Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: For Adrienne

In case you missed it last Thursday, tucked into the tail end of the post about some phone sex gone awry, Adrienne became my 100th stalker follower. She even announced it with a little bit of confetti and fireworks.

And, I say, that's not nearly enough. For 100 stalkers followers, we need to throw some kind of celebration (I realize there is 101 now; sorry, Jeney, had you been a day earlier, all this hubbub would be for you). So, today's post is dedicated to Adrienne, who is my 100th stalker follower and for Gwen, who was my very first stalker follower, and for the 98 other folks who have given me their time, attention and patience. Oh, and we'll include Jeney, so that she doesn't feel left out, and because I hear she has excellent taste in college football teams.

(Yes, I know I have 102 followers, but I'll be dealing with 102 in his own, special way. Plus, 102 signed on after I had originally written this.)

So, let's shoot off some fireworks!

Thank you, Canada, for giving us Sue Johanson, Poobomber, and that awesome fireworks display we just saw.

One thing that has always fascinated me was the colors of the fireworks. In general chemistry, we always did labs where you take a salt solution of a certain metal, dip a copper wire in it, and then burn the wire to see what color the flame of the Bunsen burner turns. It wasn't until I was a junior and was slogging through quantitative analysis that I made the connection between flame absorption spectrometry and the colors of fireworks. In case you were curious, I looked up the recipes and found this site. Accordingly, they list the colors and the metals used to create said colors.

Red comes from lithium and strontium salts. Orange comes from calcium. Golden hues come from burning iron along with charcoal. Yellow comes from sodium (this I knew, thanks to Dr. Awesome back in undergrad). Barium gives you green and copper gives you blue (which, for chemists, is a big, fat 'duh'). And for the silvery white, you can burn either magnesium or aluminum. Mixing the various amounts of the salts will give you different hues and shades of your desired colors.

So, there's all you ever didn't wanted to know about fireworks and their colors. How about some confetti? Or maybe just household items made to look like fireworks? I'll go with the latter, if only for the presence of Peeps.


I cannot tell you how happy I am that Peeps decided to expand their line of awesomeness to year-round. Something about the orange sugar they use to coat the marshmallow pumpkins makes them twice as delicious--and gut-bustingly awesome--at Halloween.