Maybe it was a “by-gone of a by-gone era.”

When we were kids, we all seemed to know two expressions; “Fire In The Hole,” and “Bombs Away.” It probably had something to do with television; or as noted before in this blog, way back into what my nephew Aziz would call the “Dark Ages” (TV before Cable) when there were only 3 or 4 TV channels to watch. With limited TV channels, as kids, we usually watched whatever was on, and in those days, there were a lot of Cowboy, and World War Two movies.

With the WW 2 movies as in real life, the expression “Bombs Away” meant to open up the belly of the Air Force Bomber Plane and empty a load of explosives on targets below. We also used this expression often to begin the barrage of snowballs or water balloons we would release on other kids or my sister from our strategic high perch as they were walking beneath us.

The Cowboys seemed to use a lot of explosives to blow out bank vaults, blow up train bridges, blow up jails to “spring” their contemporaries and most of all to blow up mines in an effort to quench their obsessive desire to get at the “Mother Loads of Gold” waiting behind every piece of stone; or so they thought. As most of us know from history, the only “true” fortunes gained from prospecting silver and gold were from the merchants who sold the miners everything from food and whiskey to shovels and axes.

As I type this blog, three things become evident to me. I am somewhat saddened to note that the tasks listed above remind me of “other” things. 1. Planes dumping tons of explosives on people so as to kill them is cruel, and the “horrors of war” are still nothing more than “horror for humanity.” I wish things were better. I wish things were different. On an up note, dropping water balloons on our sisters is still AWESOME!! 2. As I list all the tasks for the “bad” Cowboys, they don’t sound all that different from terrorists……..Hhmmmmm, I guess that was before terrorism was invented. 3. Does it seem odd that in modern society, kids would know so much about blowing things up, explosives, blasting caps and the crux of this whole story; Detonator Plungers? Of course, there is one more reason for that(besides the number of times Hogan’s Heroes had to blow up the ball-bearing plant in Düsseldorf); it was one of the most violent kids show ever to air on TV; The Road Runner Show. It was a cartoon from Warner Brothers. For the record, there was also the “violence” repeated on the Three Stooges. Children repeating what they saw. I mention this because; The Three Stooges were SO funny, and if I don’t mention this piece of trivia, “we” know who will; Anno Domini.

I’ll do all of us a favor and pass over the reports, statistics, commentary, and psycho-babble about the number of violent acts portrayed as Wile E. Coyote planned, attempted, and ultimately failed at facilitating the demise of his arch-enemy; The Road Runner.

What “we” all really want to know about after all these years? What is that plunger, and how does it work, and where is this Acme Supply House that provides all that demolition equipment? Dynamite and Detonators were/are not evil in themselves. They helped/help build bridges, roads, and mines. 

Stay tuned for questions about answers, sentences about words, and everything that we know about nothing……….