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Watch fireworks or light your own?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by novelist_wannabe, Jul 3, 2008.

?

Here's your chance to identify yourself as a pyromaniac. Or not.

  1. DIY, man. Light'em up

    5 vote(s)
    20.8%
  2. I like my fingers just like they are. Watch'em

    19 vote(s)
    79.2%
  1. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    I don't think kids are shooting their own fireworks like they did when I was a kid. We used to buy and distribute using a price list (firecrackers, 20 cents a pack; M-80s - $2; cherry bombs, $1.50; sparklers, 5 cents ea.; bottle rockets, $2; pinwheels, $3; Roman candles, $5, etc.) in the last weeks of school. Then we'd get punks (cattails) from a nearby swamp, which we'd dry out and use for lighting them because they burned slowly like a cigar. Then we'd walk around around the neighborhood all afternoon setting them off in peoples' garbage cans.
     
  2. wannabeu

    wannabeu Member

    I'll just watch. It was a lot of fun lighting fireworks when I was young, but as I have grown up, I more and more worry about accidents that could happen to kids. So me and my family will stay safe and watch from a distance.
     
  3. snuffy2

    snuffy2 Member

    As year-round bomb building kids we were always puzzled by the 'fourth' amateurs. We sawed up aluminum lawn furniture tubing and filled 'em with match heads and waxed in underwater fuses (we ordered the fuse by mail) and set em off under inches baseball infield dirt. We cut match heads in half and stuffed 'em into CO2 cartridges and lit 'em off during grade school lunch-time recess (damn those whistlers would fly). We made cannons out of cast pipe and shot nails and glass out over fields and watched the tree leaves twitter. We rode our bikes to distant stores to buy boxes of matches. We were extremely careful when hammering over the ends of the aluminum pipe (you can bet we used plenty of tight wadding) and delicate about waxing in fuses. Freshman year in high school I traded notes with a future Univ Maryland Pitcher who had been mixing his own gunpowder bombs from local ingredients. I retired.
     
  4. Rumpleforeskin

    Rumpleforeskin Active Member

    Places around me are having "Buy 1, Get 11 Free" deals and it's enticing to splurge, but I don't know.
     
  5. alleyallen

    alleyallen Guest

    If I can convince Lieslntx to let me use her place (I'm in the city limits, she's not), I'll blow up the last of my armory which came, oddly enough, from Lieslntx.
     
  6. forever_town

    forever_town Well-Known Member

    Who do you think I am, Chef?

    I go watch 'em.
     
  7. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    Residents of snuffy's town will shortly be puzzled by the presence of helicopters and Suburbans in their town with CIA, FBI, NSA and ATF screened on their sides ....
     
  8. HejiraHenry

    HejiraHenry Well-Known Member

    I always prefer to, um, light my own before watch fireworks.

    If you know what I'm saying.
     
  9. BYH

    BYH Active Member

    There are few things in this world I hate more than fireworks.

    I liked them when I was really young. Then, when I was 6 or 7, I suddenly decided the booming noise scared the shit out of me. I decided I hated them, blocked my ears and cried the whole time we were at the park downtown watching them on the 4th. Drove my dad batshit crazy. Was never tempted to go again until the July 4th after my junior year of HS, when I was seeing a girl--no, it's true, I swear--and thought it might be romantic to take her to the fireworks. But one of her parents got sick and she had to stay home to help watch her handicapped brother, so I stayed home.

    Good thing too. Romanticism might have made us go blind. Fireworks skitted into the crowd and injured a shitpot of people, all of whom sued for copious amounts of $$$. As far as I know, the town hasn't had a fireworks show since.

    A couple years later, we were friends with a complete idiot who decided it'd be fun to celebrate the 4th by settign off firecrackers in the street in front of another buddy's house. He threw a firecracker in my general direction and it went off right next to my ear. Scared the ever-holy shit out of me. I got in the car and left.

    Outside of being in Vegas for the 4th of July in 2004--when I was literally dragged by my wife and the couple we were with to watch the fireworks show from the Stratosphere--I will not watch fireworks on the 4th. First of all, the concept of getting stuck in traffic for an hour in both directions to watch far-off displays strikes me as incredibly stupid. Secondly, well, I hate fireworks, even those that are really far away. Hate them hate them hate them.

    Unfortunately, there's a block party here tomorrow and I several of neighbors strike me as the type who could someday be nicknamed "Stump." So I'll probably spend tomorrow cowered in my living room, typing away at SportsJournalists.com. I like variety.
     
  10. Lieslntx

    Lieslntx Active Member

    Come on over! I can't believe you still have an armory left!

    Things will be blowing up north of Houston tomorrow night.
     
  11. mike311gd

    mike311gd Active Member

    Your wife sure did bag herself a strong one.
     
  12. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Outing alert....Snuffy is:

    [​IMG]
     
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