God Bless the USA

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

America in a Tweet: dumb adult white males with gas-eating vehicles endanger women and children with dangerous objects while a home security cam watches

[TransMonk]

Simpli un-Safe.

[MFS62]

Some of my customers are also nominees for the Darwin Award. They would look into the tube to see when the next rocket is coming out or use a cigarette lighter to check for a gas leak.
Later

[Ceetar]

and that was presumably _just_ fireworks. That's what they're intended to do. Unless one of those punctured the gas tank after those 30 seconds.

[Edgy MD]

I'm going guess there's enough oil gunk caked on the undercarriage of the car that she caught fire good.

The security cam is pretty amazing though. Gots to be careful!

[Fman99]

Quality doorbell cam footage. Good product.

[metsmarathon]

i like that the one dufus jokingly yelled "run!" when they lit off the first one.

so very much is wrong there. not least of which is that the little tiny baby had the frontest of front row seats.

[whippoorwill]

That little boy’s leg was burned :(

[Edgy MD]

I didn't see that. I sure saw a boy close to where the box behind the car caught fire though.

I was about 12 when I saw a little girl burned by fireworks at the beach on Independence Day. I've reviled them ever since and I've steered far away from any instance of amateurs and explosives. I certainly had friends who loved fireplay and I tended to quickly find a reason to be somewhere else.

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

They can be so unpredictable. We had little shows for a number of years. We shot off the very little, silly things. And I tried to be overly cautious. We doused each one with the hose right after it went off. We lit them at the end of the driveway and everyone else sat by the garage door. For the ones that went up in the air, I screwed the plastic base into a foot-square piece of plywood so it couldn't tip over. Really trying to go over the top in terms of safety.

But a few years ago we had one that was in a little box that didn't look like it would do much. I thought it would just shoot some sparks like most of them do. (Like I said, we were getting the small things.) and it for some reason tipped over and sent something flying into the bushes. But if it had gone another direction it could have hit the family. That scared the heck out of me. We don't do them anymore.

[kcmets]

Dumb-ass knuckle heads. Don't get why it's become so cool to call out
their whiteness. This couldn't happen in Watts? Japan? India?

[whippoorwill]

Quality doorbell cam footage. Good product.

So…they posted this themselves from their own camera?

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Dumb-ass knuckle heads. Don't get why it's become so cool to call out
their whiteness. This couldn't happen in Watts? Japan? India?

Because it's a metaphor: Patriotic dumb white guys doing dumb things that hurt women, for their own amusement? Where else do we see that? Plus, they;re white.

[kcmets]

I know, and I'm not being a dick.

It's hard being old and white these days. i'm glad you have no idea yet.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Trust me, tho, I do (see: the Manfred i tried fighting with everyone). I'm trying hard every day to understand that that's okay.

[MFS62]

It's hard being old and white these days.

So true.
Later

[Ceetar]

I like fireworks, I think they're pretty neat, but as I get older I lean more and more towards thinking maybe they're not a thing we should be doing. They're dangerous, they're probably not particularly good for the environment, the noise messes with all sorts of wildlife and pets and many people too.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Thankfully, this year was like 1,000X better than the pandemic where it seemed people had nothing to do except launch fireworks around here anyway, all summer long. I can say, pretty much, July 4 is the worst single day of the year for our cat Mars, who's already wildly high-strung without sudden bursts of sound.

All that said, there was nothing like the fun of setting off fireworks when you were like 12 or 14. Where I grew up, they were not only illegal to get, but strongly unapproved by cops and parents, and the kind of mischief that, you know, announces to the world you're committing an act of mischievousness. Even your fingers smell afterward! What a thrill to get away with!

Crystallizing this thrillride for me, was my neighbor/friend Jimmy. He was maybe 11 years old, doing what we Suburban Long Island Kids From Good Homes thought was insanely daring-- he took a train into the city by himself, found his way to Chinatown, and made illegal fireworks deals with shop-owners! Then, he'd sell some at a profit.

The problem was, this thrill got uglier as we grew a little older and meaner, and firecrackers and roman candles eventually gave way to M-80s, and colorful displays on the corner became exploding mailboxes of people we didn't like. That's sort of where I dropped out.

Jimmy, whom I last hung out with the day I sat white-knuckled in the passenger seat of his first car, a red Pontiac Firebird, as it went like 130 on the Robert Moses Causeway, eventually became an airline pilot.

[Edgy MD]

Crystallizing this thrillride for me, was my neighbor/friend Jimmy. He was maybe 11 years old, doing what we Suburban Long Island Kids From Good Homes thought was insanely daring-- he took a train into the city by himself, found his way to Chinatown, and made illegal fireworks deals with shop-owners! Then, he'd sell some at a profit.

This is insane, but this exact racket was run in my neighborhood.

By an 11-year-old.

Named Jimmy.

Jimmy was the son of my parents' friends from the old neighborhood. They were the sweetest, funnest, kindest friends my parents had, and either didn't know or didn't care that all of four of their kids were a little off, and Jimmy, though the third of four, was the king of them all. Like all of them, he was likeable, but he was an absolute agent of chaos. If a dog was let loose in the junior high, you knew Jimmy was the one who set it free. If the fire alarm was pulled in the high school, it was likely that Jimmy needed a smoke break.

Jimmy got an in-school suspension, and the supervisor in the suspension dungeon was a gin-faced creepy teacher that everybody just knew was not to be trusted, but was somehow unfireable, so he got permanent sub duty along with babysitting maniacs like Jimmy in detention. Somehow, while this guy was in the bathroom, Jimmy swiped the guy's betting sheets, got to either the library or (more likely) the teachers' copy room, and photocopied them, before returning to the suspension room unsuspected.

There are worse scandals than a gambling addiction, but apparently the guy was moving some big money around, and doing it on school property. Jimmy must've been 13 or 14 at the time, but he owned this poor misbegotten guy for the rest of his school life. He was probably forcing the guy to write passes for Jimmy and his friends.

It was also around that age that he realized that the LIRR was a pain in the ass for hauling the volume of pyrotechnics he was trafficking in. He asked his Dad for a ride, and Mr. Livingstone, being the sweetest guy in town, happily obliged. After all, the kid just wanted enough to celebrate independence with his friends at the beach.

Mr. L. sat there in the sedan reading the paper, never realizing that Jimmy was stuffing untold thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of suburban contraband into his sedan trunk, or wondering why his kid's errands were taking a few hours, or why his kid had a casual but familiar relationship with the vendors.

At one level, the grandiosity of the enterprise was almost unthinkable. At another level, clearly it was happening at every stop on the LIRR, and apparently every perp was named Jimmy.

[kcmets]

I was party to more than a few mailboxes being destroyed by an M-80 or Blockbuster.

I can think of a few I'd like to hit now, but everyone has cameras everywhere and I'd
probably get into a whole heap of unneeded trouble

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Good stuff. My Jimmy had more understandable problems-- he was an only child, and adopted. His Mom was stay-at-home alcoholic who was always shitfaced and yelling, watching the Mike Douglas Show, and his dad, a genial hardworking Irish lawyer who was obviously troubled by his drunken wife and ambitiously out-of-control child. I've told stories here before about his dad--he worked for the company that then owned candy brands like Life Savers and "Bubblicious" gum... there was always free samples of it in their home, and often, we'd test their beta version candy and fill out forms about how we liked it. He also helped Jimmy to build what was --bar none--the best model train set in all of Suffolk County. But Jimmy was always on the edge of some calamity. His claim to fame before becoming a fireworks maven and speed demon was--at age 6?-- setting his house on fire by imitating a scene in the Little Rascals in which they were shown heating (or lighting) a room by candlelight. He put it under his bed.

When his dad took on the task of rebuilding the second floor of his home he left Jimmy with the coolest paint job on a kids bedroom I've ever seen and I won't ever forget, half-circles in blue or red over the lightswitches and doorknobs -- every "touch point" -- that I think at some level, was a message to Jimmy--there are things you can touch, but so much more you shouldn't. It also was good at disguising fingerprints.

[Frayed Knot]

I think I just figured out who you're talking about.
Jimmy D., right, not Jimmy W?

I think I've also just sworn off flying.

[kcmets]

But Jimmy was always on the edge of some calamity. His claim to fame before becoming a fireworks maven and speed demon was--at age 6?-- setting his house on fire by imitating a scene in the Little Rascals in which they were shown heating (or lighting) a room by candlelight. He put it under his bed.

I'm dyin' over here...

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Jimmy D. Very intelligent dare I say brilliant kid ... and also kinda sad. "That boy ain't right!"

The funny thing is, I wouldn't necessarily have remembered all this were it not for those dumb yahoo's in the above video, who knocked something loose for me.

[Edgy MD]

I just checked my Jimmy's profile at Facebook and his avatar pic has him in Tijuana riding a donkey painted like a zebra because of course he is.

His parents were never less than proud of him. They came to my wedding in their mid-70s and told me how excited they were to see him singing lead for his new punk band on the Lower East Side. He'd then disappear for months in Mexico and they'd worry that he was dead, but he'd resurface and everything was cool again.

Maniac.