The Myanmar hot air balloon festival (complete with detonation of a few tons of fireworks) is a new low in jaw-dropping public danger. But it's fascinating to watch. I don't have any mortality statistics on this incredible event, but just watching it - thousands and thousands of people running away screaming as nuclear-intensity bombs go off and live cinders rain down out of the sky - is compelling in an awful sort of way.
Does this distract me from the awfulness that is going on in the world? You bet it does. I don't know what else to do.
Believe it or not, this is an example of a "successful" launch. Even that looks too hair-raising to contemplate.
The more I watch this video, the more disturbing it is.
This is a video of a horrendous accident in a fireworks factory in Denmark. What set it off was one careless slip by an employee who dropped a box of small firecrackers. There was no taking it back.
What's disturbing about it is - well, a lot of things are. It's the sense something is being destroyed before our eyes - something normally associated with joy and celebration. But that's not the half of it. All the fireworks seem to be going off crazily at once, in some sort of mad twisted version of those lovely, orderly, gorgeously-coloured displays we see at picnics in the park.
Every once in a while, there is a hideous white-hot explosion of unbelievable intensity, forming a kind of sickeningly-bright mushroom cloud. Then more chitter-chattering of insane fireworks, their direction lost. It's as if their usual symmetry and beauty has been horribly corrupted. They've gone insane.
I think one life was lost - I don't know much about it, and am almost afraid to find out. Originally I was going to post some video that fascinates me, from a celebration in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Every year they take a gigantic paper balloon, put an immense open torch under it, pack the basket with a heavy load of explosive fireworks, and send it aloft. Something awful seems to happen at this event every year, and the one I was watching earlier today was the worst. The balloon almost seemed to be making its way upward where, at some timed point, the fireworks were supposed to shoot up into the sky. Then it began to sink. Something was happening to the hot air, it was escaping, or the open flame was shooting out sideways, but for whatever reason the balloon landed on the ground and then decided to let go with an upside-down version of the (homemade) fireworks which rained down live cinders all over the spectators. This was followed by the inevitable nuclear-strength explosion, with scenes of panicked people running around in thick smoke with fire hoses gushing everywhere.
That's how they do it in Myanmar.
A little slideshow I made from some spectacular photos of this yearly human roast. How does anyone survive this event? Why is it legal?
