Posted on 07/02/2021 10:37:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
Too many Bugs Bunny cartoons.
I live on a lake. This Sunday just about every homeowner around the 500 acre lake will blow stuff up. I have several hundred dollars of almost illegal fireworks. My neighbor across the cove probably has more but I try to keep up. Every fourth is like that. Not to mention the annual boat parade. A nice fire in the fire pit, neighbors all gathered together for grilling, a few beers and blow stuff up...what could be better!
Sometimes I wish I had gone to New Mexico Tech. Too many Mythbusters episodes I guess.
When I was a kid, some of us would make pipe bombs from black powder or emptying shotgun shells into a threaded, capped pipe. Sometimes kids would blow themselves up.
Nowdays, even having a partially made pipe bomb is against about 10,000 laws.
They’ve taken a lot of the fun out of blowing things up.
Los Angeles Bomb Squad had premature ejaculation.....
I blame Mythbusters. s/
Prior to 9/11 you could buy 12 ga. “cracker shells” at just about any gun or sporting good store in Alaska. After 9/11 the DHS then declared these to be “pyrotechnic devices’ and, although still available, one must jumps through so many regulatory hoops it is not worth it. One of those saved me from an angry brown bear so I have fond memories...
1 tin can, 1 M-80 ‘firecracker’, 1 area of soft dirt. Stick the fuse through a small hole punched in can, wedge the can halfway deep into dirt, light the fuse and RUN! Boom and the can bottom flies high and, if you can find it, its bowl-shape makes for a good ash tray. Actually, I think the cracker was smaller than a M-80 but I do remember that you had to prove you could run before the grownups let you light the fuse!
Memories!
Nothing more fun than having a rockets fight😁
Of course we were safe we wore motorcycle helmets.
When I was a kid, my parents often sent me to my grandparent’s farm for the summer.
Best memory was clearing stumps for new farmland. At a nearby country store, Grandpa picked up dynamite off the shelf. The blasting caps and chord were kept in a safe that he had to sign for.
BIG oak stumps were the most fun. I got to choose how many sticks to plant underneath each one.
Yeah, blowing stuff up is pure Americana.
All my fireworks got blowed up in Los Angeles the other day...
I worked for a mining company in college. It was a quarry operation where a typical shot was 50 holes drilled on 5’ centers. Usually two sticks of dynamite went down a hole first then fill it up to the top with ANFO.
One time there was a hard rain a few hours before and the foreman said to keep dropping in sticks until you heard them quit splashing. Instead of two sticks most holes had six.
I was under a loader bucket about 150 yards away when the shot went off. Fly rock the size of footballs came flying down and tore up the conveyor belts, punched holes in shed roofs, and banged up a lot of equipment. I got soaked by a piece that landed in a puddle in front of the loader. It took an entire day to repair the belts and equipment.
Good times.
Woohoo!!
I think it all started with Francis Scott Key.
“......the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air.....”
That’s the spirit!
With as dry and hot as it is in Eastern Washington,my uber-lib sister is absolutely wanting that the governor make an emergency decree to ban all fireworks in the state. She says she’s afraid that “idiots will burn down the state in the name of patriotism”.
I think she has an ulterior motive, though. She thinks that we shouldn’t celebrate because she doesn’t think we ‘deserve’ to do it anymore. “ Racism”, and all that.
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