This week: The Big Bada Boom Edited by: W.D.Wilcox More Newsletters By This Editor
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4th of July Headlines
Smoking man sets off firework in his own hand
Dog retrieves man’s hand after fireworks explode
600 fireworks go off in man’s trunk
Fireworks shoot in wrong direction
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The Big Bada Boom
Americans know the best way to celebrate Independence Day is to terrorize your friends, neighbors, and loved ones with foolish pyrotechnic stunts.
What is the Fourth of July without setting yourself on fire or writing your name in the air with a sparkler? Just as this nation declared its independence in 1776, so too will you declare your freedom to explode this homemade bottle rocket despite the protests from everyone else at the barbeque.
Freedom. Hot dogs. Amputations. It's July Fourth in America, and U.S. hospital visits are about to skyrocket like so many Roman candles. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. American emergency rooms treated an estimated 97,500 patients for fireworks-related injuries, ranging from burns to blindness to the total loss of fingers and forearms. It's "an annual trail of disaster following the glorious [holiday]," as one doctor put it way back in 1910 — and, as long as people keep blowing things up, it's here to stay. In the spirit of freedom and science here are a few firework mishaps.
In 2017, a 44-year-old man was lighting a firework, when the rocket exploded in his face, throwing hot shrapnel into both of his eyes. According to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the man was "unable to perceive light in the right eye" and had the vision in his left eye reduced to 20/80 acuity by the time he checked into the emergency room. Surgeons removed multiple "foreign bodies" (shown in panel A) from both corneas.
It takes an especially calm medical team to deal with a patient whose leg could literally explode. That almost happened in 2017, when a man arrived at the San Antonio Military Medical Center with an unexploded firework lodged in his leg. The man had been trying to set off a mortar-style firecracker, when the rocket ignited and blasted straight into his leg. Upon arriving at the hospital, he was quickly quarantined from other patients, and an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team had to supervise his treatment.
In one of the most gruesome instances of modern fireworks malfunctioning, a 41-year-old man in North Dakota was decapitated while setting off Independence Day rockets in 2011, NBC News reported. The man was lighting fireworks outside his mobile home, when a humungous bang caught his neighbor's attention. The neighbor watched as the man walked into the street to light another firecracker — and then disappeared in a terrible cloud of smoke. "Within 10 seconds of us talking to him, he lit it, and all we saw was a cloud of smoke, a bang," the neighbor told NBC News. "When I walked up to his body, it was nothing but his shoulders down."
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Explosive Horror
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DEAD LETTERS
Last Question: Do you scare easily?
BIG BAD WOLF Feeling Thankful
There's plenty of scary things. Some of my latest trips into the world of fetish stories prove it.... some stuff I understand - don't like them, but I get them. Some of them even have a twisted sense of humor - lessens the darkness a bit. Others make me go, "What kind of dark and twisted hole did you crawl out of to write this type of cruelty?" Mind you, I've recently written some rather dark/twisted things, but not on the level of cruelty some folks can write.
There's only two things that scare me in this world - my Mother and Grandmother. Anything else merely startles me.
Sumojo
Thank you so much for highlighting my story "Curiosity Shop" I really appreciate it.
Great newsletter, love all the quotes.
-Cheers Sue
Will
General horror, no, just disgusted at it. jump-scares, oh yes, very easily
s
No, I don't scare easily, with one exception. If you look at the whole world, there is too much to scare you out there if you let it - the world climatically sick, politicians hating people, wars for no reason, religions claiming ownership of others' bodies, species becoming extinct at a rate faster than at any time since the KT Event, the prevalence of weaponry in society... You don't need fictional ideas like ghosts, vampires, zombies, monsters et al. to scare you.
Having said that, it is good to let yourself be scared by these fictional entities - which is why I write about them - because then you don't have to think about or consider the reality you find yourself in.
Oh, and my 1 thing that scares me? Something happening to my kids.
Starling
YES
THANKFUL SONALI Library Class!
Yes, very easily.
jimmineycritic
I do scare easily, though I admit, there is usually a significantly delayed reaction.
brianmchunter
Not as easily as Lynn "Cowardly Crybaby" Loud Sr. from The Loud House. He freaks out at the slightest scary thing on Halloween, when not even his youngest daughter Lily is afraid.
Leslie Loo
Not really, but it depends.
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