I Hate Fireworks July 3, 2006
Posted by Retired Geezer in News.trackback
I love the 4th of July holiday.
I even have the Martina McBride song, Independence Day, as a ringtone on my phone.
But I hate Fireworks in the hands of Amateurs.
I have lost property, including a car, to Safe and Sane Fireworks.
You can buy semi-professional fireworks in my county in Idaho. You know, the kind of stuff that shoots up in the air and explodes.
Mrs. Geezer was once hit in the shoulder by a ‘Mortar’. We were at the neighbors to see their fireworks display. The teenagers lit one of these beauties and it tipped over and aimed directly at all of us sitting in the driveway in lawn chairs. It was pretty much like the commercial I saw recently on TV. It went off and shot the exploding part at us. It hit Mrs. Geezer in the shoulder, bounced off and exploded, setting the blankets on fire.
We don’t go to any more neighborhood fireworks shows.
The picture shows the neighbor pulling a disker with his tractor. He’s cutting a fire break around his 100 acre field. You can see that he has already graded a smooth area around the fence line.
The crispy looking vegetation is ‘Cheat Grass’. it’s really flammable and burns very hot.
I was very happy to see him riding the tractor today.
Bonus points for guessing the make and model of the tractor… I’m looking at you Skinbad.
(It will probably be Elzbth who guesses it first)
Its NOT a John Deere. I hope that’s not typical of Idahoes.
My fireworks days are pretty much over. Explosives in the hands of beer-drinking revelers is a trip to the ER waiting to happen (I dragged a friend of mine there 4 years ago when his mortar fell over and a round his bare leg. Not pretty.
There’s a county wide burn ban and fireworks ban here, and in most of central and North Texas. Waco cops are following people from stands and if they enter the city limits with fireworks, confiscating them.
Here in Wisconsin its legal for consumers to buy and possess fireworks. However, its illegal to use them! I wish they would enforce it because they scare the beejeebers out of my shelties not to mention interrupting my beauty rest.
Judas, Geezer. I can’t even hardly see that thing. I don’t know tractors. MF or Kubota? A couple of streets over, a
illegal alien’smigrant worker’s car overheated and burned up. Wind pushed the fire into the neighbor’s cheat grass. He had put in a new vinyl fence about a year ago. I should have taken a picture of the results–quite comical. Luckily it burned itself out before it melted the siding off his house.Don’t ever come to Huntington Beach on 4th of July if you don’t like fireworks. It turns into a war zone here. Every kind of firework there is + dry ice bombs. People on roof tops having bottle rocket fights with their neighbors. You have to run through some intersections to avoid ambushes from surrounding roof tops. I don’t really mind, except that all the racket freaks my dog out.
Going down to the beach and watching the official fireworks is cool though.
It looks like a Farmall from the distance, but I’d have to see a closer shot of it to guess the model. Just off the top of my head, is it an “M”?
Speaking of Independence Day (the song), this is one of the more confusing lyrics I’ve ever heard (and we covered Stairway to Heaven):
Today is a day of reckoning let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong roll the stone away, let the guilty pay, it’s independence day
Now, I get it and all she pulled a Farrah on drunk bad dad, but roll the stone away, followed by let the guilty pay?
Not. Getting. It.
I always thought “roll the stone away” was kind of a religious allusion to Easter as a symbol of independance and everything being turned upside down (e.g., “let the weak be strong”). But I’m just guessing. “Let the guilty pay” doesn’t really fit with this theory, but maybe the lyrics were written by someone who’s not really well versed in Christian theology.
My neighborhood is like Da Nang this time of year. I used to enjoy the fireworks, but I really dislike the way it effects my dog. I haven’t bought any or used any in several years.
My guess is it’s a Farmall tractor. Maybe an “H”.
I’m not a farmer, I just play one on the INTERNETS.
My female ACD used to get upstairs on the bed and tremble for hours and refuse to go outside after one of our neighbor’s annual illegal fireworks shows.
(This neighbor is the same jerk from the historical society who is up in everybody’s business about ‘rules’ everytime they want to change a window or a doorknob.)
Last year hubby blocked off the stairs so she couldn’t get up there and kept her downstairs with bluegrass music tuned in and loud on the stereo.
It really seemed to mask the whistles and pops. She could still sense the odd boom, but was much much more relaxed than before.
If asked to name the make and model of tractor, I would have to say, “Red, the kind with big wheels”
Looks like an International Harvester that my uncle had.
That tractor was actually the first vehicle I ever drove, when I was like ten or something.
Well, actually, I was just playing with you. That looks like a tractor in Farmall, Model “M”. In red. With big wheels.
They had a vet on the news today that suggested giving dogs benadryl to keep them calm during fireworks. She said it was safe for dogs. I don’t think I’d try it with my little chihuahua though.
I did it with my kids.
Russ is the winner!
Farmall, ‘M’ model.
Elzbth is second runner up.
DBS, the “H” is a little smaller but looks pretty much the same.
Those suckers run good too. I crossed two of the spark plug wires and it still ran pretty good.
Someone told me about some “Anxiety Drops” for dogs.
All natural with Valarian root or something in it. She swears by it and even I noticed that her dog seemed pretty mellow.
Haven’t learned where to get it yet, cause she got it from a friend.
Lauraw, kinda makes sense about the neighborhood jerk. Does he have a Gore sticker on his Prius?
Michael, Yeah, I never figured out the meaning of the lyrics either.
I had to go to her website to make sure it *really* said “let the right be wrong”.
What tha?
I don’t get it either but I like the heck out of it for a ringtone.
I’ll stick to “Crossroad Blues” by Robert Johnson. It scares the hell out of people when he starts wailing.
How the heck am I supposed to tell the difference between an “H” and an “M” with that tiny picture you posted?
OK DBS, here’s another one for True Believers
I think it’s more than Michael’s suggestion RG, those lyrics are just stupid.
Anyone still awake?
*rolls over*
Yeah, Honey. What do you want?
I’m just pissed off. F’n Switzerland decided to denounce Israel. Hamas, naturally, gets a free ride. I’m about to put a profanity-laden post about it on my site.
I almost forgot my 4th of July Idiot photos.
Since it’s NSFW, I’ll post them here:
Photo 1 in which an Idiot decides he will hold a Skyrocket with his cheeks.
Photo 2 In which another idiot lights the fuse.
Photo 3 where we see his involuntary Cheek Clampage on the stick that holds the Skyrocket.
Photo 4 The aftermath of holding burning stuff with your ass cheeks.
I hope I have these photos in sequence cause I just realized that Only
God can make a treeMichael can fix his comment screwups.They are in .tiff format, hope you can view them.
DBS – “Crossroad Blues” is one hell of a tune (so to speak), but I still think “Love in Vain” is his high water mark.
The “M” identification was a guess (M’s are a little more powerful, and they’re more common around here than the H model – plus my in-laws still have a working M and a not-so working H on their farm), but I can’t discount my “Farmall Tractor Identification Superpowers”. Unfortunately, I cannot accept a prize for winning the contest because my powers can only be used to fight crime (which makes them pretty freakin’ worthless in the real world, I have to admit, unless I happen upon some miscreants robbing a bank then making their escape on a restored Model “H” or something like that).
I just got an image of a stunt chase sequence;
miscreants in an ‘M’
careening around corners with a hay-bailer swinging behind them.
Crashing into cars.
At 17 mph.
17 mph? With a hay baler on the back, you’d be lucky to hit 15.
Unless someone “Pimped their Farmall”. A mechanic here in Winterset transplanted a 350 chevy into a 60′s model Farmall a couple of years ago. It’s still geared low for farm work, but the power band is humongous, since most 350′s have more than 250 horses (even though tractor horsepower & car horsepower are measured differently).
Remember the old Green Acres episode where Oliver’s hippy biker nephew comes to visit. He’s totally useless except for working on engines. He soups up the tractor and Oliver gets a speeding ticket while driving it.
RG – I just thought of the one thing your stunt chase was missing: the miscreants in question would be shooting fireworks at their pursuers.
You’re right, Russ.
I forgot to mention the crime occured in Huntington Beach.
I just remembered something that happened in NY when I was on tour with Mr. PA, about 30 years ago.
Somehow he got us backstage at Madison Square Garden to see Aerosmith.
I was amazed to see people in the balcony throwing firecrackers and flaming stuff down on other people below.
Firework Stupidity
(Contains a little profanity)
http://www.ejbdotcom.net/content/13490.html
“I was amazed to see people in the balcony throwing firecrackers and flaming stuff down on other people below.”
I was on the Mall in D.C. for the Bicentennial celebration and people were jammed so tight together you could hardly move. Didn’t deter the asshats with fireworks though.
Boy am I depressed.
I can’t identify tractors, I’ve never toured with Paul Anka, and I’ve never talked a friend into being the target for 25 roman candles.
My life is empty, meaningless.
Not to be the “fireworks Nazi” here, but the victim in that video was being shot with Saturn Missiles, not roman candles. Saturn missiles are like whistling bottle rockets without sticks, and they used to come in 10, 25, 50 and even 100-shot packages (at least they did back in the day when I was a pyro).
These were the most popular weapon in the arsenal of the pyros on my old dormitory floor. We….errr, I mean THEY….used to go to another floor where the residents had incurred our righteous wrath and rig up one of these beauties to the door of a bathroom stall with duct tape and a 6″ length of delay fuse (kite string). We’d….errr, I mean THEY WOULD…. plant the charges, sneak back to our floor, and wait for chaos to ensue. The best part of this prank is the fact that bathrooms in our dormitory were 100% tile & metal, so the risk of fire was limited to rolls of toilet paper or the extremely slim chance that someone was holding open a door at the time of detonation & a stray round ignited the carpet.
In an eight floor building, we managed to do this about seven or eight times in two years without getting caught. In order to shift suspicion from the obvious culprits (we were the pyro floor, imagine that), we bombed one of our own bathrooms first. It also worked great as a shakedown to get our technology fully working. The last thing we wanted to do was leave unexploded ordinance lying around for someone to use as evidence against us.
Good times, man. Good times.
Another popular trick in our…err, I mean their…bag of tricks was using a 5′ length of conduit to launch bottle rockets out the window. Think about it. The way most people shooting fireworks from their windows get caught is that someone outside sees them lighting a fuse or holding a rocket with a lit fuse in the window. This way, we could hang a towel over the window and stand 5′ away while lighting the rockets & avoid giving away our position. We would also use a wet hand towel to cover the back end of the conduit to avoid getting a blast of exhaust gas in the room, which would finger us as the culprits for any security guard with a working nose. By the time the rockets were leaving the end of the conduit, they were leaving a minimal spark trail, so it was damn near impossible to tell who was doing it, unless you did something dumb like shooting whistling moon travelers, or something like that. One of the crew did get busted for doing this once, but only because some dumbass newbie lit a roman candle & tried to stuff it out the gap in the bottom of the window screen, illuminating the launch pad location.
we used to light bottle rockets and give em a little lob in the direction of the intended victim.. just a bit of an arc.
one of mine landed in the cuff of a friend’s blue jeans (and he was gay for putting a cuff in his jeans for crying out loud this was 1978).
and looking back on it I think “you are one stupid son of a bitch for ever doing that crap”.
Dave, I once got in a bottle rocket fight with an old high school drinking buddy during spring break of my third year of college. The really dumb part of the fight is that it occured INSIDE a Chevy Nova while we were driving around town (he DID shoot first, I’m not crazy enough to START something like this). We managed to get off somewhere around six or seven shots before the driver got the car stopped & he and the other two passengers managed to get out & run for their lives.
Sometimes, I look back on my past stupid stunts & say to myself “Dude, how did you make it to 38 without felony convictions or missing digits?”
Sometimes, I look back on my past stupid stunts & say to myself “Dude, how did you make it to 38 without felony convictions or missing digits?”
And maybe its just me but it seems these episode almost always involve alcohol. Go figure.
BTW, Russ, that kind of ingenuity is what makes America great!
Of course, when I think about it, almost everything in my life between about 17 and 27 involved alcohol in one way or another. Except for family reunions and serving as a deacon at church on Sunday.
I really slowed down my fireworks jones after the mid 90′s. There was an incident in Des Moines where an extended family group on the near north side of DSM (the closest we’ve got to “the hood”) were cruising around town in a rented Explorer shooting fireworks at other cars & pedestrians. They had a stray spark ignite the garbage bags full of ammo in the cargo area, and the Explorer went up like it had been hit by a TOW missile. Most of them got out alive, but a 15-year old girl in the back seat burned up & several of the survivors had horrible burns. Talk about a slap in the face.
The reason why I hate fireworks: It’s been the 4th of July around here since Friday night. Enough already.
blame the idiots for those accidents not the fireworks. man most of you americans are so fucking stupid its no wonder some of you get hurt. and if you are drunk and sit down on an armed mortar ist likely you´ll feel bad afterwards…
better ban guns and rifles, guess more people get hurt or killed by firearms…
Yep, i-love-fireworks you’ve got a timeless message.
We don’t have time for this.
I couldn’t argree with you more. Blame the idiots for those accidents not the fireworks. Including the young kids, who are careless with fireworks!
Parents are not watching the kids closely like they should be.
I live in Fort Wayne. The local yocals sure do love there precious fire
works! Unfortunely, around here you can shoot fireworks off from June
28th thru July 9th. That sucks!
For the people have to go to work next day. I like fireworks too. But I
NOT appericate hearing it every night for almost two weeks! Thats
gets old pretty qick.
I will be glad when summer is finally over and the kids are back
in school!!!!