Great Duos in History

Welcome to my first blog! Hope you enjoy your stay. I know you have a choice when reading blogs, and I thank you for choosing Airwaves, Baseball Cards, and Me. I hope you will read these again. I will update upon inspiration or whenever zany life events dictate.....whichever comes first.

For my opening post, I would like to discuss Great Duos in History. Plenty come off the top of my head. There's Hall & Oates, Batman & Robin, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, and the one that perplexes me most.......

Rednecks & Fireworks.

I've been studying this phenomenon closely since I first began in Country radio about 17 years ago. I'm sure this is as much of a byproduct of living in the South as anything else, but I'm not sure. All I know is that from my first day on the air, I was getting at least one call asking, "Hey......where are the July 4th farworks gonna be?" That's how we pronounce it in the South......."farworks". This was a little unusual to me for 2 reasons. First, it was JANUARY!!!! Second, Tuscaloosa, Alabama had its 4th of July fireworks in the same location for YEARS!! Guess they thought we were gonna move it to some undisclosed Dick Cheney-esque bunker and not tell 'em.

Flash forward to last night @ Turner Field. Fireworks following the Braves/Dodgers game. Typical fireworks display......color me unimpressed. But in addition to the typical crowd in total awe of the same fireworks display they've watched in various locations all their lives, I discovered something that I guess I had noticed on the periphery but had never given much attention. Not only were they watching the same display.......THEY WERE FILMING IT!!!! Cell phone cameras and hand held minicams EVERYWHERE!! Are these people bright enough to realize you totally miss the whole thing LIVE if you're videotaping it? And WHY......Dear God WHY......would you waste precious hard drive space on a fireworks display, especially a run-of-the-mill one after a baseball game? And this time it wasn't strictly a redneck phenomenon. There was an Asian-American couple taping the whole thing. Perhaps I'm a little stereotypical here, but it would seem to me that they would be the only ones more unimpressed by pyrotechnics than me........SINCE THEY INVENTED 'EM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?! Am I the only one who thinks driving from miles around for a fireworks display is like watching a movie on a continuous loop for days on end?

In fairness, I'd like to end by giving props to the one fireworks display that has ever really bowled me over. Illuminations @ Epcot Center not only impressed me, it made me want to see it again even though I knew it would be the exact same display at the exact same time the next night. The rest are like the Jean Claude Van Damme movie library....you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.

If anyone has any explanation, scientific or otherwise, to explain the love affair between rednecks and fireworks, please leave comments below :-)