Use fireworks responsibly, i.e. don’t ride them like Dr. Strangelove’s Major T.J. “King” Kong

The Fourth of July is the day when so many mothers spend the twilight hours clucking and fretting like hens, terrified as fathers set off fireworks with their brood, annual news reports of vaporized hands dancing in their heads. I know mine was nervous enough about me holding so much as a sparkler, looking at it like it was a lit stick of dynamite. One summer, as my old man and I lit off a trove we had bought on the drive back from a Florida vacation, illegal-looking contraptions acquired at the famous South of the Border fireworks emporium, she almost died of fright. Bottom line: they make indoor shooting ranges seem like board games.

I imagine seeing their child straddling a rocket to a fiery doom would be most mothers’ worst nightmare. Yet for kids, it says “HOT DAMN THAT LOOKS LIKE FUN. BUY ME THAT.” Incidentally, some of the product names above sound like euphemisms applied to modern-day weapons — bunker busters, etc. I fully expect that “star shells” are used to root Taliban fighters out of mountain redoubts.