The 4th of July holiday has been an odd one for me. To be honest I'm not a big fan of fireworks. I'm not much of a fan of fire, so fireworks don't interest me as much as others. When I was a kid, I enjoyed seeing them but I liked the food and the atmosphere surrounding the day more than the nightfall. As I got older, it pretty much stayed that way for me. I think one thing that turned me off from fireworks, specifically bottle rockets and such that don't really do anything is an event when I was a teenager. We had moved into town and lived next to a parking lot, the main city parking lot in the middle of town. It was where the kids would party on the weekends (I have no idea why, there were plenty of cornfields where they could go), and during the week or two before the 4th, they would have bottle rocket wars. Simply put for those smart enough to never have participated in them- they would shoot bottle rockets at each other. One guy I heard a rumor about had a bottle rocket in his back pocket, and someone snuck up behind him and lit it. Anyways, calls to the mayor and the town cop didn't accomplish anything, so we basically had to deal with it.
One morning I woke up about 4 AM or so and my room was lit up like I had a disco ball. I looked out the window and the road was blocked off and a couple firetrucks and lots of first responders all had lights flashing. It turns out the local flower shop had caught on fire, and the cause was because of fireworks. The shop was totaled. A short time later, the building was torn down (along with a bunch of the city block which I have a youtube video posted of), and since I just don't care about fireworks.
There was one time I went to a house near Kansas City (a friend of my dads), and again enjoyed the atmosphere more than the fireworks, but did enjoy M-80's being blown up inside buckets of water. Anyways, these days, my enjoyment of fireworks is mostly seeing some on TV or if I go to some event that has music and entertainment (I wonder whatever happened to the Banana Oil Pan Band, they were good). I have some friends playing the local show in Columbia called Fire In The Sky, which would be kind of fun since I haven't seen them play in a while.
Might as well show a card or two. This is from 1991 Score.
Pretty nice card to have. Maybe I should have showcased the Topps Desert Storm cards I have. Oh well.
So what will I be doing this weekend? Well, I have no real plans to be honest. The last few years I have watched some movies and enjoyed the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest (reminds me I need to see who is entered this year). One year I was do a show on Blog Talk Radio and my friend and I was going to talk about hot dogs and the contest. It never happened as people called in and we got way sidetracked (not hard for me to do). One movie I think I'll watch this year is Napolean Dynamite. I haven't watched it in a while and it reminds me of the first time I saw it. I was a staff member at church camp (I was night watchmen), and as the campers left I was waiting on the people I rode with to square things away. A few of the other people was watching the movie, so I sat down to watch it to waste time. At first I thought it was stupid. Then a crazy thing happened. I had just finished the scene where Napolean was paid in change and someone told me that I was owed money in the Snack Shack. So I went there and they told me that after paying everyone they didn't have any bills left, so all they had was change. I think it was close to about $10 or so, but might have been less. I started busting up laughing and they wondered what was funny, so I told them I was watching the movie, and they started laughing too. The reason I think of the 4th is because even though it didn't happen in July (first week of June at the time), they since moved camp to the week of the 4th and they are there now. I haven't worked there in a few years but thought about showing up and seeing some of them.
Anyways to make this relevant to something, I happen to have a couple Napolean Dynamite trading cards.
I got them at Hot Topic I believe when they were on clearance. I wish I bought more. The fronts are pretty nice I think, though some sort of border would be better.
The back leaves a lot to be desired. No story about the scene, no border, nothing but a quote and the same background photo on every back. I guess they tried for the money grab, and since I found them on clearance, it backfired.
Since I've ranted longer than I thought, I wanted to mention my new site. Likely by the time you are done reading this (congrats if you managed to), I will also have posted my first meaningful post on my new blog. I decided to go with the name of Missouri Sports History. As evidenced in this post and many others, I tend to veer in many different directions on the new blog, but the idea to to give a history on people, places, teams, events, and anything to do with Sports for the state of Missouri. My first post will be on the 1940 MLB All Star Game held in St. Louis. Though the finished product isn't what I intended, I still like how it turned out, and I gave enough info that if more is to be desired I could do a future post on it or you can simply seek it out. When I'm not busy this weekend, I will probably do research for future posts. Don't worry I'm not planning on slowing down on posts on here, the Missouri Sports History blog won't have daily content, it will likely have 2-3 posts a week at most, with about 10 or so posts a month. I don't want to run out of ideas so quick, neither do I want to do all the big names and events first. I have my second post ready too, but I'll probably wait until Monday or so to post it. Some of you may have looked at it already but for those who haven't here is a picture of the background photo for the new site:
I wanted to represent as many teams and logos as I could. I am still finding new teams, and once I find even more, I will likely update it. I like how I designed it, but the spacing is off on a lot of it, so it will be something I will work on in the coming months. Some of the logos are obvious, but other may make you curious. That is part of the reason I designed it, to draw people in to see what they are.
Are there any teams or logos you can think of that I missed? I know I missed a few and not many colleges are represented, but I do hope to improve it down the road. Are there any logos you like that you maybe haven't seen before? Leave a comment and I might do a team history on them sooner. I can't wait to delve into some of the older teams specifically the pre-1950's teams. I just hope I can find enough info on them. As I work on these, my goal will also be to find a card of someone (or the team) representing that team. I have started to do that a little, and as I progress, I hope to find more. Some like the Sedalia Bombers will likely be impossible, but it will be fun to see how many I can get.
Thanks everyone for reading, and I hope everyone has a fun and exciting weekend. It should be interesting in Mid-Missouri especially if the Lake of the Ozarks has to keep the no-wake on the lake throughout the weekend.
Here is a link to that post on the 1940 All-Star Game- Missouri Sports History
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