great weekend of climbing, although i did get a little bit of a burn on sunday. that sun was strong. i think i was only in it for about 1/2 an hour. on the way home on sunday, i stopped at a "fireworks" tent in w.v. i use quotes around "fireworks", because they were anything but. i guess current paranoia about the world ending means that you can no longer have fireworks that blow shit up. everything now is wussy little roman candles, with all these high-falootin' names like "the titanic!" and "king kong". "bollocks", i say.

in college my old roomate was a firecracker afficionado. he would go to manhattan the week before the 4th, and find some illegal fireworks shop and bring home scary amounts of munitions. he had one that was about the size of a coffee can chopped in half. the fuse was as big as my pinky. there was a sculpture over on one of the rutgers campuses; looked like two ends of a trumpet welded together, and wouldn't you know it, that bomb fit perfectly down the tube. so, we hooked up a cigarette fuse, and ran over to the bushes and hid.

about 5 minutes pass, and we're giggling like idiots with excitement. at the 10 minute mark, we started to wonder if perhaps the fuse had gone out. we get up to go see, and just as we stand up:

BOOOM!!

we didn't hurt the sculpture; it was a monstrous bronze thing, but it still made a sound like the sky had split open, and we ran to his car and sped off laughing like loons. now _that's_ a firecracker.