January 7 2006

Well gang, the University of Texas is number one in college football. And it’s about time.
One of our members, Charlie Springer, wanted to celebrate in a big way. He had about four and a half pounds of black powder. And since the black powder locker out at the range blew up a couple of weeks ago, he had no safe place to keep it.
He also had ten really big sky rockets left over from the cancelled New Year’s Eve party, that would be sure to detonate at a very high altitude.
His plan was to set up the sky-rockets in a straight line, make a trail of the black powder connecting them, and then leading on to a touch-off point about fifteen feet away.
Then he and a couple of the boys, in the interest of safety from grass fires, would hose down the entire area with a gasoline powered pump, using water from a near-by drainage ditch. Especially all around his brand new SUV with the leather-covered seats.
Well, Charlie and the boys, having prepared everything, gathered at the touch-off point, grabbed a fresh beer, and when everybody was ready was ready, Charlie took his lit cigarette and poked it into the end of black powder.
Now in the movies, a guy lights the end of a trail of gunpowder, and it sort of gives a little poof, and then starts to burn, suspensfully, dramatically, slowly down the trail of gunpowder. Usually towards barrels of the stuff, usually in a gold or silver mine, instead of toward ten really big sky-rockets.
Well, in real life it ain’t like that.
No, it all goes up at once, in one big flash.
All the boys, with singed hair and eyes as big as saucers, instantly found themselves in the drainage ditch. Charlie was the one with the right hand sleeve of his shirt burned off.
Nine of the sky-rockets took off just as planned, and as everyone agreed, looked and sounded just wonderful.
The tenth rocket, however, was knocked horizontal by the sudden flash of the black powder, and making a bee-line for Charlie’s new SUV, found just enough room through a cracked window to gain access to the doomed vehicle.
No one had ever seen a fireworks rocket that big, go off inside a vehicle before. Even Charlie was impressed.
"If that SUV hadn’t been there to contain that rocket, we’d have had one helluva grass fire on our hands." Mentioned one of the boys. "You sure were lucky, Charlie."
CHarlie sipped his beer and rubbed his unburned hand through what was left of his hair. "Oh, I was lucky alright." He said. "Go U.T."

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary