Echoes of the big bang

[jhetley]

The world has changed mightily since I was young . . .

Item in the news, this old guy brought a couple of hand grenades into the local police station, he'd found them in a friend's basement and thought that was a poor choice of storage.  Bomb squad called, building evacuated, etc, etc.  WWII Japanese survivors.  That's the second incident in the last few weeks.

Thing is, I grew up with WWII vets all over the place.  And "war trophies" all over the place.  Friend up the street, his father had a line of artillery shells along the window-sill of his home office, 20mm up to 105.  Nobody thought anything of it.  He'd been in artillery himself, and I'm damned sure in retrospect that every one was deactivated.  Old Mr. Morris was no dummy.

Hell, our elementary school principal used a grenade as a paperweight in his office.  Again, not live.  That one, I know was a practice grenade.

I can just imagine what a riot either case would cause today.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Oh, the police panic was justified -- in neither recent case was the original collector around, to say whether the grenades were disarmed. And some explosives become much more unstable with age.

It's just a different age. People take fewer risks. You can't buy sulfur, saltpeter, and powdered charcoal at the local drugstore . . .

(Or ammonium nitrate fertilizer at the local hardware or garden store, either.)

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder if people are just less naive than they used to be about how risky some of those risks really are. I've certainly got a couple of "ghodDAMN, I was lucky to get out of that unscathed!" stories in my past, and they don't even involve explosives.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

My parents expected me to acquire some scars in the process of growing up. That seemed to be the parental norm for the time. Now, not so much. We have debates over the best padding to install under playground equipment.

We have warning labels on bicycles.