Sometimes, we do things we shouldn’t.
When I was a little kid, my brother got it in his head to build what he called a “bazooka.” It was really more of a shoulder-fired blank cannon; he took a five-foot length of four-inch, inside diameter iron pipe, somehow fastened some wooden handles to it, and put a cap on one end. The exact details of construction are somewhat vague at this distance in time, but you get the idea.
Firing the thing was uncomfortable, although it was a simple enough practice. One just had to light two or three M-80s, toss them down the pipe, and aim. The “bazooka” produced a fair concussion; one day we discovered, only partly by accident, that the concussion was enough from 10 feet away to knock our cousin over and make his ears ring for a couple of hours.
The Old Man directed the disassembly of the “bazooka” and forbade any more such experiments, which…
