Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

This is from funny old world in this weeks Eye!

"I wanted to play a prank on her, but I can see now that I hadn't really thought it through," thirty-five-year-old Shannon Kramer admitted to police officers from his hospital bed in Jacksonville, Florida. "I'd driven my girlfriend out to the beach in my Ford Mustang,and she'd got out. She was walking around, and I was sitting in the driver's seat, and I thought it would be kinda funny to shoot a firework at her out through the car window.

"I had a box of six-inch rockets with me, so I took one out, aimed it at her through the window, and lit it. Only then did I realise that the electric window was wound up, and that because I hadn't left the key in the ignition, I couldn't wind it down. I suppose I should have opened the door quickly and got out, but by the time I'd thought of that, the rocket had gone off, and started whooshing round and round inside the car. It was awful. So bright and loud and hot and fast. I thought I was dead. I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, it set fire to my hair and clothes, and ended up jammed between my legs and shooting flames into my buttocks.

"When it was all over, I tried to get out, but I couldn't walk or even stand up, and I was temporarily blinded. The ambulance men told me I've got second-degree burns to my buttocks, groin and legs. And needless to say, I've lost my eyelashes and most of my body hair, and the rocket even scorched an outline of my sandals onto my feet. I suppose it's lucky that the rest of the rockets didn't catch light too, otherwise I might really have been in trouble." (Orlando Sentinel and St Petersburg Times, 5/4/04.

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/content/showitem.cfm/issue.1110/section.fow