“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
Happy July 4 for yesterday! As usual we went to Rochester for a combined July 4 / JAF Birthday, which included setting these guys off:
The neighborhood was echoing with booms last night, and many nearby neighbors invested in much bigger fireworks than we did. But we had a lot of fun with our modest selection:
It took many hours to set them all off, and here’s some highlights in a short video:
Another successful July 4 backyard fireworks display then. See you again for more in 2024 🙂
These past two weekends we’ve driven interstate (to PA and NH) to buy fireworks for our annual backyard (in Rochester) celebration. As always, it’s a lot of fun seeing the variety of product available and imaging the fun of setting it off.
The above – 16000 little firecrackers (what we used to call ‘crazy jacks’ in my youth) – is about as big as the wheel on your typical car. Imagine the noise and smoke as this thing went off. Wouldn’t it be incredible?
And the above – an $860 assortment – is 60 shells that would produce effects similar to what you’d see at a professional show. It still amazes me that in some states you can just buy this stuff and let it off in your backyard. While we bought a few launching fireworks, they’re very tame and neither go high or produce much noise.
Speaking of noise: 750 missiles! This thing takes more than two minutes to fire all the missiles, and each missile whistles and then bangs in the air. While it would be spectacular, I imagine this would be the sort of thing that may have the neighbors calling the rozzers in our suburb (since these sorts of things are currently illegal in our county).
The packaging of the bigger fireworks is always wonderful, and here I focus on a few of the genre ones (although in 2023 a reference to the ‘Majestic 12’ is a bit esoteric). Here’s a few others:
Can you spot the blatant copyright infringement on two of the above? If it’s not obvious, here’s some that is:
The label designer obviously have fun with these products (which, remember, are designed to be set on fire), and every now and then there are head-scratching examples like this one:
We bought a bunch of items from several shops, and our ‘show’ promises to be a good one. At Joyce’s request we tried to only buy low-noise fireworks, and that included this selection of fountains we’ve got:
We’ve had one or two low noise fountains before (they mostly make a low hiss due to the sparks coming out) so it will be interesting seeing what these are like.
That said it’s possible that some of the fountains we got may make a few crackles, but for obvious reasons how could we pass on…
…a skull and a spinning snake?!? Imagine if such things had been available when we were kids?
I also can’t resist a good sword (handheld fountains, basically) and you know there was no chance I’d pass up this lightsaber firework!
And this is just a selection of what we’ll be lighting up on Tuesday. As usual I’ll try to catch the excitement in pictures and maybe video and follow up later in the week 🙂
I didn’t bring much back from Australia, since I wanted near-empty suitcases for Japan, but I did come home with this:
I ‘won’ this via the points I got spending too much on a DC Comics card-redemption machine in the arcade at Westfield Kotara. I actually got two sets, and gave one to Sue. I wonder if she’s made it?
Considering the quality of the items they usually have in these arcade shops, I had little expectation this would be good or even work at all. But I followed the instructions to the letter to find out.
Start by adding the powder to hot water and stirring until the mixture is clear:
This suspension will form a crystal via evaporation, but a substrate (on which the crystal will grow) is needed, and that’s the little ceramic cone that came with the kit. The instructions were to wait for the mixture to cool, place the cone in it, then let it grow for a week.
The above shows the growth process, with the photos taken about two days apart. As you can see, the crystal grew well and by the last picture some crystals had also formed on the sides of the container. Here’s what the crystal looked like once removed from the mixture and allowed to dry:
It was a little trick to take a good photo since it’s so transparent! It’s also very fragile, and even touching it can cause the crystals to break off. It’s vaguely semi-spherical and about an inch in diameter.
So far so good for the crystal growing part, but does it glow? I shone a torch on it for 10 seconds or so and and turned out the light:
Holy smokes! This thing is positively radioactive. I’ll spare you the details about how this works, but it’s not just glow-in-the-dark, but even acts as a fairly bright green light source:
This little kit far exceeded my expectations. It was simple to make and worked perfectly first go. I’ve paid for worse kits than this one, so this easily gets two thumbs up 🙂