Thanks to Queer Unity:
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New Jersey Democratic congressman Steve Rothman who previously did not support same-sex marriage has made an about face and now supports equal marriage rights. He has made this decision in light of his lesbian step-daughter.
Mr. Rothman has also joined the newly formed LGBT Caucus within the House of Representatives.
If you’d like to thank Representative Rothman for his support of Marriage Equality and joining the LGBT Caucus you can contact him here:
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Everyone has a fireworks story…
Every time Independence Day comes along I have to remember Mr Slagle’s Annual 4th of July Party. He worked at the aeronautical engineering company with my father. This family owned most of West Texas…or at least it seemed like it, because it took forever to get there in the family station wagon. He’d throw the biggest bash ever…and that was something considering we were living in Texas. I know I was little, but it really did seem like the guy had invited the whole company…there were lots of people, and I didn’t know a one of them.
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He went all out for the festivities. He had converted two old refrigerators into smokers and would barbecue anything that was moving slow enough to catch it and skin it. Fact was that after being slow smoked and slathered in barbecue sauce, just about anything he had skinned tasted mighty good. Brilliant idea when you decide to have 50 or so of your best friends over for dinner.
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While the adults were drinking LoneStar Beer out of coolers (’cause the fridges were full of smoking meat) all the 2.2 X 50 kids would run around like wild animals all over this guy’s ranch. Picture one of those Clint Eastwood movies out in the desert, with the scrub mesquite, cactus, and rattlesnakes, and that was it.
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Mr. Slagle would have purchased for us wild animal children an insane amount of smoke bombs, black cats, bottle rockets, Roman candles, Screamin’ Eagles, Magic Fountains and anything else “safe” enough for us to explode out there in the desert. These were real fireworks…not the crap by the Cheeze-its at the grocery store. We’d spend the entire 104˚F afternoon setting traps and trying to blow each other up. Good clean fun for a 7 year old kid in Texas back in 1973. Those of us that hadn’t succumbed to the heat, snakes or each other’s firecracker traps would roll in come dusk and eat tons of smoked meat, potato salad, and anything else we could get our dusty, slightly singed hands on. Wash that down with gallons of Dr. Pepper and we were flying high for round two. Mr. Salgel ramped it up a notch for round two…
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With all the adults cheering us on the 2.2 X 50 kids would all get sparklers. What’s the most efficient way to light sparklers when you’ve got a mess a kids lined up? Blow torch. This, mind you, isn’t some cool cigarette lighter, or creme bruleé torch. This was one of the torches used to weld airplanes together. He’d sit out in the middle of the prairie in a folding chair, put a big cigar in his mouth, spark the torch, light the stogie, and yell “Who’s First!” There we’re always kids older than me, and they’d run up and get their sparklers lit, but for some odd reason, I was scared as hell of that guy with that blow torch.
Use a match to light gun powder in a pretty paper wrapping all afternoon, sure. Walk up and willingly have my arm withered away by a blow torch…no way. the line would keep walking forward and I’d ready myself, gripping the sparkler at the very end of the wire. I’d take a running spark and hold my arm as far out as possible, like a relay runner set to tag out. I’d slow just enough to get the thing lit and then take off as fast as I could. Good clean fun for a 7 year old.
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Time for round three…the big guns…
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I swear this guy bought his pyrotechnics from the Armed Forces. My dad always had a bunch of military stuff…who knows what him and Mr. Slagle were up to on those coffee breaks at the office. However he got them, they were spectacular. He and some of the other dad’s would go out into the shrub where they had build plywood platforms with chute barrels the size of howitzers. Those things take, what…about a 25 pound shell? Well, the guys would go out there and check things…fuses…wires…I don’t know what. All I know is that they didn’t have the fancy electronics to rig the things so that you just pressed one button behind the bullet-proof glass. They’d light a set then run like hell back up the hill. There’d be this pause with crickets then you’d feel more than hear the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP deep in your chest. Loud…way too loud…like we weren’t far enough away from all the action. Then the sky would literally catch on fire right above our heads. It was the loudest most terrifyingly spectacular display we ever saw. It scared the crap out of me, but I couldn’t look away. It was so loud that only the menfolk that had spent too much time hunting without ear protection, wouldn’t cover their ears. That was a fireworks show…it really ruined me for anything less.
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Hindsight is 20/20 and I’m over 40 so I have a more healthy respect for fireworks. I’m still the one who thinks the bonfire could be “a little bigger” when I go camping, and can’t resist the temptation to buy the chicken that shoots fireworks out its butt when I see the road sign fireworks stand, but I realize now that I should have died out there in the desert, with one arm burnt to a crisp. I can’t help it though. I was a kid in an explosive candy store, with a pocket full of matches. I lived large…
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Speaking about the chicken that shoots fireworks out his butt…people do it too…stupid people like Sam.
I found this last year…this year when I did the search, I had to go through hundreds of videos to find this one…which is in my opinion, the absolute best. I thought maybe people would learn from watching the first one, but no…they did not.
