Scooby Doo goes Boom.

Have you ever wondered how much weight a bottle rocket can carry up into the sky? Or maybe, how many bottle rockets it takes to lift a 6 oz. frog off the ground? Or maybe a tattered up Barbie doll, with one leg, half her hair missing, and only duct tape for clothing? Have you ever wondered what a cherry bomb might do when strapped to the same Barbie, or when placed carefully in a Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich? (Personal note: To us dogs, that is just a waste of good food.) What about a cherry bomb on top of the PB&J sandwich covered by a cow bell? That one hurt my ears. Anyway Stephen and Jarred wondered, and they invited Stephen's, little brother James to come see the results of such experiments. After all, more than half of the bottle rockets belonged to James. Fortunately for the cats in Gruberville, the boys didn't think to bring one back to the pond. No, they wouldn't have hurt the cat. But they probably would have tied a 2 foot string to its tail and attached a few sparklers to the other end. However, they found a road wounded GI JOE Action Figure on the way, and after he was forced to accept a kiss from his evil arch nemesis The Benevolently Boring Barbie, his NASA testing followed hers. They almost looked like a happy couple. Gruesomely war torn, but still almost happy.

Stephen had found a bag of left over fireworks stashed in the trunk of his brother Paul's car. Paul had to have forgotten that they were there. Otherwise he would have charged the boys a storage fee. Not much mind you, but enough for weekend gas money. Paul's girlfriend was going out of town with her mom for the weekend to her Great Aunts place in Phoenix. So Paul was going to be dateless this Saturday night. And if opportunity had knocked, yes he would have embezzled from his little brothers because now he would need the cash to run his friends around from town to town this Saturday night. Also the boys were lucky to have gotten to the bag before any of Paul's friends did. If Nick Slater or Johnny Prauttin (aka Johnny Rotten) were to have found the bag, there would have been one large wasteful barrage of cherry bomb explosions coming from some ones garbage-can somewhere in town. Nick, Johnny and Paul were best buds on the football team. However, what talent they had on a football field they seemed to lack most everywhere else. And to quote not only the younger guys who hung around them from time to time, but also some of their ex-girlfriends "NO IMAGINATION". And that would have been an expensive and thoughtless waste of good, fun, explosives.

So with a small section of copper piping planted firmly in the ground, a small yet sturdy piece of dowel rod resting in the pipe, Barbie strapped to the top of the dowel, and two more bottle rockets added to the previously failed attempt at launching her into space, Jarred lit the match. "RUN!" Stephen shouted. Ten bottle rockets in all, and Barbie was headed toward heaven. She got a wobbly start, but sky rocketed to a new world record of about 25 feet. The crowd cheered. Though merely consisting of Stephen, Jarred, James, and Fast Freddie who was already back at the pond catching frogs, they cheered none-the-less. Barbie was no worse for the wear. G.I.Joe on the other hand, lost a foot in the brier patch, his make shift tin foil helmet, and tooth pick rifle were now floating in the lake, and his new dropped match inspired bald spot was sporting the extra Band-Aid James had stashed in his back pocket.

Fortunately for the frogs, by the time the boys got to figuring out what kind of vehicle to put them in they didn't have enough rockets to get the wet paper cup off the ground. And after barking at that one frog for jumping out of the cup so many times, I could swear that thing licked my nose. Ewwww, frog germs. The PB&J sandwich was not so lucky. It's splatter of bread and PeaBuJel innards on the dock looked like what Freddie described as a splatted peanut butter filled sea gull. "Must have been a kamikaze Sea Gull." he added. Then after blowing up mud pies came cat tails (the plant not the animal), and a hole in James old and rusty Scooby Doo lunch box. At the time, Stephen thought he was gonna have to console James, but just as quickly as his eyes seems to swell up, he shouted "Do it again! DO IT AGAIN!"

'Finally!' Stephen thought to himself. He would sometimes teased James about taken his lunch box and smashing it, and would tell him he was a sissy boy for having it. And yet here he was with all his baseball cards in his Superman Lunch box, which I might add, still has it's thermos but the cup top was lost and replaced with a pink one from a broken Thermos of one of his sisters mysteriously missing lunch boxes. Now if that aint the cat calling the dog dumb, or the pot calling the kettle black, or even the chocolate covered nut calling the Raisinette a Goober, I don't know what is.

Henry the Dog