Fire works fun?

Fire works fun?

Any one got any good stories? Here in Chicago one Fire work show had a problem and one of the Tech got hurt 2 &3 degree burns after the shell went off after only going a few feet in the air. One man went over next door to ask them to stop shooting off the Fire works because of the noise and the hot embers going over his house. They said no and kept shooting them off. He went in to his house got his gun and now the guy will shut off no more fire works. Oh and Chicago Tribune showed a picture of a woman’s Nipple. Don’t know why but I don’t read the paper so I only know from the radio.

Well....
...when my dad was a kid he lit one of those fountain cones. When nothing happened, he looked up close at the tip to see what was wrong. Guess what happened next?

It's all good: his eyebrows grew back.

After a really bad divorce and just generally bad year, my baby brother had the bright idea to cheer me up and take me to his special spot in Mexico.

So my brother, his wife and I went down to Mexico one year and bought a bunch of cherry bombs, black cats, butter fingers, pickalo petes, spinners and those funny grey things that you light and that turn into charcoal snakes.

Then we bought a jar of tequila..... with a snake in it.

My brother and I sat on the empty beach and set off various items in our little box of "toys". The entire night, it was "Toy", "Boom", "Sip of tequila"..... "Toy", "Boom", "Sip of tequila"..... Well you get the idea.

Finally - at I don't know what time, a sober M. (my brothers wife) dragged two passed out people off of the beach into our little cabin. I don't know how she did it because my brother is about the size of John Goodman, but she did.

The next day we were fortunate to find that we both still had fingers and the greatest extent of our injuries included pounding heads and thousands of bumps from various sand flea and no see um bites.

Disclaimer: Don't try this at home.

(edited to say don't try this in Mexico either because we were damn lucky not to be arrested by the Federalies.)
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This year, we discovered that if you drop an M-80 down into the water run-off grates near the beach, it amplifies & reverberates the explosion throughout the whole drain network for miles and miles....It seriously sounded like dynamite!

Picture thousands of tourists lighting off their puny fireworks, everyone all "Eww! and Ahhh!". Then...WHOOMPBAAAAANG!
The beach stops, everyone looks around all freaked out, kids start crying...it was great!

The Penguin, a little bar and bbq down the street from my house, lights fireworks off their roof every year. It is the scariest drunken experience of the year but I always go back for more. Most of the fireworks end up shooting directly at the crowd so you end up with shrapnel in your hair and soot on your clothing. Last year a friend was sitting on the back of his truck next to me and started laughing when I was hit in the head with a spent mortar. He stopped laughing when a still smoking mortar slammed into his crotch and melted to his ohh so trendy polyester pants.

In the imortal word of Merwan...


Excellent.



(I should IM you if my brother and I go back to Mexico for another bout firework and tequila fun.)

I always like taking fireworks apart and putting new ones together with the remains. One time we took apart Roman candles for half an hour, crammed all the balls into a VERY tight ball filled with powder and lit it. There was a big explosion of multicoloredfireballs right before my friend's mother came running outside, asking us what that sound was as we all looked her straight in the eyes and said "Nothing" with straight faces despite the gray haze that blanketed the whole front yard.

Another 4th of July, my friends decided to have a "Bottle Rocket Fight." Yes, you read that brilliant plan correctly. One guy's parents owned a ranch where they had a cabin stocked with dozens of BRICKS of bottle rockets (don't ask me why, it was Texas). They found PVC pipes and used them as shoulder cannons with one guy feeding and the other guy aiming. Oh, and you can hold the stick part of a bottle rocket until it shoots out of your hand without getting hurt. One of my friends became quite an expert at waiting for the fuse to go down some, tossing the bottle rocket in the air, and then having it shoot down at an angle toward his intended target. My friends divided into two teams and I separated their sides by lighting the field on fire (but I had to chase it all night long to keep it from going out of control under the power of its own wind, and thus spent most of the night dodging rockets aimed at other people).

Later that night, a group of highschoolers one guy knew came by and we ACTUALLY convinced them to go Snipe hunting. I don't know how none of them had never heard of that trick, but there were about ten of them and they all went along with it (and yes, we left them in the middle of hundreds of acres of wilderness). I also don't know how my friend explained a few acres of burned land to his dad. Oh well Fun times!

I don't have a story where anything bad actually happened, but a few years ago I went to my dad's for the 4th. I was inside cooking, and went out front to see my dad sitting on the front lawn in a lounge chair, watching my little brother (10) and sister (7) crouching down over the fireworks and lighting them with a large, always-on, propane TORCH.

And *I* was the bad guy when I took the torch away because I ruined their fun.

We also used to take apart fireworks and reassemble them in interesting ways...

My story is sort of a fireworks story. Just after one 4th of July, my neighbor, who was an older, geeky guy that still lived with his mom and dad (yes, he even had tape and glue holding his eyeglasses together and a pocket protector to boot) comes walking into my back yard with a brown jar.

In the jar, he explained, was sodium metal. The liquid it was in smelled like kerosene, and I imagine it was there so the metal didn't oxidize.

So he tells me to get a bucket of water, which I did - then he took out a pocket knife and cut just a little sliver off of this bar of metal (very soft metal), and tosses it into the water. The metal smoked and bounced around, crackling on top of the water. I was amazed that something reacted to water that way, and urged him to do it again. He did a few more pieces, and then told me to get a jar. I did, and he split what was left of the bar in two, and poured some of the kerosene smelling liquid into my jar.

Bad idea.

The very next weekend, with my parents at the cabin (I stayed home on weekends because I worked during high school), I decided it was time to play with the metal. I got a coffee can, filled it with water, and was soon giggling away as I tossed increasingly larger pieces of metal into the can. I still don't know to this day, what possessed me to do this, but I cut off a hunk metal about the size of a bottle cap, and threw it into the can.

Ka-blammmmmm!

Apparently I went past the threshold for the water to sodium ratio, and the chunk just about exploded, showering me with little pieces of sodium metal, which were wet, so they started burning me in tiny little spots all over my legs, arms and face. The spots burned fiercely for a day or so. I was scared shitless, so I took the jar, and hid it in the basement.

Well, I forgot all about the damned jar for over a year. One Saturday morning, I was at work, and my boss tells me my dad is on the phone, that he sounds upset, and wants to talk to me.

Well, all Dad said was "Get home now!"

I asked "why?"

"Don't ask why, you just get home NOW!"

I knew something was seriously wrong by his tone, and told the boss I had to go, he realized it too, and said "no problem".

So, I get home, and dad has fans in all the basement windows, blowing white smoke outward...

I get in the house and I see the jar I had forgotten about sitting on the steps. It was empty.

Turns out Dad had found it, looked inside, couldn't figure out what it was, so he poured it in the laundry sink, and turned on the water....

He had exposed about 10 times the amount of sodium metal to water than I had, when the coffee can blew up.

It scared the hell out of him, and of course, once the reaction started, there was no stopping it...

I was grounded for a month, and had to miss a canoeing trip I had been waiting all summer for...

'spose I deserved that.

WaHAHAHAhaha! That's a great story. Did he get burned? Was the plumbing ruined?

I don't see how you deserved it when he was the moron who went and poured something submerged in kerosene down the sink.

Ha ha ha that's great (in retrospect)! We used to play with that stuff back when I was in middle school. Since the high and middle schools were joined together, we used to have science classes in the chemistry lab...well, "our" version of the nerdy kid pointed out the sodium metal (ours was in a white powder form), and what it could do.
So, we started drying off the water fountains and sprinkling a tiny bit of the stuff in the basins (take a sip, loose a lip..)....totally wrong, I know...but I was a kid.
Anyways, the next year they stopped allowing any potentially dangerous chemicals in the labs...