That wasn't all. Still shocked I made my way home through the dark although I see very badly during darkness. I caught the last city train home but then stranded at the end station because I missed the last bus and there are no cabs to catch from the streets around here. I decided to try my luck and tramp, but this is unusual in Germany, therefore nobody stopped. At this late hour a man approached me who I had only seen once in a nearby local, therefore I know he is Pakistani. He couldn't help me as he had not car or anything, he didn't have much not even a jacket warm enough for that night. We just talked shortly before he retreated because "if I stay here with you, surely nobody will stop." After a total time of 2 1/2 hours I was finally picked up by a kind Polish man and went in, when I attached the belt and looked outside, from the shadows appeared the Pakistani. He had stood there in the shadows the whole time and watched over me. Although freezing. What an amazing guy. Thank you, Turk, Pakistani guy and Polish man, whoever you are. I don't know your names but I only wish you best for your life.
This Troper's mother had one years before even meeting his father. She was on her earlier thirties, and was on a touristic bus tour with her parents, her brother and her sister (The bus had two floors, my mom was with her sister on the first one while the rest was on the top one). Suddenly, she notices a guy on the seat in front of her slipping his hand into the purse of the woman sitting besides him, and to top it off, she notices that he and the driver where in cahoots. Cue my mon standing up and threatening the thief physically (she told me she actually punched him), then walking to the driver and demanding him to drive them to the closest police station or else she would "break his arms and drive there (herself)". He would have stood up to her, but by that time, everyone on the bus noticed what was happening and were on the verge of lynching the guys.
This one is going to be hard to believe, but I Am Not Making This Up. During the spring break for my Senior year of High School, I was having lunch at a local Chinese restaurant when in walk a couple men. I recognized one of the men from photos on a flash drive that I had found the previous Autumn and correctly assumed the other man to be his lover. I have nothing against the GBLTQ community, and am actually a big supporter of equal rights for them (why the hell should there even be an argument about that?!?), but I knew I was in danger as certain documents on that flash drive had led me to believe that the lover was in the Sicilian Mafia who are mostly violently anti-Gay. Turns out I was right, and he somehow knew that I had evidence both of his affiliation, but also his affair, so since he felt his life was at risk, he was there to end that danger by ending me. Knowing that I was probably dead anyway, I bluffed and pretended to be hanging up my cell phone as he sat down in my booth and pulled his gun on me. I have a friend who has an uncle who's pretty high ranking in the Mafia, so I just lied my ass off and pretended to be under protection and that the only way to save himself from being revealed as gay was to leave me alive. By some miracle it worked and he left. I talked to my friend later and now I actually am under protection, but those who believe me when I tell them of this story consider it to be one of the single most awesome things they know of someone doing in real life. I mean, how many people can really honestly say that they bluffed their way out of being whacked by the frickin' MAFIA?! Not very f**king many!

Close Standing up to thugs and thieves (and the Mafia)

Standing up to bullies

This Troper's aunt had such a moment. She's a 5'4" 30-something who is often mistaken for a high school senior, and is the assistant manager of a store. One day, a Big Scary Russian fellow came charging into the store, ranting and raving about his shoes being defective (i.e: leather shoes that got ruined when he wore them in wet weather), and tried to intimidate my Aunt into going against policy and giving them a refund, including slamming the said dirty shoes on the desk. She politely refused, and when asked for the manager of the store, my aunt turned around, and turned back to him, smiling broadly. "Yes, can I help you?" The big scary guy realized that he just screwed himself over, and left.
- Bonus? This was when my mother and I came in to pick her up for dinner. Turns out? We dinged his car!
While travelling to a class one evening, this troper's karate teacher's car had a run-in with another driver, who immediately tried to be a smart-ass about it, getting riled up, yelling and generally trying to make out that we'd rammed him off the road. Sensei's response? He got out of the car and stood in front of this supposed tough guy. Simply stood there. In his first dan black belt and with at least a head of height and a stone of muscle more than the driver, and asked him what the problem was. Needless to say, he backed down pretty damn fast.
This Troper's father had one of these at work. He's a milkman, so naturally, he delivers milk to stores, schools, and the like. On his old route, he had to deliver to a private school in Manhattan. He parked his truck, unloaded the milk, and delivered it, only to come back to see Mario Batali, in his limo, screaming about how the truck was blocking him and he had to drop his kids off at school. He began to scream at my father, ranting about how he was inconvenienced, dragging the principal into it on his side. Keep in mind, Mario Batali was about a foot shorter than my father. When he screamed up to him, "Do you know who I am?" my father replied "You're no Emeril." He proceeded to get in the truck and drive away, leaving behind an incredulous short chef and principal.
- ...and Emeril was Batali's protege.
  - This is one case where Not Doing the Research actually paid off!
This troper's friend had one of these. He played baseball for 8 years at the time of the CMOA, he was a pitcher. We were both in a store when, lucky us, someone came into the store and stole something off the rack. what did my friend do? He ran outside, picked up a rock, and threw it at the robber. It hit the robber in the back of the head and made him fall down, unconscious. He later said, "He had a big head from actually managing to steal something, it was easy hitting him."
- This troper doesn't agree that hitting someone in the head with a rock is a CMOA if all the guy did was steal something off a shelf.
The good friend of this troper's brother (let's call him Fred) certainly had one. Recently, while seated in the waiting room of a doctor's office, Fred overheard a pair of Middle Eastern men insulting the office receptionists (calling them "stupid Americans" and whatnot) in their native tongue. What these men didn't realize was that Fred's mother had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. government—and that he speaks and writes five languages fluently. When the receptionist called Fred's name, he calmly walked over to the men and said (in perfect Arabic): "You should be careful about what you say—you never know who might be listening." As Fred himself put it (when this troper heard the tale firsthand), "Their jaws hit the floor." Awesome, indeed!
- Something similar happened to this troper's father while he was in the Navy. His ship was docked in France, and he and his buddies went to dinner. The people who worked at the restaurant were basically hosing the American tourists; when an American asked how much something cost, the waiter would ask the manager in French, get the actual price, and then translate a more expensive price into English. When the waiter got to the table where the sailors were sitting, Dad explained in perfect French that they were not stupid American tourists, that he had lived in France when he was younger and that they were going to pay the French price for their meal instead of the American price.
- [[Stryper This troper's]] cousin had one of these. His father was a missionary in Haiti for close to 10 years. My cousin actually learned creole before english. Well, he was in high school in Pompano Beach, FL. His team was playing against a mainly Haitian team. They were loud and saying some rather rude things. Finally, my cousin in the middle of a huddle just yelled out something equally obscene in creole. It suddenly got really quite from the other side.
This Troper is very Jewish. The first Shabbat after he'd bought his house, his doorbell rang. He answered to find a couple of Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or something like that at his door. In attempting to make his point, he greeted them with "Shabbat Shalom, how can I help you?" First question they asked: "Do you believe in G-d?" I look slowly at the Mezuzah affixed to my door, showing off the Kippah (Yamulka) I'm wearing, then slowly down at the Star of David hanging on my highly visible necklace. "No. I believe in the Flying fuckin' Spaghetti Monster. Of course I believe in G-d, you schmuck!" They look at each other, look at me, one says, "Have a blessed day," and quickly got off my property. I never did figure out who they were from, but they haven't come back since. This was in the Summer of 2007.
- This troper thinks you are the most Badass Jew ever. Seriously, that is pure awesome.
- Seconded. I havent laughed that hard in weeks...
- This Mormon agrees with the above, citing that even though it is part of the Stock Introduction for Mormon missionaries, common sense is supposed to be used.
At times, it seems This Troper's father is a walking Crowning Moment Of Awesome. The incident that springs to mind most immediately is the following. We live near an enclave of Jehovah's Witnesses, and for years they pestered us godless heathens, trying to convert us to their religion (as they are wont to do). My father finally got sick of it, and one day as they came to make another attempt, he was just out of the shower. So my father, a soaking wet, hairy, middle-aged man, greets them at the door. Naked. They have not come back since.
This troper while not as awesome as other people on this page, has had a couple of CMOA's himself. One was when in the eight grade, he backhanded a desk into three other rows to get to someone. This happened because something the other person said about someone really pissed this troper off and he wanted to make the guy say sorry. Thankfully this troper was stopped by someone elses CMOA when the person who stopped this troper jumped over all of the desk this troper had backhanded out of the way while they were moving and stopped this troper.
- Your life, for a few brief moments, became an action movie. Win.
Don't know how this compares to the rest of you, but I still look back fondly on this CMOA. In 8th grade, I was somewhat of a pipsqueak. Nerdy, clumsy, you know the type. So, two bullies, one tall and lanky, the other tall and humongous, were accosting me one day during PE. They kept doing this kind of noogie thing where instead of noogieing my head, they'd grind their knuckles into my spine and sternum at the same time. It's quite painful. After they did this a few times, I got sick of it. They walked away, laughing. I followed them, tapped the big one on the shoulder, and when he turned around, I sucker punched him in the jaw as hard as I could. Then I noticed the principal standing two feet behind them. But his back was turned. Later, the skinny one held me down while the big one wailed on my own jaw. Later still, I saw the oaf, and noticed his jaw had swollen a lot more than mine, and from only one punch. In addition to being a CMOA, it was a great example of "My honor student beat up your dumb kid."
This troper had a persistent bully all throughout elementary school. When I entered middle school, I befriended a guy, but the bully kept persisting. This was one of the many reasons I went to a private school the next year, but in doing so, I missed out on my new friend's CMOA: after having been annoyed by the bully for a while, he (being considerably larger than the bully) grabbed him, shoved him into a locker whole, and told him to stop being a dick. When I returned to the public school system the next year, I noticed the bully's antics had all but disappeared.
This troper's family believes this to be one for him, but he is not particularly proud of it. In my freshman PE class, I am known as homosexual simply for not being perverted. The one who started this trend is a bit of a bully to me, attacking me for no reason and persisting with the gay insults. One day, I was running track laps and was passing this bully and a friend of his. They, again, asked the perverted questions, but I just ignored them this time. The bully, also an avid user of the Cluster F Bomb , yelled at me, "Fuck you, [name]!" Finally fed up with him after three months, I yelled back at him, "Fuck me, now who's gay?" He and his friend were in awe, but I am rather ashamed of saying it because cursing goes against my morals.
- This troper would like to nominate the above troper for a Crowning Person Of Heartwarming award on the basis of a verbal triumph being marred in his mind by the use of profanity. That's Superman-grade 'aww!' material, right there.
  - That tropers girlfriend agrees, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. You don't have to be embarrassed that you said the F-word, love! It was for a good cause!
This troper finally got bored with people bullying him at school, and so after three months of planning and laying groundwork, he managed to round up all 9 of the people who had been making his life a misery, coaxed them into the school basement, locked the door with the only key, and promptly switched off the fuses for the basement lights, and used the PA to send them ax crazy messages based on a test i asked a friend to run on them (Who claimed it was for their pyschology.) as to what would freak each and every one of them out, and did so for the better part of two hours, until finally unlocking the door silently, sneaking in, locking the door behind me, and getting a friend to turn the lights back on. Two of them actually wet themselves, and not one of them has come near me since. It's such a shame we don't have a section for 'crowning moment of batshit crazy'.
- I felt the need to edit a page for the first time just to tell you how awesome I think you are.
- You . . . you Magnificent Bastard.
- Ahem... Crazy Awesome. That is all.
This troper's brother had his crowning moment of awesome (in this troper's opinion) when he was in 5th year in secondary school. This troper was 12 at the time, had just started secondary school and was being bullied mercilessly by a guy in her class for being a loner/nerd/freak/four-eyes/fatty/swot/teacher's pet (This troper has the unfortunate combination of book smarts, a slight weight problem and glasses.) One day while my class waiting outside the P.E hall for the teacher to come, said bully began verbally abusing me. Nobody said anything to him about it, I'd given up telling him to leave me alone, a complaint to several teachers hadn't made him stop. I was just about to resign myself to 5 years of hearing this jerk insult me everytime I turned around. And then some 5th year students passed by on their way to another class. One was my brother. At home, we never stop fighting but upon seeing this jerk making his little sister upset, my brother (who is 6'4) picked the jerk up by his shirt collar, held him more than a foot off the ground for a full minute, leaned in real close and said quietly through bared teeth "Leave my sister alone." (For extra effect everyone else hade gone quiet, so that my brother's whispered ultimatum echoed throughout the hallway. Plus my brother has two extra canine teeth. They look like actual vampire fangs. He refuses to get them removed.) The jerk was suitably freaked out. He never dared bother me again.
- That's a Crowning Momentof Heartwarming, too, in my book!
While This Troper was in the school library, the librarian shouted at the group to shut up (thus being several times louder than us). No one listened, so she told us to cease and desist. Someone in the library asked "how do you spell that?" She told him to log out and leave immediately. He just said he wanted to know how to spell the word, because he didn't know what it meant. She told him to look it up, and he said he couldn't, because he didn't know how to spell it. She facepalmed, then walked away. He got to stay.
My Dad once knew a person who was rather stuck up. Would try to be pompous and say things like how art had preceded nature because paintings of sunsets outdid real sunsets. Anyway, one day in company he meets my Dad and typically says "We were at the concert last night listening to a rather spectacular Scarlatti". My Dad, who had little musical knowledge, but still some replied "Oh, that's very nice, which one?" He replied "Excuse me?", Dad said "Well there were two Scarlattis, Alessandro Scarlatti who composed a great many operas, and then his son Domenico Scarlatti who followed in his fathers footsteps." The man was utterly stunned and barely able to reply.
This troper (hereby referred to as I/me) had a slight CMoA during French class this year. Now, my French teacher is new to the school, and I liked him at first, but he began to show his incompetent side about two weeks after class began. At one point in November, he had gotten the point that we didn't like his style of teaching and so decided to 'punish' us with a full class of grammar. We did a worksheet and then he proceeded to make us go to the board and write the right answers. Now, when he goes to correct them, he marks a verb wrong and wrote the wrong tense beside it. I raised my hand and told him that he didn't have the verb right, and he told me to prove it. I took a Bescherelle (verb dictionary) out of the cabinet at the back, looked up the verb, showed him the right answer, and walked back to my desk without a word. He was speechless, and after class that day I got pats on the back and choice picks off a friend's lunch.
This troper was usually verbally harassed by these two females..(whores) in school... this troper couldn't bring himself to hit them to shut them up.. since retaliation always made him look bad, since he's 6 foot 4 and they are below 5 foot 6... so what did him and his Nakama do when they ran into them at the movies?? Insult them and make them look immature... It was especially funny since the boys they were with were our good friends and laughed with us as we tore them a new one... after that the following week at a special school event, we ended up in a brawl with one of the girl's older brothers and their friends... who do you think won??
This Troper went to the War and Peace Show and single handedly convinced every Neo Nazi she came across that yes, the Holocaust did happen actually, and no, it wasn't a good idea however you look at it (this troper is a historian).
- I am not even Jewish and I must say "thank you." This troper tends towards Heroic BSOD type stuff even thinking about the Holocaust.
Pyro Skittle had her crowning moment recently. There is a racist black jerkass at her school. She is one of the few who dealt with him in a forced manner because she is good friends with his girlfriend. How he even has a girlfriend Pyro(S) will never know. At this time it must be mentioned that Pyro(S) is the girl that makes friends with everyone, including ladybugs, (No really- they've assaulted me with their red-and-black lovin' almost monthly since last June,) can make friends with the most conservative Muslim girls that actually wear the veil and refuse to talk to non-Muslims, and has an ability to diffuse serious situations within two sentences and a tip of her hat. He said a comment that broke the straw that broke the camel's back after she warned him about her lack of patience when dealing with him for FOUR YEARS with continuous racist, hypocritical, and sexist comments virtually every time she dealt with him. He then called her fat. She got very quiet for a moment before shouting out loud, "Get Dangerous, Bitch!" kicking him in the balls- with skateboarding shoes that feel like iron boxes filled with cotton, no less, grabbing his fro and shoving his nose into her knee, waiting for him to try and stand up, and punching him hard enough in the kidney for him to shriek when he fell again. He couldn't get up. He now has a broken nose and *apparently* a very large and dark bruise on his groin, since he still talks in soprano after four days. Her English teacher told her that it was the most epic thing she had ever seen, and she used to teach in the low-income public school area. She wrote me up anyway, but only put in the cockkick because she'd gotten fed up with the jerkass, too. She now has no cell phone or TV until summer, and no regrets whatsoever.
- You are incredibly awesome and deserve a medal.
- I... it's... too... AWESOME...
This troper once faced a 12-year old bully in elementary school when the troper himself was 9. The bully did a lot of things, some of which require no mention here, but one thing that stood out particularly was that he stole my house keys from me that i had gotten only a couple of days prior from my parents as a sign of trust. He told the troper that he had thrown away the keys, and that the garbage trucks had already taken the trash away, along with the keys. What followed was major pushing on this tropers berserk button. He flew into an unstoppable rage and wtfkpwn'd the smug bastard with a single, well aimed Falcon Punch right in the face. Before i had time to KO him with another punch, teachers broke us apart. With a major nosebleed, he reached for his pockets and produced my house keys, handing them to me while saying "I'm sorry." After that, we went on to become good friends, and this troper - who had been bullied for most of his early childhood - earned everlasting respect and confidence that has survived to this day.
- So this is a real-life occurance of Defeat Means Friendship? Awesome :D* This troper had a small one during a physical dispute in 8th grade. The class was going to receive their report cards, but the teacher refused to hand them out until the class settled down (they were always rowdy). This troper got annoyed by the delay and attempted to hush some people. One of the girls got in this troper's face and before you know it, she scratches at this troper locks her arm around this troper's neck and arms, trying to choke me. Without even thinking, this troper sunk his (that's right, ~~Samus Is A Girl~~ I am a boy) teeth into girl's arm. Some of the kids the day after praised me and others teased me asking how the girl tasted. To this day, all the people he told this story to have never put him down for physically defending himself against a girl.
- Probably because it was legitimate self-defence. And because it sounds like she was a bitch (which isn't a word I use lightly by the way).
This troper witnessed one when he went to see The Bourne Ultimatum. He was in the same theater as an annoying cell phone user. During the previews and pre-movie ads, he was talking very loudly on his phone, and I suppose he might have been hard of hearing, as the volume on his phone was turned way up, so that nearly the entire theater could hear both sides of the conversation. People began shushing him, naturally, and he began getting annoyed. Eventually, he becomes irate and shouts "These are just the previews! They're garbage! You're telling me you want to listen to garbage?" Another guy calls out "Yeah, just not your garbage!" Cue theater bursting into spontaneous applause and cheering. At this point the guy finally seemed to realize that the public wasn't on his side, and was silent for the remainder of the film.
A friend of [[Zz This Troper]] who lives in Kansas goes to a high school that Fred Phelps announced he was protesting at. So, of course, said friend and hundreds of others form a counter protest. That's not the best part though —- they raised money in the form of payment for every minute that Fred and co. didn't leave. They arrived at the counter-protest with 450 people to Phelps' 10, and raised $13,000 in 45 minutes.
This Troper's mother is fluent in French. When we go into a restaurant in France (us being Australian tourists) we ask for a table in the non-smoking section. Then, a French couple come in, sit next to us... and start smoking. Mum (in French) "Excuse, me sir, this area in non-smoking". They stop. Then, they start again, as we're about to leave. So, my Mum goes to the woman, and opens up (in French) with "In Australia, we have civilised laws about smoking". A double burn. First, she has established that she is NOT British, as the French... don't like Poms. Second, she has delivered a burn to the fact that the woman's smoking. Mum continues in this way, and is about to run out of French... when the woman makes the mistake of answering in English. Oops...
This troper witnessed something that clearly shows that Reality Is Unrealistic. You see, there is a bully/loser that is always playing poker for money during lunch. He and his group of bullies try to occasionally force someone to play with them, so they can basically steal his money.(4 guys playing poker for money against one. Since they share the money they win from the person they force to play, they always end up winning.) One day, a new guy transfered to this trooper's high school. The bullies invited him to play. He accepted. This trooper felt sorry for the new guy. He wasn't very tall, and wasn't very strong either. Then, at the first hand...He bet twenty dollars. Then, that guy laughed and raised the bet to sixty dollars. IN HIGH SCHOOL. DURING LUNCH. The bullies(and everyone watching the game) stared at him for a couple of seconds. The bullies figured he was bluffing. He wasn't. Then he LAUGHED. An Evil Laugh. This troper asked his friend if the transfer student was called Akagi. Before he could answer, the transfer student decided to give them a chance to get their money back. In Black Jack 21. They lost. Then he laughed hysterically, took their money and walked away saying that they didn't know what real gambling was like. I swear, if they ever make a Western adaptation of Akagi, they should hire that guy to play Akagi. I'm dead serious.
This troper's father was a hippy during the Vietnam War, and he not only lay down on the ground in front of the White House when there were policemen on horses there, but he got arrested, escaped the police van with a bunch of his hippy friends when it got a flat tire, took over a college building, got kicked out of Yale for said college building incident, managed to get out of the draft by saying he was a CO, and got back into Yale all in the same time frame.
This troper's middle school science teacher had a CMOA. There was one student in my class who always did poorly on homework but got perfect scores on his tests, leading my teacher to believe that the student was copying off of the girl next to him, who always did very well on both her homework and tests. Right before the final exam, my teacher privately consulted the girl about the situation. He said that he would give her an "A" if she intentionally put down a completely wrong answer for every question. The copying student faithfully recorded each and every wrong answer from her test, and my teacher used the identical one-hundred-percent-wrong tests as proof that he had cheated.
This troper once heard his Spanish teacher tell a story of how her daughter, who looked like the stereotypical American blonde The Ditz who wouldn't know any other languages was in an elevator. Two creepy looking men who didn't expect her to understand Spanish were describing, in Spanish, their fantasies of raping her. As they left the elevator, she said the Spanish term for "Fuck you."
When this troper was about 8 my sister and I were playing outside when this older boy decided it would be funny to whack my 5 year old sister across the back with a bamboo stick, this troper then proceded to pick up her toy buggy and whack said boy across the head with it and send him home crying for his mother.
- Good man. I'd have hit him a few more times, so another CMoA is that you had the decency to stop when you won. Good man.
My cats both have a tendncy to react angrily to overly inquisitive dogs. My aunt has a fairly big and agressive dog, and she usually brings it with when she visits. I sadly wasn't around to see it, but apparently one of my cats kicked his ass at one point. The kicker? He was declawed in the front by his previous owner. So essentially a 10 lb. cat bitchslapped a 50 lb. dog into submission.
- And people wonder why I prefer cats to dogs...
This troper was not popular in school and had a miserable time of it for my first three years and a bad time for the last two. I was late to "develop" (If You Know What I Mean) and teased a lot about it by two particular guys (using the male version of my name etc). Between the end of year 11 and the start of year 12 (UK comprehensive schools) I did. Two years later I had ditched the glasses and sorted out my wardrobe and was at the local pub when a familiar voice shouted "Nice Jugs!" (no I wasn't carrying cocktails) I turned to see one of my tormenters. I smiled, looked them in the eye and put on a some glasses nicked from a friend. To top it off someone I knew called my name. Needless to say, he nearly choked on his drink and I was buzzing all evening.
This may not qualify as Awesome, but for this troper's standars it is certainly notable. I was on a three hours long bus trip with my classmates, some of which used to hate me quite much, and one of these guys had the nice idea to spill water on me while I was sleeping. Anyway they had no water, so they had to go around the bus to ask for some, thus definitely waking me up. Instead of going berserk on them, I chose to pretend I was still asleep, enjoying myself immensely while they went on with their quest for water (made even funnier by the fact that I lifted my eyelids just enough to see them without being seen). As they finally approached me, I suddenly opened my eyes, grinned and said "Good Morning" in the coolest tone possible. Cue their bewildered faces and the guy who hated me the most saying respectfully "Are you Splinter Cell or what?!"
My fencing instructor had one. When he was in school, he got bored while watching commercials on TV, so he decided to do sit-ups during that time instead. Then, he realized that he could still watch the TV while doing sit-ups, so he did them during the show and rested during the commercials. Eventually, he realized that he could do sit-ups for an hour straight. Soon after, he got into a fight at school, and his opponent punched him in the stomach and broke his wrist.
This troper works at a pool hall owned by his father. One day a redneck was being a real jackass and claiming he had "green beret" training. This troper just looked at him and laughed (considering he himself has trained in martial arts since he was 4, trained with a few olympiads, and with his family's history in the military knows that no green beret would ever tell a person about his training (it goes against their own cause)). Anyway, he challenged the redneck to a fight outside and not only was the jackass completely unable to make a single successful attack, this troper was able to pick him up and body slam him into the pavement with one hand, and actually made the poor sod start crying when he went to tear out his eye (something that somebody with that degree of military training should easily be able to defend against). This troper did not tear out the guy's eye (though he certainly would have if it were necessary), but was able to make the jackass submit and shut him the hell up.
Not to brag but in actuality my entire life could be described as a back and fourth series of these by me and my mom but those are tales for a different day. So it was the first day of 1st grade and the teacher had decided that she wanted assistant volunteers to come and help her for whatever reason. So I walked into the classroom with a dorky little 5 year old grin on my face and bout 3 years worth of television plus another 1 year of gaming under my belt. (That statistic about children who watch tv before the age of six doing crap in school is a total lie BTW) And to my right I see this little crippled kid who can't reach his pencil box. The teacher had said we have to get our pencil boxes for class. Well I had already grabbed mine but decided to help this kid and grab his for him. Well ms. bitch didn't like that at all. She came right on over, grabbed my neck and DRAGGED me to the assigned seat where she continued to verbally berate me while the teachers aids ignored her entirely. All except one, this woman comes over to the desk waits politely for the teacher to pause until the teacher stops for a second and mustering her best sweet old lady voice asks "Yes, how may I help you?" The woman looks down at her and announces this single line in a voice which trailed through the whole room like a lightning bolt cuts through a cloud. "THAT, IS MY SON!" The teacher froze in place because at that moment she knew one thing and one thing only. Her career was over.
This troper had a geometry teacher who had the most awesome moment in class one day. He was teaching the class and this boy was goofing around with one of the females in the class and play-threatened to choke her, another boy said that he should rape her first. Cue moment of awesome. My teacher stopped, went to the door, closed it, went back to the front of class, and (He said the meaner versions of the bold words. Also, this was addressed to the boys)said

Teacher: I should've put an end to this long ago...but I let it keep going. If you threaten a woman, I will grab you and drag you into the hallway. Threaten a woman...I'll kick all your freaking butts. You can also tell your parents I said that.

I, Rpgingmaster once did the verbal equivalent of Did You Just Punch Cthulu. I have two nasty, bitter, pissy great aunts that the entirety of BOTH sides of family dared not cross or call out on how assholey they were. On day, they bitched out my mother. I responded with many a Cluster F Bomb, and basically told them, fuck your age (I was about 17 at the time), I wasn't about to hear you give my family any shit, and despite their bitching back, I not only managed to intimidate them into shutting up, but to this day, they have since backed off, and they look at me like The Antichrist. Not that I'm normally that disrespectful or nasty, but I drew the line at those wrinkled bitches verbally tearing down my mother, so I verbally told them Shut Up Hannibal (they also liked dealing out HannibalLectures) in the bluntest manner possible. I still am congratulated for having the balls to do what people nearly three times my age couldn't muster the fortitutde to try.
This Troper has a Minor one heard through gossip. The father of a boxer who lives in this Troper's city had parked his car very awkwardly in front of a large building. An employee from the building (a slightly wimpy engineer) tried to get out, but the man wouldn't move his car. The engineer leaves his vehicle and walks up to the man, asking him politely to move. The reply was, "I'll move when I'm good and ready, thank you" in a sarcastic tone. Eventually, it escalates into an argument, it isn't soon before the man shouts "Do you know who I am?". Then explains that he is the father of so-and-so the famous boxer. Upon hearing this, the engineer right hooks the man. Flooring him. Five minutes later, after he'd recovered. He moved his car.
Not this troper's but still, and friend of his did this one. The annoying kid in the back of class is telling jokes to an audience that just wants to learn Spanish. He pulls out the joke, "What do you get if you cross and elephant and a rhino." The nicest kid in the class turns around and screams "Your Mom, now STFU." The teacher was laughing too hard, so the nice kid wasn't punished.
This Troper's mother had one as a kid. Apparently some new kids in the rather rural Cotton Wood neighborhood had been shooting squirrels and cats on my Grandparent's property, near the house. My mother, only twelve or so at the time ran out of the shower in nothing but a towel and screamed at the boys, verbally bitch-slapping them while they stared in horror (they were the same age as her). She then proceeded to grab a large stick and chase them off the property. This Troper's grandmother saw and heard the entire thing.
This Troper didn't see it himself, but his mom did. While working at my brother's marching band trained, she and another mom were working (making lemonade) outside the school, in a place popular for skateboarding. Obviously, its not allowed right then, but some teens come up to skateboard. The other mom tells them to go skateboard elsewhere, and they reply with the eternal "In a minute." After a few minutes, they still haven't left, so the mother confronts them. They replied, "What if I don't want to leave?" and started getting in the mom's face. So she hits him over the head with the pitcher, sending cold lemonade everywhere and Cluster F Bomb dropping teens heading for the hills.
This female troper's big sister has a more or less infinite number of these under her belt, but her most recent is still fresh in my mind: This chick was verbally assaulting me in the hallway, claiming I was the reason we "failed" our group assignment (in quotes because we got a B-). She was right in the middle of calling me an idiot when she seemed to vanish in the blink of an eye. Confused, I looked around to find her on the ground to my left, clutching her hip. My sister, who I hadn't seen come up to my right, was standing there with her foot hovering in mid-air. Yes, she had shoved the girl with her high-heeled foot. But the best part was when she turned to me and said, "You ready to go?", completely ignoring the girl on the ground. Stunned, I followed her towards the exit. Without turning around, she yelled, "Next time, it'll be your face, {girl's name)!"
This troper's mom had the best one she knows of. She and her husband had gotten into a truly awful argument that had been brewing for months, and at some point, he decided that he was the man of the house and was going to have his way whether she liked it or not. So he put hands on her, and it was the worst mistake he ever made; she punched him in the mouth so hard, she scraped up her knuckles when she knocked both his front teeth out. So there he is, bleeding buckets from his face, laid the fuck out on the living room floor, and all she says is "Well, we've only got one phone— who should I call? The cops, or the dentist?"
It may not be much, but it's mine. In sixth grade, this troper was the constant target of bullying for being very small for her age. Said Bully was spouting off some crap, as usual, when this troper just lost her temper and swung her coat at him, intending to shoo him off. Instead, the zipper of the coat caught the bully's glasses, and flung them off his face, where they skidded to the ground a yard away, unharmed. The Bully stood in absolute shock, frozen for several moments before he blinked, shook his head, and went to retrieve his glasses while yelling "You'll pay for that!". This troper promptly ignored him and was smiling for the rest of the day.
One of this troper's proudest memories was a mixture of a Crowning Moment Of Funny and a Crowning Moment Of Awesome. This troper was bullied a lot during childhood for being slightly overweight, bad at sports, a bookworm, and all around weird. I was leaving the school that year and wanted to get back at my tormentors before I left (I figured they couldn't throw me out if I was leaving anyway). There was this lice scare going around in the third grade class that year, and the popular girls, who, mind you, had treated me like dirt most of my seventh grade life, were supremely disgusted. Our class had been good that week so we were given an outdoor free period, and, wouldn't ya know it, third grade had also been little angels that week. Seeing the popular girls huddled in a corner, far away from the plague carrying third graders, I hatched a diabolical plan. I went over to a group of bored looking third grade boys, and told them that I would give them candy if they went over to talk to the little clique in the corner. The girls went ballistic when they saw the little "vermin" coming over to them, and started screaming and running away faster than I had ever seen them run. The boys thought it was great fun and started chasing them, and the entire time I was literally rolling on the floor laughing. And there's more - the crowning moment to this Crowning Moment Of Awesome was that three teachers (third grade, seventh grade, and the third grade class aide) had seen everything that had happened and were laughing just as hard as I was. Hail to the freaks, universe!
This Troper is currently in a high school production of Don't Drink the Water, during one of our slower days, we were left with the main cast and the assistant director, let's call her Mary. Everyone who has ever worked with her for any period of time quickly relizes, that she is, to put it simply, a bitch. Axel gets bored during a read through and starts throwing paper balls at Drobney. Drobney yells at Axel and Mary gives her a two paragraph writing assignment. Now, this troper wasn't here for this part, but everyone there swears it happened. Axel finishes the writing assignement, and Mary reads it silently. When she finishes reading it, she throws it into the nearest trash can and walks out with a word. Rehersals were undeniably over. When it was fished out of the trash can later, it read: "To be a good leader you have to be respectful and not a bitch. When your a bitch, people don't respect you and will get mad at you. When they get mad at you, they won't listen. They will also start throwing paper balls at your brother. If you are a bitch, people will just ignore you and do their own thing. To wrap this up, be respectful and not a bitch." She didn't come back for a week, but that was because she had Swine Flu. The next day, the teacher in charge of the Fine Arts department comes to Axel and asks him if he really called her a bitch. He says he did and accepted any punishment he would be given. The teacher says "It's okay, I know exactly what you're talking about." Axel got off without punishment. And this is the same school where this troper nearly got suspended for saying "ass." If you can have someone get away with calling you a bitch at this shcool, you know you're one.
To all the tropers complaining about Jehova's Witnesses, at least they only visit you once in a while. This troper's mother is a Jehova's Witness and for the last ten years has been dragging me to their awfully boring and hypocritical meetings. Well, one fateful day I was at my breaking point, Most likely drunk, and when a speaker was going on about "Oh our religion is the best!!", I stood up and gave this speech: "You all need to get your heads out of your asses. Your religion sucks infested, pus covered ASS! Why the fuck do you think people shut the door in your fucking face or hide when you knock on their doors!? Why would you go knock on peoples doors on CHRISTMAS FUCKING DAY??" Then turning to my mother, "If you try to bring me here or to any convention they hold I will jump out of the car while it's moving and hitch-hike home!" This troper then walked home in six inch heels. To this day I have not returned to that place. Oh happy day!
- Good for you.
This troper has been plagued by the dog next door with an obscene habit of trying to attack anyone within a 4 house radius. One day, while walking home, I spotted my mother out in the garden. The dog suddenly appeared from inside the neighbor's house and started running towards her. Suddenly, she just turns around and yells at the dog to shut up. I think the dog saw death that day because it just stopped, yelped and then tuck its tail between its legs and RAN. After that moment, she has been known as literally the lion across the river...
This troper (first person) was having trouble with a fellow student who "can hold a grudge like no other" and was pissed at me for some unknown reason and had resorted to a good deal of name calling. Now, I am one thicked skinned person and personal insults don't bother me at all. But after a few weeks of this, she finally struck a nerve and asked, in all seriousness, "Do you have ADD or ADHD or some kind of retardation that gives you an excuse to act like this?" Now, not once was I personally offended, but a good deal of the people who heard about it thought it was a low blow and wanted my blessing to invoke all manner of punishment on her. I told them I had something up my sleeve that would top their plans and to wait. That weekend, I wrote her a 2 page letter that detailed why what she said was unacceptable, especially for someone running for a club office, that people with any form of learning disabilities or mental handicap do not have "excuses" for acting the way they are, they act that way because they are a unique individual and that even if they have a learning disability or are mentally handicapped, that does not detract from their dignity as a person, and that a good deal of mutual friends were deeply upset that I would "just take it" so I had to act. At this point, page one of the letter ended. Page two opened with my retaliation in the form of the following sentence "I am going to forgive you." and that no matter what she did or said, I would continue to do so nd then I asked for her forgiveness for my still unknown offense.
- My hat is off to you. In a world where violence often begats violence your response is indeed a CMOA.
While watching a Japanese film, I can't remember which, one of the members of the audience who clearly didn't know it was a subbed film when he started watching it lost his temper and shouted "LEARN TO SPEAK ENGLISH". My friend in the seat next to me stood up and shouted back "LEARN TO SPEAK JAPANESE, ASSHOLE". It seems that the security had a sense of humour, because we didn't get sent out for it.
Two from me, one mine, one from an ex-maths teacher. For the teacher: Two kids were talking in class and not paying attention. They were so deeply engrossed in their conversation that they didn't notice the teacher walk up to them. He was standing in front of them, waiting for them to stop, which of course they didn't, so he picked up a ruler and WHACK. He hit the table right next to where one of the kid's hands was resting on it, so loud that the entire classroom was stunned into silence. He then pointed the end of the ruler at the kid (who was looking at him with fear in his eyes) and said in a calm but intimidating voice "Next time, I won't miss." No one said a word for the rest of the lesson.
Pyromaniac1337 had one a couple years ago. In my city, we have what is called "Poppy Day" two weekends before Remembrance Day, where volunteers (including Cadets, of which I am an Army Cadet) go out to stand in front of various businesses to sell poppies for donations to the local Legion. Second year doing this, I'm stationed at one of the Safeway's, which happened to have a raised planter and a couple of vending machines. While selling poppies, a group of 5 or 6 kids show up and start climbing on the planter and vending machine. What do I do? Turn my back on my donation box (which had ALL THE MONEY AND THE POPPIES) and proceeded to tell the kids, in the calmest way ever and in the most indirect way ever, to get the fuck off the vending machines before they fall off or knock them over and kill themselves and/or each other. While in full dress uniform. And (despite being at least 3 or 4 years older than them) being only slightly taller than them. The kids proceed to not only leave, but come back to buy poppies, and when I encountered them the next year they again bought some poppies (giving more money than most adults) and acted VERY mature for their age, even saying "thank you". I like to think I had a hand in making 5 or 6 10-11 year olds more mature than some 40 year olds.
This troper believes that averting or avoiding violence is often better than actually ending up in a fight over something. Sometimes, the diplomatic approach or pointing out a glaring omission in a person or group's strategy is enough to change the sitiuation. A couple of examples:
- When I was in high-school, my family and I moved to a new neighborhood. I met some guys my age at a local park and played basketball with them. The whole time, they were taunting me, which really wasn't a big deal. It started to get dark and the guys started talking about my mother, not knowing my older, scarier brother and his friend had shown up. The three or four guys had been really brave when I was by myself and had even threatened to beat me up, not in a fair fight, but all of them at the same time. When my brother spoke up it was the first I'd realized he was there. He offered to make good on their threat to fight them all at once with just him and me against all of them. When they refused, he made them take back everything they said up until that point. The funniest part was that the youngest brother who had witnessed the whole thing and was about 10 at the time would bring it up whenever I was around these guys again. It usually started with, "Remember when you guys first met..." followed by, "Shut up!"
- This incident was followed by another at the same place when my brother and I walked up on a grown man stuffing a 10-year-old into a trash can. A crowd had gathered, including many of the same guys from the example above. My brother yelled at the guy and told him to let the kid go. The guy let go of the kid and said, "Leave me alone. This is my brother." It was obvious that the guy wasn't emotionally or psychologically stable. I pulled the kid out of the trash can while my brother threatened to kick this grown man's ass. The man reasoned that the kid was late coming home for dinner and that he was stuffing him in the trash can to teach him a lesson (this didn't make sense to me, either). My brother told the kid to run home and tell his parents what happened and made the man wait until the kid had a long headstart. When the man finally left, the crowd of guys that had been watching were in awe of my brother's heroic/crazy actions. Instead of taking their complements on how brave/cool he was, he looked at them and said, "You're all a bunch of pussies. I hope I don't ever need help when you pussies are around," which I think is the CMOA.
My great-aunt on my mother's side was a CMOA in a wheelchair. When a US Senator was being a bit of an ass, she told him he wasn't too old to be taken over her knee. (He laughed and apologized.) An officious bureaucrat was being condescending to her, asking about her schooling; she said, "Young man, I went through Harvard for four years!" It was true; her high school was on the other side of Harvard from her place and the quickest route was... you guessed it. Once at the mall, some jackass had taken a handicapped space without the proper plates for it. My great-aunt had her driver park behind him, blocking him in; when he called the cops on her, she came out and read him the riot act, then told him she'd move when she was good and ready. He got a ticket and a hefty fine and she finished her shopping. And while she was in her eighties, she worked with a group that smuggled political refugees from Central America to Canada.
My oldest sister, who is 5'4" and rather buxom, found out that a big kid had stolen the money she'd given a couple of little kids in her apartment building so they could buy candy. She went and confronted the 6' tall bully, and ended up slapping his face. She was rather surprised when he burst into tears and ran away, and was even more surprised when the cops showed up to tell her the kid was twelve. She didn't get in trouble because a) the kid was a thief and a bully and b) he was 8 inches taller than her. The cops were actually impressed that she'd had the nerve to stand up to someone that much bigger when she didn't know he was that young.
Miso had problems with bullies the entire time she was in public school. One time, one particular troubler came up to her and randomly tried to stab her with a pencil. In a moment of instinct, she ninja grabbed his wrist. She proceeded to stare him down until he dropped the pencil and ran. Of course, this same bully came up and punched her in the stomach a couple years later, bringing along her Dethroning Moment Of Suck, but still.
This troper once witnessed a Crowning Moment of Awesome on the part of a friend. Said friend, a generally harmless, slightly overweight videogamer was being harassed by a snot-nosed, Speech and Debate fanatic who missed the class where our school's awesome Speech and Debate coaches taught Speech and Debate team members that making the opponent cry doesn't necessarily constitute a win. Said fanatic thinks he is always right, believes himself to be God's gift to drama, speech and debate, journalism, and womankind, often argues for things as loathsome as the legalizaiton of child prostitution, treats his surprisingly nice girlfriend like poo, and turns his back on all his so-called friends eventually. He also happens to be extremely sensitive about his very small stature. He was trying to tell my videogaming friend, previously a friend of his as well, that he will never amount to anything and always be an ugly, mentally retarded tub of lard simply because he plays video games. My gamer friend put up with it for a while, but as the fanatic got more and more off the wall, calling on statistics he pulled out of his ear and getting more and more personal, the gamer finally gave this totally calm response, without reacting at all the way the fanatic expected. With a serene smile on his face, the gamer said, "And, apparently, the fact that you're in Speech and Debate means that you will always be a tiny asshole who thinks he knows everything and doesn't have any real friends." The fanatic was speechless, for the first and, unfortunately, probably the last time in his life.
This troper's older brother has a CMOA. He used to work at the same business as his father, a dishwasher maintenance business that covers much of this state and the next. One of their co-workers was a man who was brought up in Texas and had been in and out of jail several times over. This man was prone to telling racially-insensitive jokes about black people, and while everyone else was disgusted by them no one really did anything about it because - hey - there was no one black there to be offended. One day he gets done with a joke about black speech impediments and grammar, and Bro was in earshot. Without missing a beat, he turns to the man and hisses, "My wife's black." Cue massive embarrassment...for days afterwards. The best part? His wife isn't black.
- Another one from this troper's experience has to do with a beloved teacher of eighth grade algebra. This guy had just enough quirks to work his way into this troper's psyche: from the way he licked chalk dust off his fingers (and led this troper to do it as well on occasion) to the fact that he was missing parts of his middle and ring fingers due to a mishap with a band saw as Tech Ed teacher (when asked if he had trouble flipping the bird, he responded with a resounding "Nope" and demonstrated - in good humor, of course). One day, the class was working on that evening's assignment during school time, when two teachers walked past the room, talking very loudly. He asked them politely to keep it down so his class could work, and one of the teachers responded - and I quote - "Up yours!" After a tiny Heroic BSOD, he told us to leave slips on this teacher's desk stating they were to receive detention, as well as to wag our fingers at them in a 'naughty-naughty' gesture whenever we came across them.

Close Standing up to bullies

Video Games and Roleplaying

This troper played a tank in City Of Heroes before the class was nerfed. Once, on a high-level mission into the Circle of Thorns' home base/city Oranbega, he and his teammates accidentally activated a room full of large, demonic enemies which were all way above our level - they showed up as purple, in the game's threat-level color scheme. And they all looked like flaming Satanic demons. Most of the team died on the spot, with only a speedster making a clean getaway. Too slow to outrun the enemies, this troper planted himself in a narrow hallway between two doors, turned on every damage reduction and protective power available at his level, and held the line, giving our healer time to go to the hospital and re-zone, wake our teleporter and start pulling corpses out of the room to they could resurrect, as well. Given our relatively low level, this process took about 20 minutes. Yes, it would have been quicker to just take the death and go to the hospital, but by god, being a Spartan standing alone against the hordes of hell was just too badass a moment to pass up.
- And yes, at the end of it, I died anyway. That wasn't the point.
- To be fair, so did the Spartans
  - That... actually makes it even more awesome in my eyes.
This post was a personal C Mo A for its author, especially with the provided musical accompaniment, for several reasons. The most prominent include its Nightmare Fuel qualities, the intense suspense throughout the post, the fact that it does not end the way you think it does, and the sheer length of time it took to write (two days). And no, this editor is not the post's author.
My little brother and I always worked together when playing Thief, because I have the directional sense of a suicidal lemming and he simply cannot control the weapons properly. So we've got Garrett in a castle keep - I don't even remember what the mission was - hiding in a food store room. There's a window in the wall where we can see a guard patrolling back and forth, and we can't get out without alerting him. Finally, frustrated, I raise the bow and let loose through the window... and nailed the guard in the fucking throat. My brother still brags about this.
My CMOA is finding a completely new glitch in Sonic 3 and Knuckles... that smashed the time record for Sandopolis 1 as Tails. On TSC. Too bad I just can't do the boss battle properly and always end up like three seconds behind the new record even if I do manage to pull the trick off. Oh well.
This Troper is an avid player of forum based, text RPs. Darwin's Soldiers, a Furry SF RP he created and played has inspired another player to write Fan Fiction about it. Lest you think this troper is making this up, here's the link: Confirmation of fan fiction
This troper once did such an awesome (http://s9.zetaboards.com/Nintendo_64_Forever/single/?p=4363&t=419610) review of Quest 64, that somebody bought the game because of it.
This troper was once struggling against a badguy in Final Fantasy X. All but two characters were KO'd, and both were low on health. As a last ditch attempt at salvaging the game, one of the remaining characters (Tidus or Yuna, I believe) was switched out for Auron. Auron happened to have his Overdrive gauge full, and as soon as he entered the battle, the troper performed Dragon Blade and killed the pesky enemy. Auron topped it all off by adding "That's how it's done!" as the battle ended. This is all increased several times over by the fact that throughout most of the game, This Troper played Auron as a coward who flees from hard battles at the first chance.
This Troper's CMoA was pretty small, but it made her happy. I had gotten one of those CD cases for multiple C Ds stuck in the lower drawer of my nightstand, and I'd been listening to the Persona 4 soundtrack- note, it was also cloudy. Just as "The Almighty" finished, I got the CD case out, "Never Again" struck up, and I looked up to find it was sunny again. Totally made my day.
- Another one, from my DND group (for the record, she was a dwarf rogue who used her beard like a whip when she lost her ax) were up against the Final Boss of their game. For the record, our DM was a MAJOR Rules Lawyer. The Big Bad cornered our Bard, half of the party near anihillated, and the Bard announces he can still beat him. Cue following sequence.
DM: The Big Bad has you cornered... he scoffs at you. "What can you do? Sing a rhyme at me?"
Bard: (calmly) ...I'm the Bard.

He calmly, OOC, goes over, pops Guitar Hero in, and proceeds to five star Through The Fire And Flames (on Expert) Adding lyrics which, as far as I can recall, involved "I'mma chargin' mah LAZOR" "OBJECTION!" and Nice Boat. Our Cleric gets up and launches into this speech that ends with "In this dire moment, we must ask ourselves! WHAT WOULD KAMINA DO?!" So we start chanting "ROW ROW FIGHT THA POWAH" to the Bard, who as he epically finishes the song, yells "SHOOP DA MOTHERUCKING WHOOOOOOP", while the DM sits there, stunned, then gently sets his rulebook down, and announces:

DM: The party, encouraged by the Bard's song, is filled with the Power of Rock and Shoop Da Whoop lazers start to shoot out of their mouths, eyes and ears. The Monk has one coming out of his crotch, too. The Big Bad is literally scared shitless, and just sort of... dies.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaahahahahha *gasps* ahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
This Troper, at one in the morning with the rest of her family asleep, had to stifle her (silently?) roaring laughter at this epic, epic Crowning Moment and probably burst something in the process. Relevantly, may I have their number?
Oh... oh god... Its 2 in the morning here, no one else is awake, and Im' fairly sure I woke them up with my screams of laughter... I havent laughed like that in years... Oh god my sides hurt...

An admin on a forum this troper frequents managed to (at least temporarily) fool Xbox 360 News.com into thinking that the theoretical Freespace 3 would be on the Xbox. The forum has acknowledged this as his simultaneous Crowning Moment Of Awesome and Crowning Moment Of Funny. Read the full story here. The fact that it was a bona fide accident just served to make it that much more awesome.
Once while recently playing Starfox 64, this troper had a small audience of her friend and two of his friends. I was in Venom, fighting the Starwolf team in their fancy-shmancy ships. What made this particularly special for me was the fact that I'd been having a bit of a bad day; mostly I was using the game that night as a stress-reliever. A moment came where I was directly behind Andrew, and he only got the words "You'll never" out of his mouth before I said, "Shut the fuck up" and proceeded to furiously rail on him. He went down in two seconds, and I'd never heard three guys whoop and cheer so loudly before in my life. It still makes me smile to think about it today.
This troper and an online pal at a Warcraft fan-forum. When a new member joins to rekindle an old flame-war topic, we give him the trashing he deserves, me ending the flurry of posts with an offhanded: "Welcome to the fora, kid." Best welcome committee, ever, and the forum version of an ultra double team combo attack.
A friend of this troper was playing Dn D with some others when an enemy weak to fire attacks rears it's ugly head. What does said friend's character do? Light his hands on fire and punch its lights out. The DM was impressed.
Playing Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 with Vice, I learned how to use Vice's taunt to dodge airborne spells, by doing it by accident against Morrigan.
This Troper has had a CMoA in Worms 4:Mayhem.I took out 2 worms in 1 turn by shooting them with the Shotgun.That's not the awesome part.The awesome part was that my worm was jumping over them, action-movie style.So I jumped over 2 worms in 1 turn and shot them from above for massive damage.
In Kirby Air Ride, in City Trial, this troper managed to beat a Dragoon (The best glider in the game) at Air Glider on a wing star. She just collected a LOT of glide patches.
This is small compared to some of the other stuff on this page, but here it goes: While playing Team Fortress 2, I got invited by one of my Steam friends to help kick off a server. Well, after switching aroung with classes for a while, I become a medic, and pair up with a pyro. Turns out, a pyro and a medic on the other team have the same idea. We meet a little bit away from the cart (Badwater) and go at it. I lose the pyro I'm healing, but the enemy pyro loses his medic. So what do I, a lone (somewhat of a noob) medic do against a pyro who has clearly been playing this longer than I have(not to mention that he has overheal) ? Attack with the blautsauger of course. He heals with a medi-pack. I try again. The (experenced)pyro dies against a single medic using nothing but the blautsauger. The pyro who died? The Steam friend who invited me onto the server in the first place.
At school, a friend of mine played Through Fire and Flames on Expert and got five stars during band class (we never do anything in there). Awesome as that is alone, the best was the beginning, while he was playing the hammer-ons with both hands, he turned to another friend, playing perfectly while not even looking at the screen, and said calmly, "You like that?"
This troper hates anyone who tries to be a Griefer in a game online. Left 4 Dead is full of them, but there are sweet moments when you make the griefing backfire. In the said game, during Death Toll in the 2nd map, this troper was shot at a few times by the griefer, but I didn't take any immediate action because I wanted to see what the guy had planned. After clearing the crescendo event, we get attacked by a Tank. The Tank incapacitates another player but is dead by that point. The griefer then proceeded to shoot the helpless victim. Seeing that I was some distance away and was using the Hunting Rifle, I kept shooting the griefer until he was incapacitated, then I voted him out of the game. Sadly, the victim left the game before I could start the vote.
This troper was playying Hunter: The reckoning once with a friend, both of us were really slow and we had just set a bomb. We then proceded to run/walk out of there with 4-5 werewolfs and undead following us and made it out with only 4-7 seconds to spare.
This troper had a Big Damn Heroes moment when playing Starcraft with friends. We had been playing a number of matches against each other on Big Game Hunters and, just for kicks, decided to pit the three of us against a map full of five AI opponents. This troper had a bit of bad luck as he was spawned in the upper right corner of the map, completely cut off from his two allies in the lower left. For the next 45 minutes, however, my two allies took a brutal beating from 4 of our 5 opponents, as they quickly became trapped in that corner and the AI enemies sent a constant flood of units to try and break their defenses. This troper, having selected the Terrans, had managed to construct a quick and sturdy defense that held off the occasional attacks from the neighboring opponent while this troper built up his resources and upgrades. When it came time to free my allies, this troper decided that finesse wouldn't be as effective as sheer force and numbers; Nukes or Seige Tanks would be too slow and a fleet of Battlecruisers could be easily Lockeddown. So this troper constructed half a dozen Barracks, filled his Supply limit with Marines and Firebats, then gathered them up into massive groups and ordered them to make a beeline for my enseiged allies. This mass of infantry then proceeded to carve a bloody swath through the center of the map, obliterating the collected armies of the AI opponents as they were making their way to my allies and quite handidly broke the seige and just about everything else this troper's units encountered during their march. Upon arriving at the other side of the map, this troper greeted his stunned friends with "Hi guys. Looked like you could use some help." It's just a shame this troper hadn't yet seen Firefly at the time, or he could've given his best Malcolm Reynolds impression.
This Troper had one while playing Team Fortress 2 and getting mocked for his voice:
(enemy Demoman drops grenade and no one else notices)
Me (as Pyro): Guys, a grenade just dropped.
Other retard: Too bad your balls haven't.
(I use a compressed air blast to blow the grenade to the rest of them)
Everybody else: (Cluster F Bomb)

Close Video Games and Roleplaying

Other

if anyone can figure out why this doesn't work, please help

Too long to go in a folder.

This Troper achieved enlightenment while sitting in a share taxi riding home from a date. He now understands how to live life.
When she was a freshman in high school she fell out of the back of a pickup on the highway, her nose was almost severed and she was pronounced dead at the scene, only to revive in the ambulance, then she was pronounced dead at the hospital, again she revived. They even sowed her nose back on, the only thing you can see is a small scar on the bridge.
- Who?
- Did you see anything?
- Either that troper is talking about herself or its the same troper posting more about her mother.
This Troper's grandfather was in the Korean War, and he brought this up at a family dinner, I then proceeded to ask him if he had gotten a Purple Heart. He looked and said "well hell yes, before I went to Korea." My jaw dropped. He then began to tell me that they were on the firing range firing off rounds and the seargent told the men to cease fire, well apparently one guy mistook the order and accidently shot my grandfather, earning him a Purple Heart before he even went to Korea, but his multiple CMOA happenned in Korea, when his team was manning a mortar on the field and grandpa saw a Korean man run over to a foxhole and take a dump, grandpa gave the coordinates and fired, you can imagine.
- His second CMOA was again with his mortar team and things were slow and they had nothing to do, so they started firing rounds off into the forest. Well, one shell that was fired, amazingly, hit a North Korean ammo dump, BOOM. Grandpa's commander got a medal for that action, but my grandpa was telling them where to fire, so in reality, my grandpa should have gotten the medal.
- Not to slight the troper's grandfather, but you don't get the Purple Heart for wounds that aren't combat related, especially those that are inflicted by someone who is not the enemy. To receive the Purple Heart, you have to be wounded by the enemy in combat. Getting shot by a fellow allied soldier does not count.
A little while ago, I was walking over to my friend's house, and I was about 15 minutes away, when I was seized by a sudden urge. I zipped up my hoody, and put my hood up. I hid my ring finger on my left hand, and placed them left over right in front of me, and slowed my pace. See where this going? For a bit I was ok, but then I saw a few teens in front of me, and I thought "Aw hell, they're going to give me crap for this." Nope. They actually moved out of my way and let me pass. Moments later, they suddenly came up, and positioned themselves on either side of me, and in front and behind me. For about five minutes they hid me, until I was at a darkened street, where I broke from them, turned and nodded a thanks to them, and sprinted off.
- What? So confused...
- He did the thing where Altair hides in the middle of four priests by pretending to be one of them. In REAL LIFE.
  - Epic win.
  - Seconded.
- I actually borrowed that just a couple days ago (Nov. 13 2009). I pulled up my hoodie and entered into a crowd of kids, who willingly hid me, to sneak into a football game. Not quite as epic, but still.
This troper is a fan of practical martial arts (martial arts you can use) and has a friend whom practices Wing Chun (a style characterized by its flurry of rapid-fire punches). While demonstrating his skills to me, he likes to ask questions on other martial arts. So this troper gives him the suggestion of turning his hip to increase the force of his punch. That is not the C Mo A. The real C Mo A comes during a practice match when fighting a friend of his. Apparently the friend was very cocky and confident that he could beat my friend. Cue the moment of Awesome when using the tip I gave him, he landed a blow that knocked the wind out of the guy for 2 minutes.
- The pity is that the tip I gave him wasn't an aspect of Wing Chun at all. It was from Karate.
When I was 15, my family and I had gone to a water park while on summer vacation. When went off to enjoy the parts that didn't involve water, I was placed in charge of her 6-year-old niece as I ran off to the gargantuan, beach-shaped pool (in a leopard print bikini, no doubt). She didn't know how to swim, so she wore one of those inflatable life jackets. Before long, she and I got separated in the confusion of suburban families and their huge flotation devices. The little one actually managed to be bumped all the way to the deep end. Cue myself frantically swimming to her, pushing several vacationers out of my way and finally rescuing her. I swam back with the same amount of determination, and her clinging to my back like a little monkey. When a lifeguard blew her whistle at me for hanging on to the railing of the pool, I looked her in the eye and told her to fuck off. Upon reaching the shallowest end of the pool, my niece caught the bad end of the worst scolding in years.
One day my family went to Costco, and while we were loading up the car, I knocked over my mother's soda. She told me to go back in and get her a Diet Coke. I got her a regular. While I was returning from my second trip inside, I saw her start to pull the car away. Cue me running after the car, jumping on the ledge in front of the trunk and grabbing onto the roof rack, all without dropping the soda in one hand. Needless to say, she stopped when she realized I was holding onto the back.
- Did you then give her the regular and say, "They were all out of Diet"?
My history/civics teacher is a little... overprotective of the girls in his class (to the point of almost seeming perverted). He's an awesome guy, and jokes around a lot. One of the girls in class was dating a guy who was a troublemaker in his other class. They were chatting about this (meaning I had to do almost nothing that hour) when the kid comes in. The teacher grabs the guy by the neck and says "If you ever do anything to hurt her or do anything against her will, I swear I will make you wish for death." Granted, the teacher made jokes like that occasionally, but this was the first time he actually sounded serious.
- That actually works as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming for me... Then again, I have a twisted sense of what's heartwarming... I'd get the warm fuzzies if a teacher did that for me...
- Agreed.
  - Sounds more like a Crowning Moment of...Weirdness there. Sounds as though that man is a little too - ahem - 'attached' to those young girls.
  - Just say it. Wikis don't blush.
  - I will! He wants them youngins and he wants 'em TIGHT!!
  - Or takes his in loco parentis extremely seriously.
This troper was a sort expert on the "dodge" part of Dodgeball. Dodging, literally, front, right, and center, he was constantly pulling off Matrixesque maneuvers left and right. The end of nearly every match would accumulate to his teammates demanding he "quit" and be hit so a new game could begin. Adding to the fact that he is overweight and should be an easy target, he proved that whoever wasn't on his side couldn't hit the broad side of barn. He has two notable CMOAs:
- A popular game-with-a-game he invented would be to sneak over to the other side of the dodgeball court and pretend to be on the enemy team; conversing with his opponents about the game or the "enemy" team was commonplace. While his team cheered him on and laughed their collective ass off, he would steal their ball, tag them out, and run back to his side leaving the tagee with a very confused look on their face.
  - This troper christens your elite gymnasium espionage as a Crowning Moment of Gentlemen.
- After dodging a cannon inches away from him via a Matrix-move that could only have been more perfect if his spine was flexible, he walked away as cockily as possible. After noticing a shift in the nearby shadows and a teammate yelling, "Look out!", instinct took over and he ducked down, dodging the cannon from the same man from before (who was still mere feet away) without ever seeing it coming.
  - This Troper was similar in the being on the large side, and surprising the hell out of people on how well she could dodge...at age 6!! Some dodgeball games degenerated into a loose circle of her classmates around her in the center all throwing balls to see if they could hit her.
This troper wants to join the US Army or Marine Corps, and has essentially become a military nerd (never thought I'd hear those words used together). One day, the Army came to his school for recruiting purposes with a Stryker armored vehicle. There were several officers and NCOs supervising the kids who wanted to go into it, and when it was my turn to go into the driver's compartment, I said, "thanks, Top" to the Master Sergeant supervising. He executed a beautiful double-take, and asked me how I knew his rank. When I told him, he shook my hand and told me I'd do just fine.
This troper observed someone's bike hit a tall street-edge and keel over; and that person, who to this day remains unknown aside from being a brown-haired guy of average height, proceeded to flip off off the bicycle, land on the ground, and execute a forward roll onto a lawn. And stand up unharmed.
- This troper did that himself once. There was a car oncoming and I had to get out of the road. Got up, picked up the bike, and walked down the road.
  - This troper also did that, and broke his wrist. don't try this at home, people.
  - This troper did it too, and fractured her skull. So Yeah, Dont Try This At Home.
  - Griffin managed to do something like that once. Her bike was tipping, so she leapt off and landed safely to one side while the bike fell over. Except the second time, the bike fell on her. Ouch. Although she only scraped her nail, it was pretty painful to be trapped like that.
  - Same here, But when the bike got stuck on the curb and this troper went flying straight at a fire hydrant, adrenaline pounded and the world seemed to slow. This troper launched himself off the firehydrant with his hands, landed on his feet, nd proceeded to say "Nobody panic, that was intentional!"
- The first time this troper was learning to downhill ski, he had a particularly impressive fall. It was mostly toward the side, and the skis went up over his head, continuing into a complete roll. The skis hit the snow again, and the momentum carried the troper up into a crouch, whereupon he continued down the hill. Witnesses at the time were much impressed, but this troper is hard-pressed to claim any significant awesomeness, since he knows he could not possibly do that again if he tried.
  - Similar to the above example, this troper once witnessed a snowboarder pull a perfect backflip completely by accident.
- This troper skies rather well, but once was going down a slope that hadn't been groomed so much as it had been chopped. I hit a bump, which caused me to spin completely while still going down the slope. I hit another bump, and that combined with the momentum of my spin launched me into air where I preceded to 1) Lose a ski, 2) Lose both poles, and 3) Do a full 360 flip. I landed on my back, slid down about 10 feet, and then collected my skis and poles once I was sure I was still alive. I did not break any bones, and my two friends who witnessed this still say it's the coolest thing they ever saw.
This Troper's Dad is a Memetic Bad Ass. As an example, while in the army, he once took down nine guys on his own. His C Mo A is the one time where he was on the phone and a guy poked him in the back with a knife. He then calmly said to whoever it was on the phone "I have to go—somebody's trying to kill me." A couple minutes later, he's offering the guy back his knife. The guy is on the ground, thoroughly beaten up, and refuses the knife. My father then tells him to run, and the guy obeyed.
- And then he suffered from the Worf Effect when he entered a dojo taught by an old Chinese man who refused to learn any language but Chinese. The martial art itself is Tai Chi—a slow-moving, altogether boring form of meditation. At some point, my father questioned the old man, who proceeded to questioned the old man. The old man then kicked my father, sending him literally flying across the room. I don't know his name, but that guy just earned himself an entry in the Crowning Moment Of Awesome page!
This troper once went to stay at a cousin's place when he was 7. Our normal play area was in someone's little maize farm...with an 8-foot high wall surrounding it. This farmer was a notoriously cranky guy, so when he whipped out a cutlass and threatened to rip us in half and feed to the dogs, we ALL found a way to skip over said wall, incredibly smoothed by age, before the guy could go five paces. Awesomeness, though I couldn't do it today, 12 years later, if I tried.
- You can do wonderful things when your life is in danger. This troper once had to get over a 12 foot high wall to avoid getting hit by a bus. He did it in one second, because two seconds would have been too late.
This Troper had one just the other day. I was flying home from Boston to my home in Florida. The flight out of Boston had been delayed by three hours, and the connection in Atlanta would have taken off before we had even left. The projected odds that the Atlanta flight would be sufficiently delayed were about 5%. I mulled over this number in my head, and then the line floated into my mind:
"The probability is exceedingly close to zero."
"But it's not zero, right?"
"..."
"In that case, it's as good a hundred percent!"

I continued to chant the ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWER in my head for the rest of the trip. I made it.

More like a Crowning Moment of Irritation than Awesome, but... this troper's house is unfortunately infested with mice. One such mouse got trapped in his room, and despite all his efforts to kill the little bugger, its still around. One night, as if to mock his pathetic efforts to eradicate it, it somehow climbed on top of his bed and did a little dance on his stuffed tiger collection. Yes, a little mouse bested this troper using a Humiliation Conga.
This troper recalls a few of these in her own life, but the one that comes to mind is the time that I worked at a museum, and a gang of Star Wars cosplayers from Garrison Carida popped by, held a trivia contest, and I won a free lightsaber and got my picture taken with them.
- Also, when I was working as a lab assistant, I once caught a box of dead cats after the idiot I worked with dropped her end. It took a lot of balance and a fair bit of strength to pull that stunt off.
  - Why did you have a box of dead cats?
  - They were researching the concept of being in two places at the same time.
  - They didn't know whether they were alive or dead because the box was closed.
  - Oh, I see what you two did there...
  - I'm sorry but, and I'm sure most normal people would agree with me, I don't think that anything to do with boxes of dead cats can ever be considered awesome.
  - They're usually used for disections. Y'know, to help future doctors 'n' such. And they're cats that have been put down anyways.
This troper went to see a concert by his favourite cabaret group. They caught him singing along halfway through and loaned him a microphone for the big finale. He sang on stage with his favourite singer, singing a duet. Then the audience assumed he was actually a plant and asked for autographs after the show. Win.
My religion teacher, Mr. Rubio. He's 5'2", from Spain, has been forcefully removed from two Holy Places, and got a Jehovah Witness to swear at him. He got kicked out of the Mormon Holy temple for arguing with the tour guide. Then he got hauled out of a Catholic shrine (note: he is a Devout Catholic) for honking a dead saint's nose! Then a Jehovah's witness came to his door. To quote him, "However, they found the one person who knows the Bible better then they do." He got him to say "You're going to Hell." His response? "Good. And I hope to see you there."
- Your teacher is officially my hero.
- This troper was also able to out-Bible a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses who came to my door; Every claim they made, I was able to answer with a verse that contradicted them. Sadly, I was unable to make them to damn me to Hell. But I did get them to walk way.
- This troper, while he personally enjoys to use Bible verses against fundamentalists, is a bit confused about Jehovah's Witnesses cursing anyone to Hell, since they don't believe in the existence of such a place - they just believe that anyone who doesn't love God will completely cease to be after death. It's more fun to comment on how they treat the people who leave their ranks, considering that their faith should forbid them from judging anybody.
  - This troper disagrees with that last statement; his family left the Witnesses long ago, yet his brother (who is still in) has never abandoned them, and is pretty damn cool. Definitely not a stereptypical Witness either, but still pretty damn cool.
  - Just because it should doesn't mean it will . Its never stopped the Christians...
  - Actually, the Christian faith doesn't forbid judging others per se, it "merely" says you will be judged according to how you judge others. That said, there is a fundamental difference between something being forbidden and something being done or not. You see, unfortunately, Christians (and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists, etc.) do what they are forbidden far more often than they should.
This troper arranged for Bob Saget to be the comedian for his college's Homecoming week celebration. Pretty cool, but not quite a CMoA. The crowning moment of awesome? During the show, Bob Saget called up this troper to the stage and announced that I was his son.
This troper is a member of a little organization called a marching band. I refuse to even try to put this on the sports page because we're not a sport.... we're an establishment! But any band nerd should know that a CMoA occurs every single time you do a certain thing called a Hype. Now a Hype consists of basically, at the climax of a song, you stop all movement and start to basically use all your previous adrenaline to either dance with your instrument or just go to town breaking in down to the music. HUGE effect on the judges and seriously the funnest thing you will ever do in the marching band. Did I mention we're STILL playing while doing this? My personal band tries to add it at least once every year, and sections that include the low brass or saxophones are usually the greatest ones to watch, ha.
- There is no greater feeling this troper has experienced than finishing off a show, knowing you just kicked the crap out of that fucker, as the music echoes off the stands.
Cybele here has witnessed one—which involves an ordinary house spider. I had one of those huge buzzy flies in my TV room and I could not for the life of me kill the little shit. There was also a spider and its web in the corner near my TV stand but I left that alone. The fly was much more annoying 'cause it kept going for my pizza slice. About an hour passed and the fly was stuck in the web. Which the tiny spider had for lunch. I pretty much leaned near the web and gave the spider a thumbs up and a "Thaaaaank yooouuu". Gee, nature is really awesome sometimes...
This troper has a CMOA from the sports files. He joined a roller hockey league last summer to keep in shape. Said troper was certainly the worst player on the championship winning team, but managed to make a spectacular play. It is described in all its glory as follows: Troper wins faceoff to team mate. Teammate brings ball into offensive zone. As teammate is bringing ball into the zone, loses the ball and moving towards goalie but to the far side of the rink, where this troper was following the play. The troper proceeds to put on a burst of speed (as much as possible for a player who can barely skate) and recovers the ball. There is no one ahead of the troper, and an opponent is coming from behind. The troper takes the ball towards the goalie, but is moving towards the upper left corner..while doing so, he makes [[{{}} a no look through the legs pass]] to his teammate. The other team, shocked that such an inconsequential player could make such a play, admired for too long, and the teammate buried the ball into the back of the net. Cue surprise from teammates wondering why the troper hadn't been playing like this all along.
- Ironically, on the next shift, the troper almost scored a nice goal (admittedly not as nice as the assist). Thinking back, he would rather take the goal than the assist, as he never scored a single goal in 16 games.
This troper tried to learn to swim on his own without much success, usually only succeeding in almost drowning. One day, feeling a particular case of badassness, he attempted the breaststroke in the 8 ft end of the pool... and succeeded!
This troper remembers one day in particular that was deserving of this. It was during one of my marching band practices while there was a break going on. Now, at breaks we would usually set our instruments down on the field in a line and pick them up later. There was this guy in the clarinet section who liked to take all our clarinets and form some kind of cool shape using them (The Pentagon, a spiral, fireworks). That was very cool and all, but that's not the Crowning Moment. That happened onde break on a Tuesday, The clarinet guy did his usual thing and formed our clarinets into a big spiral shape that took up a lot of room on the sideline. The brass section wasn't that cool about the clarinets intruding on their space just for the sake of a design. But they didn't complain about it. Instead, they banded together in a truly epic moment of banding together. The entire brass section took all of the brass instruments, and spell the word "BRASS" in big, shining letters. All the clarinets and the other woodwinds could do was stare in awe. We all got a few pictures out of it. Needless to say, that one clarinet guy was never taken seriously again, and we never did another design.
This same troper was also part of one for a nerf war. Our team was lead by a senior who had a foam sword and a nerf Vulcan. He runs in front of us and gives a speech. "Some people have greatness thrust on them, others are born to greatness and still others make greatness for themselves. Tonight! You are all THREE!" He then ran across us, banging his sword against our guns.
During the February 2008 lunar eclipse, this troper started an impromptu astronomy talk near a large window in a hotel lobby. She got EVERY SINGLE HOTEL GUEST who walked by to look and be amazed.
This troper is extremely quiet, and was made fun of for his large size. He hated PE. He was forced to play in a game of the PE teacher's devising which was like Rugby but with no rules and a lot of tackling. His CMoA came when he (For the first time that year) caught a ball passed to him. The aim was to run to the other end of the field without being brought down. In doing so, he gave another player a concussion accidentally when they tried to tackle him, another a black and purple bruise across their chest the same way, and carried another player hanging off his waist trying to bring him down the entire length. After reaching the end of the field, he threw the ball down and shouted "YEAH! YEAH!" and burst into manic laughter. This was impressive enough to start a short lived Memetic Badass status (Introduced to new students as "This is John, who runs down freight trains" and variations thereon).
- This Troper had a similar incident happen during his seventh grade class trip. A group of friends and I were playing football in a pretty big garden, and at one point, the ball was handed to me. Being of particularly large stature and somewhat overweight, I proceeded to power through about 8 different people, and in the end made it to the designated end zone with one bugger hanging off my jacket and another hanging on to my leg. My knee never touched the ground.
- When in high school, [[Stryper this troper]] was playing American football afterschool with the JROTC guy. Being over 6' I naturally was a little intimidating. 1) Got the ball in runing toward the goal this 5'3" dude tries to tackle me aournd the waist. Minorly inconvenience I continued. By the time I was down but cessession of forward movement I had 4 guys hanging off me and was still moving, barely. 2) got the ball in a hand off. A guy I had previously pissed off because I tackled him hard. Clotheslined me accross the throat. Landing me flat on my back. Few seconds later I jump up in the middle of group of guy. My friend asked me if I was okay I said I was fine. He stated I had been out for a about a minute. For some reason I earned the nickname M1 after that.
Great Penguin would like to give an Assassin-related shout-out to the clever lady who "killed" him by putting "poison" (actually toothpaste) on his deodorant. The funny thing is that it made the deodorant smell better, and he now continues to apply a small amount to each stick.
Probably stupid, especially compared with some of the things listed here (Tropers are apparently, by sheer definition, made of win and awesome), but it was fun. This troper took some kids from her church to play laser tag. During the massive team battle, she and the oldest kid, whom she has dubbed "the General," were conferring about their status. She started to move toward the enemy base when ten guns lit up to indicate that they were effectively surrounded. Hearing the General cry out, "Troper, look out!", she promptly dropped to one knee and gunned in a perfect half-circle, taking out every single one of the enemy rifles. She freely admits she'll never manage to do it again, but for that afternoon, she was a Big Damn Hero in the eyes of those kids. The bonus? This troper is blind in one eye and was basically emulating Big Boss.
- Recently, the same troper pulled off another one at her workplace. She doesn't just hang out with the kids from her church, she's the church secretary, and was told that she needed to replace her leaking office printer. But there's no money anywhere...we're in some serious financial straits. So here's what she does. She takes the broken printer, and also the useless scanner that has cluttered her desk for four years, to be recycled. She then goes to Staples and returns the package of ink cartridges she bought for the now-broken printer; it was never opened, so they gave full credit for the return. She then browses the sale merchandise and returns to the church with a brand-new piece of equipment, a combination printer-scanner-copier-fax machine. The machine cost $40. The ink that she returned gave her a store credit of $57. The best part? The ink that she returned to get that store credit had been free in the first place, because she'd bought it with free store credit earned by recycling used ink cartridges. So the new printer cost literally less than nothing.
This troper's father once told her of a time, long before she was born, when he had to take a long commute into town for a job in Dallas, driving a Karmann Ghia. One morning on his way to work, he lost of the car and went off the edge of the highway, flipping end over end down a steep hill. Once the car came to a stop (fortunately, wheels side down), Dad got out, went over and picked up his windshield (which had fallen out in one piece), and taped it back in. He then proceeded to drive to work as usual, arriving five or ten minutes late. Eventually his coworkers noticed his vehicle's somewhat battered appearance, and asked him what happened. He explained. A little while later, his boss came into his office and gave him a raise.
A minor one for this Troper (KKDW) while on work experience was asked to sort out a small section of the website of the group he was working for, the boss expected the job to take all day. I was done within the hour!
This troper's father was a Marine. As far as he's concerned, his dad lived in a CMOA for twenty years.
- When I grow up, I want to be your grandpappy!
- This troper, who recently updated the "War and Politics" CMoA section with yet another US Marines example (near the bottom of the page, and simply typical of the entire corps), agrees with you.
This troper was married to the same lovely woman for fifteen years. She died from pancreatic cancer. When I simply could not function due to my extreme grief over the loss of the only woman I've ever loved in the entire world, my oldest son, who was only fourteen at the time, managed to keep us going. He cooked, he cleaned, he made sure his younger brother got onto his school bus on time, he comforted his little brother who was only just old enough to understand why Mommy wasn't coming back, and he never failed to make sure his dad took care of himself. When he became a father himself, the first thing he said to me after his own son was born was "I just hope I can be the dad you taught me how to be." My younger son told me, when he was three, that he wanted to be a paleontologist. He didn't say "I want to dig up dinosaur bones", he actually used the word "paleontologist". At age three. This year, he graduated with his PhD in paleontology, having never given up on his earliest dream. He credits me with always encouraging him to pursue this dream. My children growing from the boys they were into the men they are is my personal Crowning Moment of Awesome.
- Nothing I can do but salute and wish them the best of luck.
- So, your son had a Heartwarmingly Awesome Moment of Crowning with his PhD then. :)
Mine's a bit minor, but I like it. I was taking health in summer school (its a school requirement, for some reason) and the teacher was having the class play tug-o-war. We went through a few rounds, and then we split into boys versus girls. We boys beat the girls pretty easily (no offense to any females out there) and the teacher decided to handicap us by having us all sit down, meaning that we would only be using upper body strength to tug the rope. We started, and we were losing, when all of a sudden someone started yelling "HEAVE! HO!" and we all started chanting along with him. We won.
This troper lost about 300lbs playing Dance Dance Revolution an hour a day, six days a week, for ten months.
- That. Is so. Awesome.
  - This troper salutes you, cries Manly Tears for your achievement, and vows to follow in your groovin' footsteps.
  - This guy has a similar story; he has lost 43 lbs. (and counting!) using Wii Fit for 30 minutes a day seven days a week for 5 months - combined with diet. Not as crowningly awesome as 300 lbs., but I was interviewed by my university's newspaper.
  - This troper (who posted the original entry) would like to first thank everyone for not responding with accusations of BS as happens often (though, in retrospect, understandably) and would also like to add in that he's also since gotten his brown belt in Okinawan Karate. This troper would also like to encourage the guy using Wii Fit to continue being unburdened by numbers, because quite a few people who try to lose weight get discouraged and stop over them, and not falling prey to this is certainly it's own CMOA.
  - This Troper loves you so much. See, this is why DDR kicks ass. She recently started dieting and exercising regularly, too, after almost hitting the overweight mark. Now she's back to being healthy weight again and also used DDR to help with this process.
This troper has been involved with a local fundraiser for a few years now called ''Bearvillities'' which is a once-a-year drag/variety show that raises money for Camp Sunrise (a summer camp for kids who have been affected by HIV/AIDS). Granted, this is fairly awesome in and of itself but the official Moment was during 2008's show (titled The Funk) wherein, because of the '70's theme, I streaked off the stage and through the crowd. Best 2 seconds of stage time EVAR! We raised enough money to send 10 kids to camp that night. (The previous year, I performed with a live snake, but that's not as awesome as public nudity for charity.)
This troper's dad once dove into a lake and rescued a guy from drowning by swimming him to shore and performing CPR (If I remember correctly). He got his story in the newspaper for saving the guy's life and has saved it all these years. For a dad who is the dean of the engineering department at his local college, this troper believes that to be his crowning achievment. He saved a man's life.
This troper's is rather minor. Having been on his school's Spanish Forensics team for four years, he had made a name for himself in improvisation and was supposed to be the favourite in his junior year, having won second to a senior the year before. He didn't make it, partly because he underestimated his opponent, partly because he didn't practice as much, and partly because it was just a plain old bad year, but he still won third and knew he'd be going for the rematch. He got abuse from all quarters his senior year - hard practices, juggling both forensics teams and the school musical, and the guy who'd beaten him repeatedly making references to his rather large belly - but he remained determined and won first place his last year, beating out the other guy and thus leaving on a high note. The real Crowning Moment Of Awesome, though, was this troper's team - who stayed with him even when he was convinced he'd lost, who cheered even louder than he did when his name wasn't called at second place, and one of whom warned off the other guy without any prompting from this troper himself. There was much love handed out that night.
This Troper's whole family rides motorcycles. It's a bit easier than a car in a lot of cases. However, one night, my brother was riding home, and hit a deer. The bike and the deer were a mess, but my brother? He wasn't. Not a single scratch. He fucking rode back home, got cleaned up, and went to sleep. The only proof we have now is the god forsaken pictures of the bike.
This troper and his brother were irritated with net nanny at a (jewish) community center we frequent because it's near our school, so to beat net nanny, we installed a new operating system. The staff didn't notice it for a couple of months, then one day, the computer disappeared.
This troper's father was participating in a fishing tournament in the dead of night. While he was idling in the boat, a drunk driver on a speedboat ran right over the boat this troper's father was in. The rudder of the speedboat slashed his side open, literally disemboweling him (it was reported by the doctors that some of his intestines were hanging out through the wound, though they were still attached, so it's not technically a disembowelment... but close enough). In incredible pain, he was able to crawl to the front of the boat and signal to the other participants in the fishing tournament to go and get help, after which time he and his friend (who was also in the boat and had a broken arm) were medivaced to the hospital. This troper's father never lost consciousness until the doctors used drugs to knock him out in the helicopter. He made a full recovery, and would later testify in front of the state congress to get a law passed that would make the penalty for fleeing the scene of a boating accident a felony (it was a misdemeanor at the time of the incident).
This troper (Godeskian), who has a background as a programmer, was asked to help manually compare parts at work, in a long and tedious process. After completing his first comparison he said 'Fuck that' and in somewhat less than 10 minutes devised an automated solution that's going to save some 450 man-hours of work every year.
This troper attained his CMOA on the first day of preschool. I came home complaining that the other kids were pretending they couldn't read. (It's all been downhill since then.)
Very, very small compared to most of these, but this troper, at a very young age (in preschool, she believes), was in the car with her grandmother, and stopped at a light. She looks out the window. "But Grandma, that says no stopping or standing!" Grandma returns her to her mother: "She can READ!" Mother: "Well, yeah."
This Troper didn't really like gym - he wasn't fat or small, just prefered other classes. Naturally, he was picked on. The teacher noticed this, so she offered some help - she would enlist me in an orientation cross (with compasses and maps and flags), because I was the only guy who never participated in any local sport competitions. Two minor [=CMoAs=] for him - the teacher was able to make myself and another friend to whom I haven't spoken in months quit arguing, at least until the competition was over, since we were on the same team. We put aside our differences and scored 2nd place. A kid who hated gym with his obese enemy. After that, we became friends again. But the best part was at the end of 8th grade (a year later), when everyone was receiving diplomas for prizes won. After my name was called for Math, History, and English, the principal said PE. The whole hall was silent. And then everyone started claping. The awseomest diploma I ever got, considering the circumstances.
This troper is in his high school's J.V. wrestling team and during one tournament had to wrestle someone from his own team who, although in the same weight class, was probably twice as strong. Before the match, he said the usual "Good luck, hope you do well" stuff, but ended with "Don't worry, It'll be quick and painless." Yeah. During the match this troper was on his back getting pinned, but was able to bridge up (going up on his toes and head) and then flip over so that he was pinning the other guy. Slightly less awesome was that the other guy got out of it eventually, but he still got bragging rights for the day.
A CMOA or perhaps a Crowning Moment of Squick. This Troper (Dialga X) once successfully treated a toenail with a pair of wirecutter-like toenail clippers, a nail file, several Q-tips and a lot of peroxide. What makes this a CMOA was the fact that he used no anesthetic as he cut out the toenail and he did this twice in his life and the toe now looks better than the one that the doctor treated.
On the last day of this troper's GCSE year (a British qualification which I think equates to sophomore) all the boys in the year had a dodge ball session. We play dodge ball with each side having half of the hall as their territory which they stand in to throw balls at the other side. We had three teams rotating in a winner-stays-on system. However, many of the games were quite boring as one of the teams (team A) always lost. At the end of the session they was up against Team C, which included most of our years muscular jocks. It ended up being reduced to Jack, a particularly big jock who had given this troper a massive bruise, against this troper's friend Peter. Other people were so confident of the result that they started walking off, but despite expectations Peter not only dodged three balls hrown by Jack, but then caught him right in the chin with one of his own. To give you some context on how surprising this was Peter has lousy co-ordination, hated sport in general, and had only jus recovered from a broken leg when this happened. No member of our year has ever forgotten the incident.
In high school, I was good friends with a girl I'll call Sarah. We'd tease and pick on each other in the way that friends do, but one day I said something that absolutely infuriated her. So much so that in front of the entire lunchroom she wound up and swung directly at my gentleman's area. Could have been a CMOA for her, except I stood there unflinching, and she ended up spraining her wrist - which is why my nickname for the remainder of school was "Steel Balls."
This troper's mother had her own CMOA one December. In order to prevent her children from shaking their Christmas presents to find out what was inside them, she severely over-packed all the packages, making it impossible to determine what was inside by shaking. The icing on the cake was not writing in the names on the gift tags, thus keeping the youths in suspense not only about what each present was, but also about whom they were for. Magnificent Bastard, anyone?
- My mother did something similar. I kid you not, she wrapped up some light-bulbs with some rocks. Needless to say, not a real present, but when I heard that smashing sound... Just wow. Haven't shaken presents since.
One of this troper's proudest moments is getting my English teacher addicted to Dave Barry.
This troper's high school physics professor has so many stories surrounding him it's developed into something of a minor sect. One we haven't confirmed is that, while in active duty in Korea, he ripped a bullet out of his chest using his teeth. Why did he use his teeth? His arms were too badly wounded to move.
- One of his stories we HAVE confirmed is that he is in the book of the worst mountaineering falls in history. Apparently, he fell something like 100 feet onto rocks and survived, but only because he had the presence of mind to aim at outcroppings on the way down, to bounce and slow his descent.
This troper once took a volleyball dropkick to the crotch from his high school's star female soccer player in gym class. This troper was the only one on the court still standing five seconds later. Apparently, the other players really liked slapstick.
My little sister, this Christmas, for putting the look on This Troper's face when he unwrapped the gift she gave him, to find a limited-edition hardcover copy of Watchmen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a book to read... and something in my eye...
- More of a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming. Also, I fixed it. There's no book that I or this wiki know of called "The Watchmen". It's just Watchmen.
This troper wanted to help out her best friend, who was strapped for cash but refusing to accept money from her. This troper lives in the US, her friend in Brazil. So this troper converted a couple thousand into Brazilian currency—cash—before leaving on her summer trip. To prevent theft, she carried the cash in the pockets of her shorts, worn under an ankle-length skirt, through airports, etc. in the US, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil. At her friend's house, she hid the money in a plastic bag at the bottom of a little-used drawer. Ten days after returning to the States, she contacted her friend and told her to check that drawer. The friend was perplexed, yet delighted (due to careful timing of The Reveal), yet perplexed. The plan took more than a month to execute, during which time this troper said no word to anyone.
- I'm copying this to Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.
This is not as much of a CMOA to anyone else, but oh god, to this troper, this was one of the highlights of her life. This troper would go to Girl Scout camp every summer, and loved it enough that she entered the counselor in training program when she was old enough. She completed it, and then did an internship. On the first day, a fellow counselor asked about what she was going to do during her two-hour break. Apparently, the counselors have a mandatory block of two hours where they have to get away from their campers, and they can go anywhere, by themselves. This troper had been so used to being somewhat corralled about camp since the fourth grade that the chance to go running around the camp that she had only been able to go to some places was... Wow. The troper marched herself up to the highest point of the camp, and cheered.
So, my freshman year of college, while taking College Composition I, my professor divides the class in half so that we may debate. The subject: whether or not we should have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The debate is... really rather weak; neither side really wanted to contribute. The only people who were were me and the oldest guy in the class, who was like in his forties. We had (foolishly) been placed on the same team (We were supposed to argue that we should have dropped the A-Bomb), and were pretty much tearing apart the opposing side. Finally, the professor steps in, and proceeds to rip us to shreds in about five minutes. When we conceded defeat, he smiled and told us that by the way, he was in favour of the bombing. Cue the entire class jawdropping.
In High School, after cementing her reputation as the 'quiet, booky one' this troper proceeded to enter the Talent Contest, belt out a Death Metal song in full war-gear, and GET THROWN OFF STAGE BY THE TEACHERS for terrifying the audience.
This troper's mother has basically lived one long Crowning Moment of Awesome. Currently, she's an accountant, and is easily one of, if not THE best, in Florida, and has literally made and destroyed companies simply by joining and leaving (though she refuses to be a boss due to her desire to just go home and relax when the whole place starts collapsing, as she knows she can get another job instantly). She did a dual-enrollment with UCF and Oxford at the same time she was doing the accounting for Canadian rock band Glass Tiger and dating their guitarist. She followed them on their tours and even got help from Slash himself on a history paper. What really makes her shine, is her criminal busting. This troper's mother has been the victim of a robbery about eight times so far. The robber succeeded once, only because nobody was in the room with her purse at the time. Every other time, she decimated the guy until the cops picked him up. Three particular moments shine.
- First, when she was in college in Florida (before working for Glass Tiger), a man attempted to mug her outside a bank just next to I-4. He was armed with a snub-nosed revolver and a tire iron. She simply ripped the tire iron out of his hand and beat him with it. The police showed up while she was still whaling on him, and he practically ran into their arms, calling her a "crazy bitch". Well, the kid was bailed out of jail, and had been robbing people for several years afterward, and was never caught. As she was driving by the same bank with her boyfriend, she saw his skinny ass sticking out of a drainpipe near the bank, where he hid after every crime. She promptly told her boyfriend to pull over and get to a payphone and call the police. She went over to the kid, dragged him out on his knees (it was on asphalt, and he was wearing shorts), and beat the ever-loving crap out of him. He immediately recognized her, calling him "that crazy bitch from before!"
- The next one was in 2007. She was working at a local rug store, owned by the Soni family from India. She was at the front desk right as the store opened when a very disheveled, possibly homeless man armed with a rusty kitchen knife barged in, demanding money. When she tried to explain to his drug-addled brain that there was no money, as they had just opened and had no customers yet, he ran behind the counter and grabbed her, putting his blade at her throat. She immediately poked him in the eye to get him to release her, then poked him in the other eye, kicked him in the balls, poured scalding hot coffee on him, whacked him with the coffee pot, and finally tossed him over the desk. As he tried to make his escape, Mr. Soni, the 50-something Indian man, gut bouncing in front of him, chased him out and began fighting him in the parking lot, including a stick vs. rock dual. The whole time this troper's mother was on the phone with the police, giving a blow-by-blow of the fight to the dispatcher.
- The latest incident was early in 2008. She was working at the rug place again, this time at their warehouse where they house the majority of their rugs and functions effectively as a secondary outlet. The warehouse had recently been robbed by a shotgun-toting bandit, and while my mother wasn't there at the time, she was being quite cautious. Lo and behold, another robber showed up, pointing a handgun at them. They were all very cooperative and gave him the money...until he pointed his gun at a pregnant employee. Something in my mom snapped, and she pounced on him and beat him to unconsciousness. The Crowning Moment came in the November, when a trial was schedueled. The rat bastard had been repeatedly assuring the police it was a case of mistaken identity. This troper's mother was to be called in as the key witness in the trial. Well, he had been asking his friends to call and threaten her into not showing for the trial. Unfortunately for him, it didn't work. When they told him that she would be appearing for the prosecution, he took an immediate plea deal.
  - Now that IS awesome - has she ever considered a career as a superhero? the world could do with someone like that dressed in lycra.
One day at school, we had a day where you could dress up as your halloween costume. I went dressed as a Greaser( from Grease and the Outsiders ). When the day ended and the bell rang, me, my sister and my friend walked out the side entrance. I, for some reason, had matches in my pocket. I took them and a piece of paper out and rolled the paper as a cigarette(I Don't actually smoke I was only joking). I stuck it in my mouth and lit it with the matches. I started to strut and act tough. Then, some old couple(probably parents picking up their kids) drove by. I walked in front of the car and glared at them, smoke coming out of my mouth. They looked very frighted. We walked on past and as soon as the car was away we laughed are asses off. That is my Crowning Moment of Awesome.
CMoA courtesy the Internet: taking parts in a thread on the Traditional Games board on 4chan. We were creating Warhammer40000 stats...for Freddie Mercury. He ended up this gamebreaking God of pure epic win.
Didn't happen to this troper personally, but it did happen at his place of work just this week. Del Wolfgramm, an American Airlines worker, pulled US Airways maintenance worker Mike Robinson out of a burning car at 1:00 in the morning on a remote service road in the DFW Airport. That's awesome in and of itself, but what really makes it a CMoA is how casually Wolfgramm intiated the rescue, calmly walking up to a burning vehicle, knocking on the window, asking Robinson if he was okay, then smashing in the driver's side window with his bare hands and pulling Robinson to safety. What flabbergasts this troper, though, is that Wolfgramm says that it was no big deal, and that he was only doing what anyone else would have.
This troper had one when she was four. Her parents were into bird watching at the time; they had a few books about the various bird species in our region; they still have those books, but I digress. One day, her parents see a type of bird they haven't seen before, and are desperately trying to look it up in one of their books. (end of third person) I try to get mom's attention, and am shooed away. I try again, same result. Finally, I say, "But, mom, isn't it that one on the cover?" Mom and dad look. Indeed, the bird they were looking up was on the front cover, and even had the species name listed on the back, for looking up. I'm going to have to mock them for this, one day.
This troper has had so many moments like this it's hard to choose one. But his most famous example is when he did an essay on vandalism for a school project about criminal activity and read it to the rest of his class in a totally Hamtastic style via a Chris Farley as Matt Foley impersonation. Then there's the time he got the part of Gaston in his company's production of Beauty And The Beast, he pulled it off rather well thanks to his tendency to be a Large Ham, and also thanks to some Method Acting he actually felt like he IS him and stayed completely in character throughout the entire day of rehearsal.
Producer: Okay everyone, big smiles.
Me (as Gaston): No one smiles like Gaston!
Troper's Friend: Good luck buddy, break a leg.
Me (as Gaston): No one breaks a leg like Gaston! (Goes off stage and pretends to break his leg)
''Producer: That's great acting.
Me (as Gaston): No one acts like Gaston! (strikes an Elvis pose).
This troper goes to an Australian public school - year 10 this year, actually. Anyway, most years, the way the house captains are announced is by just having the principal call out their names and having them walk up to the front all normal-like. This year, we did something different. They started up like they were going to do the normal thing, then two of the house captains came up onto the stage in black clothes and shades and announced a mission - 'jailbreak' one of the other senior students. Cue a vaguely All Your Colours Combined sequence ... then some dude runs in with a fake bomb, plants it on the door to the assembly hall staff room. Everyone ducks. No explosion noise. The dude kicks the door open. The 'captive' walks out. Through all this the Mission Impossible theme is playing. It was stupid and awesome at the same time.
This troper sort of had one a few years back in his high school days. After leaving school after it was over, I went to cross the street, but I got blinded by the glare from the sun. Next thing I know, I almost got ran over by a car head on! Luckily, it ran over only my right foot and it didn't actually hurt too much, most likely because the car wasn't going too fast. I did limp for a few hours, but amazingly, all I got was a small bruise.
One of this tropers most proud moments happened about half a year ago, when he got in an internet discussion with a Swedish politician, and won. The kick? I wrote my argument while being on my high-school lesson in social science.
- Seeing the number of typos I had to correct in your sentence, I suggest you pay attention in class in the future.
This troper, who recently got home after curing acute appendicitis, apparently walked around with said appendicitis for four years, as the symptoms began showing four years ago when this troper was thirteen years old. Most who do not treat acute appendicitis is likely to die within in a matter of days or weeks untreated. This troper, Made Of Iron? Fuck no, this troper is GODDAMN IMMORTAL!. As icing on the cake, this troper has never broken a single bone in his body, rarely if ever gets infected by diseases and has a pain threshhold over 9000. This troper thinks a lot of it is related to his status as a Determinator worthy of Bro' Kamina himself. To compensate for it, he's the living embodiment of the Afraid Of Needles trope.
My Dad has had several [=CMoAs=]. These include rescuing a family from a burning car, getting a car on the roof of a building as part of a prank, running away to join the circus as a teenager, being a motorbike racer (and winning the British sandracing championship one year), and saving a mouse from drowning. [[{{}} Seriously]].
- I think your dad might have been mates with my dad, as he was also part of a prank involving getting a car on a roof. He's not from north-east England by any chance is he?
- My Dad took apart his gym teacher's car and reassembled it in the library. In one night.
Today, I was witness to a CMOA from two of my friends. All of us are playing wallball, and these two are the last two left in the game. They are both off the wall. One zaps the other, and before the ball has bounce twice, hits the zapper. This would normally mean that they are on the wall, leaving no one off the wall. Normally, this would mean that all people who are out go on the wall and all people who are on the wall go off the wall. BUT if they did this that would mean that, after this shuffle, no one was off the wall. That's right, two people caused the equivelant of a syntax error IN REAL LIFE. It may not be up to other moments, but it is still pretty good.
- The first involves arguing with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. I had met him while visiting Philadelphia while he was campaigning to retain his Senate seat (he ended up losing). I publicly challenged him on his stance regarding privacy, and forced him to acknowledge that since the Ninth Amendment covered unenumerated rights, it almost certainly guaranteed a right not only to privacy, but to absolute self-ownership.
- The second involves a mugger on the NYC subway late at night. The guy pulled a knife on me, and stabbed my right shoulder when I refused to hand over my wallet by saying, "I have no intention of giving you my money. It's bad enough I pay taxes!" I clamped down on the pain long enough to pull the knife out of my shoulder, give the guy a Kubrick Stare over the tops of my glasses, and ask, "Did it ever occur to you that I might be left-handed?" I then drove the knife into his shoulder, broke the blade off, and got off at the next stop to get my shoulder stitched and report the incident to the NYPD.
- The third involves introducing my wife to my parents. My wife is from Australia. We had met online, and spent four years talking with one another (and met in person several times) before we decided to get married. As soon as she had her visa (I had offered to emigrate to Australia, but she wanted to come to America) I introduced her to my parents. My father was friendly to her, and refrained from making his usual Archie Bunker-style jokes about dingos and babies. My mother, however, simply said, "What's wrong? Couldn't you find a nice American girl?" I just shrugged, turned to my wife, and said, "Looks like we'll be eloping. How does Vegas sound?"
  - *reads all three CMOA* ... You are my new God.
  - I wouldn't call you my new deity, but you might just be the king of this trope.
  - You guys are making me blush. I think my wife had a CMOA last night. We hang out at the local Barnes & Noble/Starbucks after work, since neither of us get any writing done at home. I had gotten there first, found a copy of Iron Man: Extremis that somebody had left on a table, and decided to check it out. As my wife approached my table, the guy sitting next to me looks at what I'm reading and says, "Dude, if you want to get a girlfriend, you have to stop reading that shit in public and get a haircut." Hearing this, my wife says, "If he cuts his hair, I'll kill him", before kissing me. She then sits down and says, "I spilled coffee on your copy of Watchmen, so here's a new copy." If it helps, here's a pic of me and my wife◊ together.
  - A Crowning Couple Of Awesome? Yes, I think so. BTW, I too know something about parents who are too bigoted and narrow-minded to accept your mate, so you're both doubly awesome.
  - Why can't you visit Pennsylvania... y'know... permanently? This state would be made so much better with the addition of you and your wife.
For some odd reason, this troper didn't have many friends in middle school. She had some, and those she kept close in her heart. Near the end of eighth grade, she learned she had to move to a different part of Hawaii, and go to another school, leaving her friends behind. They were all heartbroken. On the last day of the school year, the last time they'd ever be together, they presented her with a poster. Glued on was PICTURES OF THEM ALL AND A POEM SAYING THAT THIS TROPER WAS THEIR GREATEST TREASURE. Needless to say, I will never forget them. . .
This Troper knows a kid personally who is known by some only as the Juggernaut. Why? Because he was hit by a car and the car took more damage then he did.
This troper fell on his face, fell on his back, twisted his back, twisted his ankle, and gave himself a light concussion and STILL taught himself to snowboard. More awesome (to this troper, at least) because he learned to do it at almost 30 years old, an age when many folks either need at least a formal lesson or they're simply too freaked out by the constant falling and crashing.
Griffin's Geography teacher got one when he told us, "Yes, it's an open-book test. You just need to open your book before the test." Totally deadpan. It's so much more awesome in context.
This troper's dad had a CMOA at Animal Kingdom in Disney world. He happened to notice some decorative bongos setup on one of the paths and, being a drummer, decided to play. He's always been good, but what made this a CMOA was that by the time he was done there was a rather large gathered around, including some of the roaming characters.
This troper's grandfather (her Dad's dad), was in the Korean War, leading a platoon on a reconnaissance mission when a grenade was thrown at them. My grandfather picked it up and THREW IT before it exploded, causing him to get hit with shrapnel. He later got a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his bravery.
This troper goes to a Catholic school. One time, someone lit a fire in the bathroom that had flames on the toilet seat taller than the stall. It was put out by a priest who used to be our principal. He left the school yet still had time to save it from being burned down. It seriously was that serious, if it hadn't been put out so quickly, then I would probably have dead friends, or at the very least hospitalized friends, and no school, literally.
This troper was a professional bike courier in downtown Manhattan for three years and has a mountain bike that weighs approximately eight pounds. Needless to say, I'm pretty freaking fast when I'm riding my bike. I now live in Toronto, having moved here two years ago. That summer I was riding my bike downtown when I rolled up next to a bicycle cop and asked her if she was up for a little race. I was wearing khakis and a button-up T-shirt at the time. Needless to say, I beat her pretty handily. That wasn't the awesome, however. I stopped at the next red light and she looked over at me, saying "We're in a school zone, so I'm pretty sure you were speeding." The light turns green and I grin, "Well, it's a shame you'll have to catch me if you want to give me that ticket," and proceed to speed off once more. She caught me again at the next light, to give me her number. We've been dating for two years now.
- I wish stories that awesome happened more often.
This troper was once practicing his parkour on the bleachers behind his school. Upon sighting security grunts making their rounds, he went prone then crawled to the the far end of the bleachers. Then he swung off and rolled out the twenty-five foot drop's impact and hid in the shadows. They never had a chance to see me.
This troper was once at a big celebration in New Zealand. Seeing a shirtless dude playing the air guitar in front of a music video that was being played outdoors on a giant screen. Well, I thought that the guy might as well have some company. So I took off six of my seven pairs of pants (don't ask) and air-drummed with the dude for about forty-five minutes. You want to know the best part? I used my Capoeira experience to spontaneously learn how to breakdance.
This troper's mother once got pinned into a corner at a party by a very dull man with some fairly offensive views and who's personal achievements apparently included "never having watched Coronation Street" and "never having worn jeans". She eventually escapes and relates this to my father. Later on, my father meets the same gentleman. The follow exchange occured:
Dull Man: So, what do you do for a living?
Father: Actually, I'm retired.
Dull Man: Really? You don't look that old.
Father: I'm obviously better at it than you. It must be in the jeans. (leaves in the stunned silence)
Kawaii Kon 09. Vic Mignogna's panel on the second day. There was one single question a girl asked that made most of the people there go "awww." The question? "Can I have a hug?" She got it.
- And yes, the person writing this, this troper, was the girl who asked the question.
  - Dawwwww.
This troper had one in high school. She was taking a study-skills class (Brilliant But Lazy, nuff said), and if you didn't have homework to do in the class you were encouraged to bring a book to read. Her teacher noticed her fantasy-novel habit and challenged her to bring in a book that wasn't fantasy or science-fiction (or Tom Clancy). The book she showed up with next day? Lady Chatterley's Lover. Her teacher's expression was a picture.
While playing a healthy game of airsoft with this troper's cousin, I proceeded to get shot directly in the eye through a series of unfortunate coincidences involving my goggles and sweat. Fortunately, it only hit me in the tear duct and sunk it's way in a bit. I quickly reached a finger into my eye socket, ripped out the pellet, grabbed my M4, and went back to work, despite having only one functioning eye. You know what the best part was? I shot him in his uncovered legs with the 330 fps M4 on full auto. With a 100 round clip. At 10 meters. He deserved it.
- This Troper sincerely hopes you got better, and applauds you for your awesomeness.
This Troper once visited a site about suicide after he'd been experiencing some tough times in school and his family and began to have minor suicidal thoughts. He wanted to read what others had to say about the subject, and was quite horrified by what he read. To say the least, his contemplations of suicide vanished immediately, and as a result he spent a little time making a (rather harsh, actually) comment to these folk to try and "toughen them up" and lighten their hearts. This was the result.
- *hug* Thanks man... I needed that.
- Dude, what, a Gurren refrence? One Made Of Win for you, sir.
- Goddamn you mighty, awe-inspiring son of a bitch. You sir, have just saved my life.
This troper used to work on a trail-building crew in Arizona. She got to go lots of cool places, including a campground built by a group of hang-gliders, where we camped for eight days while we were working on a trail. Now, these hang-gliders, contrary to what one may think, were extremely rude and extremely snotty. They treated my crew like crap and were just utterly rude the whole time. Well, one morning, my buddy had cooked breakfast for our whole crew, over a cooking-fire. We put the fire out (and after the housefire I had a few years ago, I am EXTREMELY careful to make sure every last bit of the fire is extinguished) and then went about our work for the day. We were out working for ten hours, and we return to camp to find that someone has dumped the last ten gallons of our drinking water on the ashen wood in the fire-pit, and they had left a note saying that "it needed putting out." Now, I had made sure that those coals were COLD before I left. I put my hand on the coals and stamped them into ash for good measure. My personal theory is that it was just a dick move on behalf of the hang-gliders. Nevertheless, the management insisted that we write an apology letter to them, which we never did, simply because I piped up with the letter I was going to seriously send out if we were forced to do so: "Dear Sirs, SUCK IT. Regards, the Grateful Tread." This troper didn't think there was anything particularly awesome about it, but her teammates insist that it was one of my best ideas, and it did get us out of writing a bull apology letter to people who screwed US over with no reason at all.
- pics or it didn't happen (Had to be said ;-))
This troper's manager earned herself a CMoA last week. Upon learning that I had to work with the store bitch for the night, my manager told me, "At about eight o'clock, get 'sick' and go home so she can see what it's like to work by yourself on a Friday night. You'll still get paid for the time you don't work." I was very supportive of this idea.
The Weirdo has a few. (And now I stop talking about myself in the third person).
- One was in a debate about guns here in Brazil. I favor control, but understand that there are good arguments on both sides - which the pro-gun side didn't offer at that debate, instead claiming other armies might attack us and other tripe - with one of the pro-gunners calling the Brazilian coup d'etat a "revolution". I was only allowed one question... "Considering that (Long List, among which was) the only army that ever attacked us was OUR OWN, in the 1964 Coup, that Mr. (gun advocate) called a "revolution" (...), to whom does the gun lobby here benefit? Quo bonum?"
- Another was at a presentation about RPG - which was shared by my friend and my very gentle then-girlfriend-still-friend, who isn't a player. A woman in the audience had it in for the game, and implied that the "heavy" imagery meant the game was evil. Cue my then-girlfriend (from the audience) saying that that's like implying an ugly or poorly-dressed person is necessarily evil. Some more debate turns by me and my friend later, we have the moderator actually berating the stupidity of the anti-RPG side and taking over from there. My remark afterwards: "So, is the Manipulation 3, Intelligence 4, Wits 3 in my sheet correct?" - My friend agreed.
- Finally, taking a call for some work (I'm a freelance translator) while at the same time managing to hold my own in a King Of Fighters 98 arcade game I was playing, going on to beat the opponent handily nonetheless after the call was done, and then another one. Of course, the caller never knew I was gaming then.
- And, recently, managing to get about 36 pages done in one day (his usual per diem rate is around 16, more experienced translators seldom pass 28).
A girl had grown up with hippie parents - there were no rules, and the daughter was free to do anything she pleased. When she hit the teenage years, she had the urge to rebel, but there wasn't anything to rebel against... or WAS there? Yes, there was: the hippie lifestyle. This girl horrified her parents by becoming the one thing they didn't want her to be: a lawyer.
This Troper was taking a swim in the beach when he saw a sardine-like fish swimming by. Due to him being only 11 at the time, he though it'd be fun to try to catch it. And he did, with his bare hand. A fast-swimming, sharp turner fish, caught by the bare hand of a clumsy kid.
This Troper's younger brother, despite having never to her knowledge played any similar game, climbed into a very realistic flight simulator that actually TURNED UPSIDE DOWN in response to his joystick and handled it like a pro, managing to pull out of a dive while FOUR FEET FROM THE GROUND and then shooting down an enemy plane that was on his tail. My kid brother, a Chuck Yeager in training.
This troper's school has a freshman who is known for being racist, homophobic, sexist, and many other similar prejudices. This troper's friend was trapped in a conversation with said person. The English teacher who was present in the room sent this troper's friend an email saying that he was fighting the good fight. A teacher congratulated the friend on being in a debate with the school's fundamentalist. CMOA for both of them. Arguably Crowning Moment of Heartwarming as well.
When this troper was eight years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. The psychiatrist making the diagnosis told his mother that he would never be able to hold down a job, never get his driver's license, never graduate high school, and would need to be cared for his entire life. A month ago, this troper drove to his college graduation in the car he bought with his own money, and is planning on going to grad school to get his Master's in library science.
This troper's grandfather has at least three of them.
- As a fresh-faced kid just out of the Marines, after fighting in the Korean War, he got his first civilian job. There was a union at the job site, and they wanted him to join. He had nothing against unions, but he just didn't particularly feel like belonging to this one. They got pushy. He politely refused. After a few days, the union boss sent a couple of [[Mooks guys with lead pipes]] after him at the end of the day, to "persuade" him. They didn't know where he'd been and what he'd been doing for the last few years. He walked away without a scratch on him. The thugs... well... didn't. Nobody tried to pester him about joining the union after that.
- He eventually found his calling as a telecom engineer, becoming a pioneer in the burgeoning field and working for governments and corporations around the world. At one point, the company he was working with wanted to get a certain contract, and they had a computer program that would calculate what they should bid on it. They punched all the variables in and got a figure almost a million dollars higher than the initial estimate. They checked their numbers, ran it again, and got the same figure. They were about to shrug and just go with it, when he showed up. He asked for the numbers, then pulled out his pocket slide rule, did all the math on paper, and came up with a much more reasonable answer. He then asked the IT guys to walk him through the program and explain the algorithm step-by-step. They ended up finding that it was applying one of the multipliers twice, and he saved the company a million dollars. The best part? He did this all without the benefit of a college education.
- At one point, he was working in Spain. He and his family were in an apartment a few floors up, facing one of the plazas that are so common in many European cities. One day, a small carnival-style attraction set up shop in the plaza. They had an announcer with a loudspeaker system that he'd pointed directly at the apartment building, to reflect the sound off the wall for better coverage. Well, Papa's mother had just flown in to visit and she was tired, and the barker's constant calls for attention were keeping her up and getting on her nerves. So he went outside, with a glass and a bottle of wine, crossed the street and went up to the barker. He was very friendly, pouring him a glass and trying to explain in his broken Spanish that the loudspeaker was disturbing la abuela and would he please turn the loudspeaker in a different direction? The man understood and ended up demurring, so Papa quite calmly poured the glass out on the ground, then went back to the apartment. Remember the bit about him being a telecom engineer? Pissing them off is a bad idea. He got one of his coworkers, who lived a few apartments down, to bring over his record player. You know the old type, big enough to double as a bench with speakers larger than most modern guitar amps? Well the coworker had one of those and Papa had one too. They put them both next to the window, facing outward, wired the speakers together, cranked the volume Up To Eleven and put on a record of a Scottish bagpipe band. It didn't take the carnival barker very long to turn his loudspeaker in a different direction.
This troper also had a CMOA, where I managed to singlehandedly defeat this chav who already beat me up, with nothing but his own insults and (Team Fortress 2)taunts. (Namely, the Sniper's taunt with his sniper rifle, and the Engineer's laugh.)
This Troper, while playing in the basement with a friend, once dodged an entire set of those light-up glow stars (for ceiling decoration). He did this without moving his feet, basically Matrixing. When the friend threw the last one, he caught it out of midair, spun, and launched it— it connected and stuck straight in his zipper.
This Troper's mother is not the most prepossessing figure in the world, being only five feet tall and slightly overweight. However, about fifteen years ago she and this troper's younger brother were at the Marine Corps Exchange, and he was running around ignoring Mom. Finally fed up with everything, Mom shouted, "AND HALT!" Little Brother stopped. So did two Marines not more than a few months out of boot camp, who immediately dropped what they were doing and snapped to attention before sheepishly looking around at Mom.
- This Troper's brother had a good one a couple years ago. One of his classmates, who happens to be black, was going on and on about how "his people" had been put down by my brother's people for centuries just because they were black. My brother, who is very proud of the fact that our mother's family arrived from Norway and Sweden just before World War I, waited for the classmate to finish, then announced, "My ancestors were Vikings. We're equal-opportunity oppressors. We enslaved everybody." His classmates gave him a standing ovation.
- This Troper works at a preschool as a French teacher and usually takes the bus from college to work. One day as she was walking the last block from bus stop to work, a group of prepubescent boys fell in behind her and started making derisive, whale-related comments. (This Troper is somewhat overweight.) Upon hearing what the boys had said, her boss walked out to the edge of the property, listened to the "What a whale!" from the ringleader, and then said, quite calmly, "Well, your pants don't fit properly. How can you insult someone's size when your pants don't fit properly?"
- This Troper herself attended a Constitution Day debate between the Dean of Students and a PhD in History at her college, discussing two Supreme Court cases, one of which involved the rape of an eight-year-old girl by her stepfather and the stepfather being sentenced to death; the SC overturned it because they felt the jury was emotionally involved and the death penalty in anything other than felony murder was unconstitutional. During the question-and-answer session, this troper had the final question and asked whether the two men, who had argued for the impartiality of juries, thought it was possible to separate emotion from fact in that case. She was the only person to ask a question that floored both men.
This Troper's CMoA came a few months back. This Troper - who will now speak in first-person - is a senior in high school. I like to think of myself as a nice guy, quiet, don't say much. I decide to enter the school talent show, with my talent being "accents". The night of the show comes around, and as I'm sitting beside the stage with the rest of the performers, I hear the announcer declare, "Next up on stage is [Troper's name], the man of a thousand voices!". So I just out-of-the-blue decide to leap onto the stage, waving the "horned hands" gesture around and calling out to the audience. I do my bit - telling jokes I prepared and speaking in funny accents - and everybody in the audience is roaring with laughter. Perhaps as a result of watching too many stand-up comedians, I say something, thank the audience and bound off the stage proudly. During the interval, everyone's telling me that I did well (whether or not they were just being nice, I don't really know). The best part? I came into school the next day later than usual (I overslept), and the minute I walk into class, the whole room starts to cheer. One guy, in his usual over-the-top manner, even ran up and yelled, "I LOVE YOU, [Troper's name]!". From then on, a good deal of the younger students knew me as "the funny guy". A minor victory, but damn, I felt good that day.
This troper has been essentially an Ensemble Darkhorse since he began his work for his school's drama club at the end of his freshman year. He started out unknown by all buy two or three members with a low-end job on the lighting crew where he didn't even get his name on the programs. Currently he plays Lord Montague in Romeo and Juliet and, during the production of Annie, not only took control of the entire sound crew from the rather poor sound head (she didn't even know what she was doing) and, when the sound and light crews worked together to help paint the sets and signs, managed to take control of two crews at once and stop a rather destructive tape-addicted techie from wrecking the production.
Scribblenauts. Full stop. Click the link, read the quotes, visit the Neo GAF topic, learn why this game is destined to be awesome incarnate. (Here's a hint: it involves riding a dinosaur through time to destroy robot zombies.)
This troper kinda has one, in that it wasn't actually me. As my cousin told the rest of the family the next morning, he had had a nightmare involving a giant T-Rex chasing him. Then I showed up and proceeded to beat the crap out of said T-Rex. With a hammer. Sure, it was all a dream, from this troper's 4-year-old cousin, who had just seen Ice Age 3, but damn if I didn't feel awesome for the rest of the day. Perhaps I should change my name to He who Hunts Dinos while Holding a Hammer.
This troper had a moment at Hard Knocks today. Hard Knocks is, for those not in the know, a combat arena using infrared lasers to simulate actual combat, similar technology to the MILES used by the military. This troper went on his first trip to Hard Knocks today, and on his fourth and final mission, was doing standard team deathmatch in the warehouse arena. He leaned out from behind some shelves and fired a few shots at a kid hiding behind some barrels. This under-ten-years-old kid decides that the proper response is to run at his attacker with a war cry. This troper, seeing him through the crates on the shelf, calmly stepped out from behind the shelf and levelled his rifle at waist-height. This troper is 6'4, broad-shouldered, in a blood red t-shirt, and armed with a rifle so large that he could stand it on its end and it would be longer than his leg. The kid promptly stopped, turned around, and ran away screaming in terror. The referee was cracking up at it.
- He ran away from a Red Shirt?!?!
Due to a stack of problems piled on by the councilors, in the final mission for this troper's Space Camp team, this troper ended up the only non-incapacitated person on a space shuttle preparing for re-entry, with everyone else either insane, wounded, or unconscious, with the CAPCOM in Mission Control also unwell. Also, the overhead lights were all turned off. She dug out the medicine kit, diagnosed everyone's symptoms using only the light of a display screen, treated all the other astronauts with the right prescriptions, and managed to save four lives. At the time, she was being brought down from the space station and essentially considered useless personnel.
This Troper’s family tends to be filled with CMO As, such as her grandmother's eightieth birthday party (held at a ski resort), or her other grandmother's solo escape from the Holocaust that killed her parents and thirteen siblings. However, several do stand out.
- My father, a Well Done Son Guy who does not express affection verbally, does heroic things on an impressively regular basis. When I was eight, I was attacked by a vicious dog that did its best to kill me and left scars all over my forearms, which were held up to protect my throat. My father rushed in and wrestled it to the ground, leaving it whimpering and walking out untouched except for three parallel scratches on his shoulder, which healed into an awesome tribal scar look.
- Several years later, we were out on a supposedly deserted train track to hunt for fossils. The track turned out to be less than deserted, and very shortly a train was headed for our new puppy, who refused to come when called. With the train less than fifty feet off and going at top speed, my father ran to the tracks and got to the puppy just as the train reached them. We weren’t sure they’d survived until the train passed and we saw him standing, dog safely in his arms.
  - Requesting permission to worship your father as a God, SIR!
This Troper is neither the magician nor the smooth young fellow witnessed in this video of the slickest wedding proposal ever made, but hey, I saw it and I must give props.
Another CMOA happened during this Troper's Spanish class. When students were late to the class, the teacher would have them sing a song. Technically they could sing any song they liked, but normally people sang the special 'I'm Late' song the teacher had ready for them. Then one day three regularly late students arrived at the same time. Instead of singing the pre-determined late song, they opted to sing a song they had specifically written for just such an occasion. Those three did the whole boyband thing, with two in the back going 'oooooh' and snapping and dancing, with the one up front singing well thought out lyrics, then they'd switch off one at a time so they each got a chance to sing. It was clever, it lasted for five whole minutes, and it was GREAT. Cue the applause from the rest of the room, teacher included.
This Troper once saved her mother's life with a perfect Heimlich manoeuvre, which she had never actually been taught and learned from watching Mrs Doubtfire.
This troper's brother had two pet mice. One day he found one of them on the floor of the cage with some kind of inexplicable open gash or lesion on its chest, not breathing, apparently having bled to death. He took it outside and dropped it a little way into the woods. This was November, and there was a pretty heavy frost that night. The next evening — so about thirty hours after disposing of the mouse — we're outside by the front steps, and I happen to look down, and what do I see but a mouse walking along, steadily approaching the door from the direction of the woods. And holy shit, it doesn't look like a field mouse — in fact, it's exactly the same color as the mouse my brother lost the other day. And — holy shit, it has a mostly-healed scar on its chest in exactly the right place, and it's totally fine and lives to a ripe old age.
- Mostly-healed? Are you sure that mouse wasn't in posession of supernatural powers?
This troper's horse gets all the CMOA. She pulled two stunts in one ride- a haunch turn over a cliff and climbing a twenty foot dirt wall on her knees- to really impress the local cowboys. Unfortunately, this troper couldn't take any credit; this troper was busy hanging on for dear life.
This troper once went for a header in a soccer game, and was knocked down by a fairly large girl's shoulder. This troper landed head first onto the ground resulting in a moderate concussion that took a very very long time to heal and a severe neck sprain, so what does this troper do? She immediately gets up, doesn't cry or say ow or anything, and just plays super aggressively, making a girl on the other team cry. Looking back on that day, this troper can confidently say she played the best of anyone on that field by far. She was 14. However this led to unforseen consequences due to concussion related symptoms such as insomnia, chronic fatigue, dissyness, trouble focusing, varying sleep cycles, anxiety disorder, massive clinical depression, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), sensitivity to light and sound, moodiness, etc. Still, this troper never regrets that almost header.
- Actually just making it through the resulting issues (such as depression, which this troper describes as so painful that she didn't/doesn't know how anyone could survive it) as a crowning moment of awesome in of itself. Plus, this troper did it without the help of drugs because they would inevitably make it worse due to not getting to the root cause- the injury. That was a year from hell.
I think my brother counts. A normal human would, when he is living with a somewhat demanding girlfriend who he is having second thoughts about, move back home, or get a new place to live. My brother, with no plan and very little possessions, moves, from southeast England, to Estonia. Estonia is a small, snowy ex-communist country in eastern europe, near Russia. He's been there for about 10 months now, and shows no signs of leaving.
I am currently editing this page with a G3 iBook, with Ubuntu 9.04, while checking my twitter stream, gmail, and aggregating podcasts over a wireless connection. While that doesn't sound like much to someone who doesn't know the arcane ways of the Linux Kernel, let me flesh this out.
- I am running an Ubuntu Linux distribution, which requires a bit of tech savvy know-how.
- This distro is running on top of a 500 Mhz (read as .5Ghz) Power PC processor, which has been off the market for some time and this particular distro is incredibly specialised and temperamental.
- I put a solid weekend into making the laptop run, including finding the right version of software though trial and error, installing said software (an entire afternoon in itself), manually setting the screen resolution, and finding a compatible wireless dongle.
- The other hardware in this 10 year old laptop is 300MB (.3GB) of RAM and a 9GB hard drive and it spent 8 years of it's life running Mac OS 9, and 2 in a surplus warehouse.
- It can run Firefox, a Gmail Notifier, a Podcast aggragator (gPodder, for those interested), and a Twitter client (Gwibber), at the same time without skipping a beat.
- It is using a Belkin Wireless USB Stick to get online that couldn't possibly be used in Mac OS 9. (The only device {an original Airport Card} it could work with in it's original OS has long been discontinued.)
- The only thing that can't be worked around is a lack of Flash. (No Youtube, Hulu, and the like.)
- It's already ran for 3 months under the new distro with only a couple minor bumps.
- And this whole project started after my Laptop hit a motherboard failure after 3 years of service.
- So screw you, Planned Obsolescence!
  - Just goes to prove; They don't make 'em like they used to.
A year ago, at the end-of-the-year Thespian Award banquet, this troper was ignored by most everybody, his contributions overlooked, his very presence all but inconsequential, and spent more time out on the dock contemplating suicide than in the company of his fellow actors (who, again, barely noticed his existence). It didn't help that he was booted out of his seat by a harpy. This year, he was honored with the Most Valuable Performer award, received thunderous applause, and was beside himself with joy at knowing that he had—finally—earned the respect and acceptence of his friends. No, of his family. The crowning moment of awesome in his entire school career.
This troper heard this tale from a friend. Said friend was talking about his boss, who holds the world record for longest period of time while wrestling a bear. But said boss didn't find out until years later when he happened to be chatting with the guy who had held the PREVIOUS record, and learned that he stripped him of his title. Awkward!
This technically isn't mine, I just took part in it It's got a bit of a buildup, though. This troper was at Anime Weekend Atlanta this year, staying the night with two friends. It was midnight, and we were waiting for Cartoon Network's anime block to come on. Since we still had half an hour, I decided to leave our hotel room and stretch my legs for a while. As I was walking around the convention, I looked out the glass doors leading outside from the convention center. There were about twenty people out there, two of whom had stereo speakers strapped to their backs and were blasting rap music. In the middle of it all were two guys breakdancing to the whole thing. I popped out there and clapped along with the music, it was kinda fun. That was when the real awesomeness began. The rap ended, and they started playing the next song. Guess what it was? Benny Fucking Hill. Nobody even said a word, we all just took off into the parking lot en masse. We spent about five minutes running around the outside of the hotel. By the time the song was over, we had made our way back to the glass doors, and a slower, techno-beat song started. I dashed forward, flung open the doors, and yelled, "RAID THE GALLERIA!" And with that, the otaku's went marching in. I think I personally started everyone clapping along to the music. We made our way past the dealers room, past the art room, to the other end of the convention center, down the stairs to the entrance, back up the other stairs, and back out the glass doors. By the time we got back outside, we must have had a hundred people following us. For the next I-don't-know-how-long, we danced to more techno music, singing, dancing, and clapping. Security finally broke us up around 12:45. I can say in all honesty that I will never forget that night.
This troper has never truly done anything spectacular. Especially in the physical department. Overweight, clumsy, not very agile or nimble... but all of his friends agree that he had a Crowning Moment Of Awesome when he took a fencing class... and got an A. Three semesters in a row.
This Troper has a couple to share:
- First, my freshman year in highschool. I was on the JV swim team. It was one of our first meets, freshman only, and it was against out biggest rival (there were other teams there, but they didn't matter). Technically, I wasn't supposed to be there since I wasn't ON the freshman team, but hey, I was a freshman! Anyway, I get up on the blocks for the 100 Fly, and I can see that no one is taking me seriously since I didn't exactly have a swimmer's body. BOOM. I beat all of them by quite a large margin. Later at the same meet, they were announcing the winners. My school got first place by ONE POINT. EPIC!
- A water polo example, it's the last game of the year (freshman again), and I'm in in the last quarter. The other team gets possesion with about 25 seconds left. I take a look down the pool, see the our goalie about to shut them down, and make a mad rush towards the other goal. I get a beautiful pass, and throw it in just as the buzzer sounds. The only way it could have been more awesome is if we didn't win 16-2...
- My grandfather had one during WWII. He was a Staff Sergeant in the Army Air Corps, and he was the bombardier in a mission over Yugoslavia. His plane got shot down. He ejected and parachuted, and noticed that one of his buddies that was going down with him had a pretty bad flak wound. The instant they touched down, he ripped up his parachute and bandaged the wound, picked up his friend, and ran over to a nearby farm. Despite not speaking a word of the language, he convinced the farmer to shelter them. A few weeks later, the Allies rolled through, and my grandfather got rescued. He was awarded two bronze stars and a silver star, and already had a purple heart from a previous mission.
This troper's 3-year-old son had one this morning. My husband and I were trying to sleep in, it being a weekend, when we heard a WHACK downstairs followed by an outraged howl from our son. Our 5-year-old daughter frantically tried to shush him, but he replied with, "Go to your room!" Of course she said, "No!" He repeated, "Go to your room!" She repeated, "NO!" He shouted, "Go to your ROOM!" With that, the daughter stomped into her room and slammed her door... causing the son to shout, "AND DON'T BANG THE DOOR!"
My little sister recently sent what can only be described as a Crowning Text Of Awesome:
I can't get to work. My Dad is in London and I have no money. None. Zilch. Nada. Nil. Zero. Nought. Nothing... at all. Like seriously. I don't have any. I'm broke. Like proper skint. I'm poor. I'm economically challenged. I NEED CASH!!!!
The following shall be told in the First Person by This Troper.
- During a Speech class in my Senior year of high school, we had officially run out of lesson for the day, so someone brought out their Wii and some of us started playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with the radio playing on the teacher's desk next to the TV. Minutes before class is over, a classmate and I start the final match. Lucas versus Pokemon Trainer (me). We are both known for being really good at the game. The match is close, and my classmate manages to KO me as Ivysaur, forcing me to switch to Charizard on my next stock. Cue "Through The Fire And Flames" starting up on the radio. I proceed to combo and edgeguard the shit out of Lucas. Game's decided, song ends, bell rings, I emerge as the victor with two stocks out of three remaining. I pick up my books and turn to the classmate I had just defeated. "It's super-effective." And then I walk out the door to my next class.
This Troper just had on of these. In Daytona USA. Three Seven Speedway. On a 20 lap race. With the AUTOMATIC Hornet. For those who don't know, Auto Hornet means you have the same Top Speed (w/o drafting) that the 1st car, and you can't do the 4-1-4 drifting; you actually need to brake (thus making you go slower). Lap 20 starts. The AI car passed me on Turn 1, then I regained my 1st position by Turn 2. Cue slowdown, as they both approach Turn 3, side by fuckin' side: I do a text-book brake drift on the inside lane, blocking the AI car with my trunk. I cross the finish lane in 1st. Yep. I just won the race. With the Auto Hornet.
This may be a bit minor compared to everything else here, but this troper had one the other week that could also double as a real-life example of a Theme Music Power Up. *now switching to first-person* At the time, we'd spent a week of no class due to typhoon Ketsana; that day, we were to watch a show at one of the major cultural centers in our city. On that day, my comrades also decided it'd be interesting to make a dare: if, after the show, I managed to confess my feelings to the girl I harbored feelings for (one of my twin girls, who I usually referred to as 'baby bear'), they'd buy me Starbucks. Otherwise, I'd be the one treating. So later, I was really effin' nervous (it's a silly thing, but... yeah. It didn't help that she still had a boyfriend at the time) and decided to calm my nerves by listening to my 'battle music': Premonition by Nobuo Uematsu, from Final Fantasy VIII. Sure enough, I managed to confess later on - not that she was surprised, as she herself told me she could sense it a mile away. My friends, to my surprise, even decided to hold their end of the deal and got me a slice of cheesecake, which I let her have. And then she tried to feed it to me...
During a rollercoaster ride this troper made the particularly unwise decision of bringing his glasses with him on his face. Predictably enough, the glasses fell midway, and I was panicking because I am half blind without them. After the ride was over, my cousin's friend (who was sitting behind me) asked me if the glasses she's holding in her hands are mine. Apparently she grabbed the falling glasses from mid-air. During a roller coaster ride.
This troper has had a few:
- Finally standing up to the bus-stop bully on the last day of school in sixth grade. (though, admittedly, knowing that I was going to be moving soon, I could have come up with something better than what I said.)
- Beating a friend of mine at a Winter Retreat at Sumo Wrestling (we were wearing fat suits). Made even more awesome by the fact that it was two rounds, was on the wrestling team at his school, and had been (jokingly) bragging about how he was going to win. So when he came at me, I stepped to the side, then tackled him.
- I'm not sure if it counts, but accidentally gaining memetic badas$ status at my school and my church youth group; the former I got from a sports team having to use the same room as the martial arts club and seeing the club practicing martial arts; and the latter I gained by showing a friend of mine how to pretend to know martial arts, and having a cheesy, totally fake fight with her and another friend in the middle of a crowded area.
Troper's example is not as great as the ones that are written in here, but he feels very proud of it: he survived not one, but two cancers. Lost a leg in the process, and he is fucking proud of his scars. Like I said, not as awesome as some examples, but for me, it's my CMOA.
- Being tougher than cancer? That's CMOA.
This Troper was recently at a pasta party for her school musical. (This year it was The Sound Of Music.) Everyone had just finished dinner and one of the boys was playing on the piano, so everyone crowed around. Suddenly he begins playing "Don't Stop Believin'". Cue roughly 50+ high schoolers singing Journey. Good fun.
Two years ago, at This Troper's high school's annual choir Christmas madrigal dinner, the chamber choir sang the Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. The entire thing. And they pulled it off perfectly. This is when This Troper realized how badly she wanted to make chamber choir. ._.
This Troper recalls getting a text message at four-thirty in the morning after falling asleep reading about three hours earlier (she even woke up still in a sitting position). The text message? It was from my friend, and it read, "Hey, um, did you just call me asking me for cookies?" It was easily one of the greatest moments of This Troper's life. Everyone should fall asleep reading more often.
This Troper loves snow, and her favorite season is winter. The day she was born, it snowed eight inches. In Illinois. In March.
As for my own, first I should mention that I am NOT very fit at all and running for about 2 minutes gets me out of breath. Anyway, I went to catch the bus from the bus stop near my house, only to JUST miss it. Fortunately, there is another bus stop about 10 minutes' walk away, which the bus takes a rather long route to get to. Wasting no time, I SPRINTED - ALL THE WAY, without stopping - to the other stop (that was five minutes of constant running, at FULL SPEED) and made it to the other stop JUST as the bus arrived. I leapt on, paid the fare, and collapsed into a seat. I felt hot, sick and out of breath for the whole journey, but also felt an incredible sense of self-pride.
- Just gonna add this other one here, though it's more a Crowning Coincidence Of Awesome than a CMOA. I used to work with Royal Mail, and often took quite a while to pack my mail pouch before heading out. One day, despite having a ton of mail, I managed to pack it all and be ready to go on time. Just as I finished and was feeling rather proud of myself, I suddenly noticed what was playing on the radio - Don't Stop Me Now by Queen.
This Troper has witnessed, participated in, or been related to a metric buttload of CMO As.
- The second time I performed Iolanthe, we found out that our set designer had flaked on us by showing up at put-in and finding no sets to put in. He had been assuring the director all along that everything was going smoothly. (I'd never actually seen anybody's face turn purple before that day.) The CMOA goes to the lighting crew- within three hours they redesigned the lighting cues for the entire show less than a week before opening night and created a set using just painted platforms, a few low flats, and lighting effects.
- Same group, different show. We were performing at Arisia, which is not our usual venue, and the logistics of the place meant that the chorus had to wait for a page to come and tell them when to go to their entrance. The page went for a drink instead, and we found out by the director running up in hysterics telling us the second number was almost over. We sprinted to our entrance and got there just in time to come in on the last line. Why was the show not ruined? Because one of the main characters was just off stage, and entered early, singing both numbers as a solo.
- My grandmother was a walking CMOA. She put up with my grandfather during his days as an alcoholic and helped him get dried out. She saw her son throw over a girl he had been more or less dating for ten years for a girl twenty years younger (my mother) who he'd only known for a few weeks. (On my father's behalf, the woman he dumped had wanted to remain in a holding pattern indefinitely and he was 44; the woman took up with a new man without much delay.) She then saw her son marry this younger girl about four months after meeting her, and never made her feel unwelcome. She saw her husband and son die within six months of each other and kept on going. She kept her own house until after she turned 100, and only then agreed to hire someone to help. She refused to go to a nursing home because they were full of "old people", most of whom were twenty to thirty years younger than her but had given up. She walked to her doctor's office until she was 95; the office was a mile away. At 101, she painted her back porch by herself because her 70-year-old handyman had decided he was too old and retired. She died in her own house, in her own bed, at 103.
- Crowning Grandma of awesome, right there.
This troper's C Mo A was his uncanny guess sense. An ex girlfriend phoned him up and proceeded to ask to be friends again. Within 5 minutes of conversation he had determined that said ex girlfriend was pregnant with her then-boyfriends baby. The words "Hah! You're pregnant aren't you?" were uttered, then subsequently denied. A short while later, it transpires that he was right, and actually confirmed it for her even before a pregnancy test did. She'd had an abortion.
Today, this troper's English teacher was yelling at the entire class (because nobody wanted to spend all hour playing a stupid Mad Libs card game). Halfway through the rant (which got to the the point of insulting the personalities and intelligence of the entire class), one of this troper's friends, who has a medical condition where she has seizures if she gets stressed out, calmly said "Mrs. Day, you're stressing me out. I can't get stressed out. Stop talking." And Mrs. Day had to stop talking, since the school is aware of the medical condition and the teachers aren't supposed to stress her out. It rocked.
- Two years ago, when this troper's sister had that same teacher, Mrs. Day assigned the class the journal topic of "what is the biggest problem in this class?" Clearly, Mrs. Day expected the class to say that it was their behaviour. (Part of the problem was the behaviour, but most of the problem was that Mrs. Day was/is one of the worst teachers ever, with a habit of leaving in the middle of class to "get coffee", which takes her about fifteen minutes.) When it was time to read journal entries out loud, one student raised his hand and said that he volunteered to read his journal first. He stood up and read "Mrs. Day, you are the biggest problem in this class." It wasn't awesome because he was insulting the teacher. It was awesome because it was a hundred percent true.
This happened during this troper's high school's last football game of the season. We were losing horribly and everyone knew we wouldn't win (we were playing better than we had for part of the season, though, when we hadn't scored a touchdown between two games.) The opposing team's band was in the same stands as we were. We started having a battle of the bands, they would play something and we'd respond with something else. Most of the bands confessed it was the most fun they'd had in band.
This troper's cousin had one recently. He's serving in the war and recently his unit were attacked. Now they were in a truck at this point and the cousin as driving. He was shot in the abdomen (the bullet barely missed his spine) however he shrugged it off and drove his unit to safety. Only when he got back did he collapse. He lived but that isn't the end of the story. No he REFUSED to go home once he was awake and instead served the rest of his term with his unit. Granted it was only three weeks left but still. He's still only 21 as well.
This troper's best friend went to a party a while back. The theme was the letter J, so she went as the Joker and scared the fuck out of everyone there. (I wasn't there, for the record). Apparently she kept popping up next to people holding a pencil and asking them if they wanted to see a trick.
This troper once was early to one of his physics lessons and, noticing that the room he was in had reasonably stiff curtains and feeling a bit cheeky, he hid behind one of the curtains as the other students came in, expecting to be found fairly quickly, especially since the window-alcove was far too small for his 6'3" frame. However, he didn't, and remained hidden for almost an hour, after which he nonchalantly strolled out, onto a table and casually asked "Not late, am I?"
This Troper once convinced his AP Bio teacher to move a test back one day... After everyone else failed to even get a response.
This troper couldn't have planned his CMOA if he'd wanted to, but he still savours the memory fifteen years later. Having Calculus and Statistics in back-to-back periods of high school? Tedious. Having the teacher tell the class at year's beginning "I don't care what you do in class, as long as you're quiet and don't bother me unless someone's dying!"? Distasteful. Having a Jerk Jock sit next to this troper in Stats one day and demand "Lemme copy what you're doing" (with an implicit "or else!")? Aggravating. Watching a week later as the teacher gets up before the class, makes a speech about 'copying's okay, as long as you *learn* in the process' - then skewers said Jerk Jock for handing in a copy of my ''Calc'' assignment as his ''Stats'' homework? PRICELESS.
- * This troper's sister once accidentally handed in the wrong version of her French coursework - she'd also written it in runes.
This Troper has a couple. This Troper is now going to switch to first person.
- I am a descendant of Martin Luther- who had the balls to stand up to the Catholic church, and form a new religion. One of my great uncles/other familial relation I do not know how to explain was a part of the plot to assassinate Hitler with a suitcase. He was the one with the suitcase. And yes, I am talking about the plot of [[Valkyrie]]. It also turns out that my Great-Grandmother was put in an internment camp for not being a good Hitler supporter (i.e. Not Gay, Jewish, Polish etc.) and my Grandmother was part of the White Rose, an Anti-Nazi spy group.
  - Plus my Grandmother is just playing epic, she's survived WWII, the firebombings of Hamburg, an abusive husband, breast cancer and being hit by a bus- while in her eighties. (the bus thing, I mean).
- I got to go to Sakura-Con. While there I got to talk to Todd Haberkorn, J Michael Tatum, and Aaron Dismuke. I thanked Todd Haberkorn for coming, and he hugged me.
- Our class was doing A Midsummer Nights Dream, and we had to break into small groups and perform pieces from it. The day we were to perform in front of the class came along, and the girl playing Bottom did not show up. I ended up having to do the part, and I actually knew most of the lines.
- My school has a thing called the "Eurasian Conference" which basically means all the school's Sophomores get together and have a meeting while pretending to be ambassadors from certain countries. India brought a radio/CD player, and "Don't Stop Believing" came on. There were about 120 people there, and about half of them started to have a dance party. 'Twas Epic.
- The last I'm going to talk about, some Tropers may already know. My school had an... Incident where this racist kid got in trouble for mouthing off racist remarks. He ended up calling his parents who showed up and proceeded to verbally abuse some African-American kids who had nothing to do with any of the fight thus far. A lot of people stood up against the racists peoples, and a huge fight insued- all against those people. You can read about it here: North- the fight http://www.kval.com/news/40389977.html
A troper this guy knows managed to come out in an epic way. He did it on the radio, then plays a song bashing homophobia right after.
This troper's grandmother, when she was 66, got diagnosed with emphysema and told by a doctor she wouldn't live to 70. She quit smoking and just celebrated her birthday last Saturday. She's seventy-nine. That is not the CMOA. The CMOA is that on her 79th birthday, reminded that "didn't the doctor say you wouldn't live to 70?", said "Well yes, but until God calls me home, I see no reason to listen to some quack doctor about how long I should live."
This troper attended the airing of a live public radio program this year, and was invited to come on stage to participate in their trivia program. In it, you're paired up with a call-in partner to answer questions. In my nervousness, I let my partner answer most of the questions, and made myself look stupid for one of them (when the question dealt with the nature of a NASA space program and I was too busy trying to remember its name). Then it came time for a final, double-or-nothing question. The line was dead. "Well, it's all up to you, (name)." The question was whether students at my university did more of cleaning lint from dryers or tested their smoke detectors. I answered from experience. And won. In front of hundreds in the audience, and millions of listeners nation-wide.

Go back to Crowning Moment Of Awesome while wailing on a guitar in front of a bus exploding in slow motion, making out with your Love Interest, and doing backflips. Then Punch out Cthulhu.

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