Ahh, Happy 4th of July to all my readers here in America (and the rest of you across the world). This is the American holiday that we use as an excuse to buy fireworks and blow stuff up all in the name of freedom. Americans like to buy fireworks, and shoot them off in the false belief that we are being safe. It is really just an excuse to buy dangerous flying toys and injure ourselves.
As a typical guy, I love explosions just like the next hot blooded male. Show me a great movie with lots of explosions and no realistic plot, throw in some hot babes and I am all over it.
However, as a fairly intelligent person, real life fireworks scare the crap out of me. I have no real expert knowledge of fireworks, how they are made, how much gun powder goes into them, etc. It is out of my range of expertise and I’m OK with that. I know that they explode and I have a good chance of getting hurt. That is all the knowledge I need to have to tell me to stay away.
Already this morning, I saw on our local KIRO TV news program (in the Seattle area) we already had someone headed to the hospital because of the homemade fireworks bomb he made.
Now, I enjoy watching the professional fireworks shows but I’m not into lighting fireworks off myself. Over the years, our family has had the bad luck of fireworks tipping over and shooting right at us. So it isn’t that the fireworks are dangerous as much as the people lighting them off. I think my living room is a perfectly safe spot to watch the fireworks and not get blown up by untrained monkeys.
Don’t get me starting with the “safe” fireworks like sparklers. Who thinks that handing a child a piece of burning metal is a smart thing to do? Can I see a show of hands, please? Call me a downer but a sparkler is burning at 2000 degrees F and can burn metal. Hmmm, seems like a safe toy for a child. My daughter had the sparks from the sparkler fall on her foot a few years back. No permanent damage but she now knows the dangers of fireworks. And don’t I feel like a stupid ass parent? You bet.
Don’t get me started on sparkler bombs. Just Bing or Google sparkler bombs and you’ll get tons of videos, how to articles, and step by step instructions to make a dangerous weapon of death. I watched a few YouTube videos and when you have a lot of questions and most of the answers from the makers are “I don’t know” then you know you are dealing with a bunch of idiots.
I am all for free speech and free knowledge but there are some stupid people out there that don’t need to know how to do this stuff. They just aren’t smart enough to handle the knowledge and use it in a responsible manner. (Now if that doesn’t sound like government censorship, I don’t what does!) However, I think we can all agree that some people just aren’t smart enough to handle some things. Fireworks just so happens to be one of them. Give someone just enough knowledge to be dangerous and look what happens.
Perhaps this would be a good time to wish everyone a safe and sane holiday here in America. I’d give you a warning that you should be safe on the 4th of July but you’d just file it under worthless advice so I’ll skip it today.
Kevin Hellriegel's Blog of Worthless Advice 
Love that title!
Thanks! The sparkler bombs was the tipping point for me. Soooo many morons, so little time to weed out the gene pool. I’ve done some stupid things but blowing myself up wasn’t one of them.
I believe we need an amendment to the Constitution that legally requires all fireworks to be called “Unnecessary Air Pollution.” That’s utterly brilliant.
Calling your blog “advice” takes a lot of … hubris. I like. 🙂
Thanks! After breathing in all that air pollution last night, I feel so much more alive and free!!
My new favorite blogger! This is Mrs. Abyss, you know, the one that likes to insult her husbands use of too many words and stuff.
I love your post here. The hubby and I are of exact minds. Our neighborhood is chock full of untrained monkeys scaring the hell out of our cats and us.
Several years ago I was sitting outside enjoying the night sky whilst my drunken family acted like asses and played with their fireworks. My dad thought it would be “fun” to shoot his shotgun in the air to celebrate the 4th. All of a sudden over my head and about 3 feet from my backside I heard a loud horrible explosion and plopping noise. I flew outta of my chair and hit the ground. As I looked up to see who tried to shoot me there stood my own dad with a look of stupor on his face. I started screaming at him for shooting the damned thing over my head when I realized he wasn’t listening but just staring at the tip of the gun. Just then I saw that the barrel had a huge split from the tip to about 5 inches down, thus the mystery of the plopping noise. The gun hadn’t been cleaned in years and was probably damp. Dear old dad, I didn’t speak to him for several months after that.
Nice story! I always like it when parents attempt to kill us in the name of fun!