For those of you outside of UK, you might not know about Guy Fawkes night, AKA Bonfire Night.
It’s a celebration of Guy Fawkes getting caught and tortured to death after attempting to blow up Parliment a couple hundred years ago. UK dopers please feel free to correct the story, as I am sure I only have part of it.
The point being, everyone gets fireworks from their local shop. And these aren’t the pussy little versions you can get in the States from a gas station. These are the gi-hugic mothers you can only get on the Indian Reservations. Roman candles, m-80s, the whole nine yards.
So great fun is had by all on Friday and Saturday nights. But it’s Tuesday night now, 11pm, and the only reason I am up (I have an early morning meeting tomorrow which is a 2-hour drive from home) is because of the fucking fireworks the lame-ass dickheads are STILL setting off in my neighborhood!
So just lay off, already, or at least blow off a part of your anatomy, but please, just shut the fuck up!
You’ve got it. It’s an Indian festival.
As for fireworks, under new laws, fireworks are not meant to be let off after 2300 hrs. except on 4 occasions.
Diwali (Hindi New year)
Guy Fawkes
New year’s Eve
Chinese New Year.
Oi! No kidding. This is my first Guy Fawkes (week?) and these folks are certifiably nuts. I don’t think Americans can imagine this stuff. The backyards here are about the size of the average American living room and they’re setting off M80s in them - and Roman candles that would make you go “oooo ahhh” if you went to a professional display in the States. I’ve been trying to take my dogs out for their evening walk for five nights now and their poor little sphincters are permanently shut with fear. It’s like a war zone I tell ya.
We have Guy Fawkes in New Zealand, with the fireworks sold from corner stores, the noise, the litter, the fires, the people and animals injured. For 14 nights around where I live, every damn night, they let off fireworks.
A pox on the things, I say.
You want fun? Go someplace away from houses, idiots. :mad:
The fireworks the kids have these days are just weedy. In my day we had proper fireworks that could take a leg off - jumping jacks, aeroplanes and catherine wheels as big as wagon wheels (not the biscuit).
Even the Brits here have no idea of true firework insanity.
Dublin, Hallowe’en night. My street has 500 houses in it. Roughly every third house has a display with all the fireworks described here, in the front yard facing the street, being set off by hundreds of unsupervised children and teenagers, simultaneously. We were out of the area for most of the night, but you should have seen the devastation the next day. There were about 30 spent rockets in my front yard, and one of them had exploded on my car.
And the laugh is, fireworks are illegal in Ireland.
Most years the fireworks carry on going off sporadically for a few weeks afterwards, but not this year: I think the skangers even frightened themselves with the intensity. The old guy who lives next door to me said, in his 68 years of living there, he’d never seen anything like it. Shock and Awe, motherfucker, shock and awe.
But you should be around my northeastern American ghetto for the Fourth of July celebrations here. It all begins around the middle of June, as soon as the nitwits get their hands on some fireworks. Day and night for weeks, the fireworks go off, and they tend to save the biggest ones for two and three a.m., so as to annoy as many people as possible by waking them up.
On the Fourth itself, thousands of dollars worth of professional-size skyrockets are set off in backyards and on the streets all over the city of Providence. Seen from the balcony at the top of my house, the horizon is lit up for miles and miles, while hot rocket casings land on asphalt roofs. And it doesn’t stop on the Fourth – it goes on as long as there are any fireworks left. This year it was the end of August before my neighborhood quieted down. And fireworks are illegal in Rhode Island!
Used to be, in my community (San Fernando Valley), people would fire their guns in the air on New Year’s Eve. This is illegal, whether you have a permit for the gun or not, but it went on for years anyway. Stopped after 2000, though.
