Loading ...It’s not necessarily groundbreaking to say it, but explosions are manly. Really, how could they not be? All that energy packed in to one specific moment in time, packed into one specific spot at that time? I’m assuming that you’re all picking up on the metaphor here.
Silly metaphors aside, getting things to explode has been a crowning achievement of manhood for quite some time. Gunpowder was first created as part of Chinese alchemy research concerning the secrets of eternal life. Needless to say, it was all downhill uphill from there. Centuries later, we saw the dawn of gunpowder being used as a weapon in guns, and eventually cannons. Gunpowder was the preeminent explosive for another few centuries or so until the mid-1800’s, when the world saw the development of nitroglycerine, TNT, and dynamite.
It’s not just the fact that man has developed shit that blows up that’s amazing–it’s that we’ve done constructive (heh) things with the lot of it. Mining’s pretty much the best example of the good to come from explosives–that ring you bought for your wife wouldn’t have been a possibility were it not for this guy blowing the fuck out of the side of a hill.
That said, mining doesn’t even come close to the fun kind of explosion, the sort that wasn’t mean’t to provide access, or even the kind that wipes out a reasonably sized Japanese city. The manliest kind of explosion is the kind that’s created recreationally, for its own sake. It’s these explosions that we remember best with appreciation and happiness, even if they are at times at the expense of others (and what explosion isn’t at the expense of others in some way or another?).
There doesn’t seem to be any kind of documented history of this “fun” kind of explosion, other than the vast library existent at Youtube and other video sites all over the damn place. Not that this matters–having a history of explosions and their agents isn’t even close to the important thing when it comes to manliness. It’s watching them, or even being responsible for them, and knowing that you’ve got that rich, millenium-and-a-half history quite literally in your DNA.
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front pg thumb:http://www.flickr.com/photos/giginger/ / CC BY 2.0
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