Fourth Fun

Remember kids, fireworks and alcohol don't mix. So get all of your drinking out of the way before you start lighting the bottle rockets. It's chug then boom.

Llong ago I actually worked in a fireworks factory. All we did was take the fireworks which were made in China and put in large, ugly plain brown boxes and repackage them into those colorful assortment boxes sold at all of those transient stands that seem to pop up overnight at this time of year. What a racket.

That same summer two other fireworks factories blew up. I actually had to keep someone from trying to smoke in the warehouse. Yikes!

To amuse myself, I used to read the instructions on the fireworks. And I think it was safe to safe that though they were printed in English, it might have been a bad translation.

There was one firework called a Lotus Blossom that you put on the ground and then it spun around very fast and changed colors. It was only for night use or you would see the colors and spinning correctly. And the instructions on the firework were (and I'm not making this up):

Place on ground. Lite fuse. Get away.

I still remember the typo on light to this day.

The only good thing about that job was that my house had a bitchin' fireworks display that year from all the leftover crap that didn't get sold. I wound up setting one of the buses in our yard on fire from an errant bottle rocket and had to scramble for a bucket of water. Ah, memories.

Be safe folks. You don't want to be nicknamed "Stumpy" the rest of your life.