I forget how old I was when I discovered an interesting thing about orange pips. During the process of eating an orange, there is a small window of opportunity before you discard a pip, when you can impart a large quantity of kinetic energy to the pip. Accelerate it to a high speed, a bit like a very small nuclear particle accelerator. Simply remove the pip from your mouth, place it firmly between your thumb and index finger, and squeeze hard. The innocent piece of orange gametes is transformed into a high-speed pip. And the miniscule movement required means that it is very rare that you are identified as the particle source.
After a surprisingly small amount of practice, you can send a high-speed pip sailing clean across a large room. I have found this to be a source of amusement in the office work environment, and as a side benefit, it is a practice rich in vitamin C. I usually aim for someone a long-ish way away. Since high-speed pips are very inaccurate, if you aim at someone, there is very little chance that you will hit them, and it's quite safe. Well, you might hit someone whom you didn't aim at, but they can be counted as victims of friendly fire, and apparently these days, they don't count.
Sometimes, to add a bit of interest, if I am sitting close to a window I will send a high-speed pip at the window glass, and it ricochets off in a completely random direction. Or, as a variation on this, I fire at the ceiling, and with luck, the high-speed pip screams out of the sky and onto someone's desk. It can be mildly perplexing for a fellow worker sitting in the privacy of an office cubicle when a high-speed pip fires down from the sky and thunks into his or her desk, and it is very amusing for me to cause such perplexment.
In all my years of experience with high-speed pips, I have only once been embarassed by the practice. In an office once, I sent a high-speed pip towards a target across the room, but the recalcitrant pip thunked into the cheek of a co-worker sitting a couple of yards away. She put her hand to her cheek, turned slowly, fixed me with a withering glare and said "Did you spit that?" How could I tell her in the short time available about the small window of opportunity, how unlucky she was, about the friendly fire, about the vitamin C, and the rest of the arguments that render high-speed pips relatively innocuous? I had to sit there in mortified, silent embarrassment and will time to pass.
