he is nate from girlyman (http://www.girlyman.com/), and girlyman has a new album out, which has a fabulous song on it called easy bake ovens, (http://www.girlyman.com/themusic/lyrics.php?song_id=84) which happens to have a refrain about "throwing your shoes right up over the wire." i'd never heard the phrase before that song, and now your poll comes along, so. :)
I have no doubt today that that's what it actually means, but for some reason that's never how I heard it. (I regret not thinking to put it up as a poll option now, tho)
I hadn't run into the drugs story as a kid, but classicaljunkie heard it from a neighbor a couple of years ago. So maybe that's more of an adult-based urban legend than a kid one...
When we went to Philmont in New Mexico (1983??), some people would toss their expired and dead boots over the gateway to hang there for others to see. I kept my boots.
There was an outbreak of shoes-thrown-over-phone-wires in my neighborhood when I was about ten, a new pair showed up every couple of days for maybe three weeks.
IIRC, the official Big Kids Who Knew Everything [tm] swore that they knew Some Kid who knew Some Other Kid who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors but right before that they heard Yet Another Kid say that he knew some kid who got killed by a drunk driver and someone threw shoes over the wire with the dead kid's name written on them. Or something like that. Stuff that makes total sense when you're ten.
If you wanted to know what other sources had to say about it, you would have, and perhaps did, look it up yourself (rather than simply being curious what other people in your friends list had read or heard) but just for fun:
My god I love the "logic" in the first link! "I saw a news brief about a neighbourhood in Amsterdam where there was a lot of drug use, and there was a pair of shoes over a wire, so that proves it!" and "This seems proven to me, there were a pair of shoes over the wire near where a drug murder had occurred."
I always thought it was something kid did to other kids ... knock em down -- grab their shoes -- tie em together and sling them over power lines. Kid then gets to trudge home in his socks and have to explain to parents where his shoes went.
There was some movie where they were using the 'shoes over the power lines' thing to promote some political idea ... saw it once on cable but don't remember and don't care.
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I've heard recently--the past two years, maybe--the drug-meet story, but not previously.
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IIRC, the official Big Kids Who Knew Everything [tm] swore that they knew Some Kid who knew Some Other Kid who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors but right before that they heard Yet Another Kid say that he knew some kid who got killed by a drunk driver and someone threw shoes over the wire with the dead kid's name written on them. Or something like that. Stuff that makes total sense when you're ten.
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http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1177/why-do-you-see-pairs-of-shoes-hanging-by-the-laces-from-power-lines
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/shoetrees.html
("*They* were looking for it, too, but *they* weren't good enough!")
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There's probably more but I had to avert my eyes!
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or maybe some newb got pwned neaerby
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There was some movie where they were using the 'shoes over the power lines' thing to promote some political idea ... saw it once on cable but don't remember and don't care.