Which is to say, “Don’t. Just, don’t.”
You know there’s a few more of us here and we’re not all that colossally stupid. You may be waiting a bit longer.
I’m just imagining someone giving the eulogy while trying to keep a straight face.
Related thread, by the way: Should the Sale of Fireworks be Banned (except to Trained Professionals), over in GD, where the debate is largely informed by Mr. Fireheadworks unfortunate Darwinian experience.
He needs that like he needs a hole in his head.
mmm
I don’t think padding would help.
as I understand it, the kick back force from the mortar was like a hammer blow to the head. A piece of wood might make it worse because it would strike your head.
You’re all blowing pretty hard about this, but I can’t help feeling there’s mortar this than meets the eye.
“Blew his hand up” seems to have been downgraded to “suffered burns on his hand from which he should recover”.
That’s like asking how thick a piece of wood should be placed on your head before someone hits it with a sledgehammer. as Silenus explains, you’d want a piece of wood with enough mass to absorb most of the impulse from the blast.
There’s also this genius from Michigan, exactly the same thing, from a week earlier. With CG re-enactment!
The last one.
Temper Fire
Not quite. Momentum is conserved, kinetic energy isn’t. It’s the difference between the kick of a rifle butt against your shoulder, or the bullet impact. Butt hurt, but bullet kill. Even so, I wouldn’t use my cranium to absorb the recoil of even quite a light artillery piece. :smack:
Hate to admit it but I did something almost as stupid many many years ago (96’?).
It was a New Year’s Eve party and of course much drinking involved.
I decided to hold the mortar tube and shoot it like a roman candle. Bad idea.
The explosion blew the bottom of the tube out but still managed to get the mortar away from me. However those hot gases blowing out the bottom was enough to singe my arm hairs off and give me a sunburn like burn over the arm.
Reading about these deaths now make me feel damn lucky I wasn’t another dead idiot.
WAG - the launcher fired a volley of shots. The first one dislodged the launcher and caused it to fall. The second one hit him in the neck.
The story said he died of a head injury, not a neck injury.
More details here.
As has been pointed out, resting the mortar on his head while setting it off would easily be enough to kill him, without needing to invoke some more elaborate scenario.
I think the second brother’s interpretation may be wrong, and it was the charge that was supposed to lift the shell into the air that caused the recoil that killed him, rather than the explosion of the shell itself (that was supposed to occur in the air). But although it’s unclear exactly what happened, it was definitely a head trauma.
At some point, “pretending to do something stupid” and “doing something stupid” are the same.
It is one of the tragic qualities of stupidity is that the person thinks they’re only pretending to be stupid.
No doubt. As I get older, though, I find it more difficult to laugh at stuff like this and make smug references to Darwin Awards. The guy is dead and his family is brokenhearted. There are plenty of people walking the Earth, to include me, who are alive due to nothing more than shit-ass good luck. People make bad decisions and, sometimes, die for it. Not really seeing the humor, any more.
Nah, I’m with **Scumpup **on this. I would have found it a lot funner 20 years ago, but now it’s just sad, with maybe room for one little smirk.
The eulogy needs to begin, “Who here has never taken a stupid risk or made a potentially dangerous mistake? Thought so.”
I certainly have some incidents in my younger days - 14-20 or so - that still wake me up in a cold sweat some nights.
Young people, as a group, tend to overestimate themselves and, especially, they confuse shit-ass good luck with competence. I know I did.