Start your day with a good laugh! Slight profanity alert: the S-word comes in for frequent use in the second half of the clip.
From Dan Garber via MeWe:
I'm glad I wasn't within range when it happened, but I'd love to have seen the reactions of emergency services . . .
(I can confirm from personal experience the "fountain" reaction of pooled human waste in an explosion. The incident involved yours truly, a "long drop" bush toilet in Zimbabwe, a snake, and a double-barreled shotgun. Further deponent sayeth naught!)
Peter
14 comments:
OMG that's hysterical! Thank you Peter! My Appalachian family has some good dynamite stories, but nothing like that.
Your story sounds like one relayed by Peter Hathaway Capstick - shooting down the crapper with a shotgun, but still not finding the black mamba.
Fun and games with explosives!
@pjk: Wait till you hear about the Rhodesian serviceman who used a hand grenade on a snake-infested long drop. Not a good idea...
I had a friend who, while a cadet, was thrown off the ranges at Otterburn for an exploit involving improvised rafts, thunderflashes and slit latrines.
Tears in my eyes. Tears, I say.
When I was 11(circa 1968), me and 2 friends got a hold of 4 sticks of dynamite from Jimmy's grandads barn. we had been watching cowboy movies for several weekends and wanted to see if what we saw in the movies was true. Remember the old cowboy movies? Bad guys trying to escape into the mountains, throwing lit dynamite back down the hill? BIG explosions.
We went out to an old swamp in the woods behind the village, just off an old logging road. Jimmy. who had been around his grand dad enough to know how to do it, rigged up one stick and we threw it as far as we could into the swamp. ducked into a nearby ditch and touched it off. It was ok, but not near what was in the movies. More like a cherry bomb we thought. Must have been an old stick we thought. Rigged a second and did the exact same thing, ok but nothing special. Took the 2 remaining sticks, tied them together and tied a rock to it(this part is important). Rigged it, threw it as far as an 11 year old could, maybe 25-30 feet, and just stood next to the swamp. Jimmy touched it off and hell reigned. All 3 of us got knocked flat on our ass about 5 feet back from where we were standing. Mud, swamp weeds, frogs and water went 50 feet in the air. And loud. I'm talking ear ringing, can't hear squat now, loud. We knew we would be in big trouble if we got caught so we all hauled butt. Went to a nearby pond to clean up and drifted back to our houses in the next 20 or so minutes. EVERYONE in the village was out, having heard the boom. We claimed to have been down in an area called the flats, opposite direction from the ruckus.
Remember the rock? What we didn't know was that to be REALLY effective, dynamite had to be "buried". And it was years later when I learned that the movie explosions were staged, not even a dynamite explosion.
Certainly learned a few things that day, number 1 being; DON'T MESS WITH DYNAMITE.
*snickers*
My dad and his friends were playing with black powder bombs on their dairy farm one day, and threw one - lit - into their sewage pit. One of the friends' kid brothers leaned forward while the rest of the others were running away, insisting, "It won't blow! It's not gonna blow!"
It did. That poor kid brother.
My dad's lucky that Grampa made sure he did his chores before he could play, because he stayed out of a whole lot of trouble when his friends stole an entire box of dynamite from a nearby mine and went 'fishing' in the reservoir, then blew up an abandoned house while they should have been in Sunday School. As I understand it the resulting blast blew out windows a mile in each direction. His friends got on an FBI watchlist at the tender age of 14, and were still getting called on every time there was an incident 10 years later.
Try this one by Blaster Bates, a well known Yorkshire man:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbZsVd7j7l4
@selsey.steve - Thank you for introducing me to Blaster Bates. I think he's addictive. I've listened to three of his videos after your link, and I'll be looking for more.
Have to watch this from home instead but your short comment reminded me of a story by Peter Capstick (Of "Death in the Long Grass") fame and a story about a black mamba and a 12 gauge when it came up through the middle of the seat at him. He was un injured by it, but tried to shoot down into the "stuff" in the outhouse, in his words "rendering me Hors de combat" AND it didn't get the snake!
I absolutely can relate. I grew up in the sixties in a mined out coal region in eastern Kansas. What hadn't been under ground mined was stripped mine, but the area had been mined out years before I was born. Some cleaver folks in the dying mining camps had punched holes through the 40' overburden into the "Old Works" down below and ran their sewers down there. One plugged up once. The men tied a rock to a single stick of dynamite, capped it and lowered it down the hole as far as it would go. They then threw old sheets of tin over the hole, several old tires and rock to weight it down.
To this day I am grateful that they had us kid all get back before the touched it off. When they touched it off a black gyser and all the junk on top of the hole shot 30-40' straight up. The blast pulled some siding off the back of the house, however, the sewer line to the house had been dug up and disconnected so nothing went in the house. It DID clear the plug, but it stunk to high heaven for weeks when you walked past the place.
Now, that gas-fired 'Destroylet' of the 1970's doesn't seem quite so bad.
Fishing with dynamite a quarter stick is about the right charge, or so I've been told. The blast will kill or stun every fish in a 20 yard radius so you can just scoop them up with a dip net.
As for that "septic system", that's what happens when you jury rig something up without a proper drain field. A proper system may have to be pumped out every five years or so, but without a drain field of course it's gonna fill up with no place to go.
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