Things will again be a bit slow around here today as I try to put to bed whatever it is that has had me sick all week. Here’s me and Toby talking about stuff:

He’s right, you know.

Regular readers of this site may know that I spent many of my formative years on something of a pyromaniac bender, which included lighting off just about every type of firework I could get my hands on. Usually that just meant standard-issue thunderbombs, bottle rockets, jumping jacks and Roman candles, but one time — I must have been 13 or so — a friend got his hands on something, well… quite a bit larger.

I have no idea how he came by the thing, but it was one of the cake-style fireworks that sits on the ground and spouts off all sorts of awesome. Only this one was huge. Three friends and I took it down to Hempstead Lake State Park, a common locale for teenage high-jinx.

We had to carry it in a hockey bag to keep it hidden. To maintain the charade we actually Rollerbladed there holding hockey sticks, even though no teenager in his right mind would skate over a footbridge to play roller-hockey in a mostly wooded park when there were plenty of fine suburban streets around (Ed. note: “Game off! Game on!“).

We waited until dusk — not full nightfall, in part to keep up the hockey thing, in part because that park got quite creepy at night. We cased out a decent clearing with some good hiding spots and paved getaways (remember: rollerblades) nearby and laid the thing down. The kid who acquired it lit it — his obvious right, though it meant running away on the dirt in stocking feet.

I guess none of us realized that Grucci-level fireworks extravaganzas have to come from somewhere, and that it might be even remotely possible for someone in our social circle to get his hands on something so inexplicably, explosively awesome. Hell, the hiding spot we picked wasn’t even an appropriate vantage point to see the wild, repeated bursts of colors high up in the air and — more frighteningly — near the tops of some nearby trees.

We froze, horrified. We were doomed to be either caught by park police and punished eternally by our parents or burned up in a forest fire of our own devising. Amazing as the display was, all of us only wanted it to end without incident.

But it kept going.

I imagine you realize that when you’re a terrified teenager fearing for your life a few seconds can feel like an eternity. I have no idea how long that thing lasted. Looking back now it feels like it must have been 20 minutes, though I know it must have been closer to one or two.

However long it took, the thing sure was still going when the cops showed up, and we sure were still only very mildly hidden behind a few trees maybe 20 yards away.

Luckily for our sake, the park police were more concerned with the possibility of fire than finding the perpetrators. Drowned out by the noise of the reports, we made a break for it. Last we saw before we stumbled and skated away, two officers were struggling to smother the still-spewing cake with a blanket — an extremely silly sight, really, but one none of us thought to laugh at until long after we rolled our way out of there.

Neither this site nor the SNY.tv blog network endorses reckless use of pyrotechnics without proper supervision. Be safe this weekend.

Growing up in the Long Island suburbs, the scariest wild animals we ever encountered were raccoons. And no one knew anyone that had actually been attacked by a raccoon, we just knew they had a reputation for orneriness, they hung out in people’s garbage, and they could potentially be rabid.

In Westchester, though, we’ve got a particularly terrifying coyote problem, thanks in part to an old-woman-who-swallowed-the-fly scenario kicked off by the northeast’s out-of-control deer population. Plus, someone hit a mountain lion on the Merritt Parkway a couple of weeks ago and now Greenwich residents keep claiming they’ve seen others.

The latest? There’s a baboon on the loose in New Jersey. The people at Great Adventure claim its not one of theirs, but they are nonetheless working with authorities and encouraging everyone to remain calm, because everyone always urges everyone to remain calm even in situations (there’s a baboon in my backyard hurling feces at my children!) that seem to call rather expressly for panic.