BLUE NOSE GUIDE TO SUMMER SAFETY - PART 2

 

Last week, I explained what to do in order to prevent overexposure to the sun by using Sonblock, how not to drop important things into the ocean by wearing a trendy fanny pack, what to do in case your pretty girlfriend¹ starts a huge fire while cooking on the grill, why you shouldn't eat and then go swimming without waiting precisely 30 minutes unless you're a Navy SEAL, and what to do if you accidentally leave your crayons outside in the sun to melt. 

You may seem pretty safe right now by having a plan of action for any of those situations, but let me assure you that there are still plenty of ways to get extremely hurt, damage your belongings, emotionally traumatize your family, or even die if you are not very careful this summer.  I'm surprised people like RavenTresses and I even make it to Labor Day² every year without accidentally barbecuing ourselves or swimming directly into a shark's open mouth.  Hopefully, you've survived through the past week without finding any of these out the hard way, but here are my last five safety tips for having fun this summer: 


TIP 6 - FIREWORKS SAFETY.  First of all, if you have slow reflexes, can't see very well, can't throw very far, or are deathly afraid of exploding fireballs in your hand or near your face, fireworks are not for you.³  Instead, you should stick to prancing around to show tunes and throwing colorful bits of confetti in the air, or whatever people do who live in cities which prohibit setting off fireworks.  Most people don't know this, but fireworks were invented by ancient Chinese scientists along with Kung Fu and China Buffets.  The most popular use of fireworks is to celebrate the Fourth of July by getting all drunk and giving yourself searing burns and lost fingers in the backyard, because apparently our founding forefathers⁴ set off Roman Candles and Blackjacks and ran around twirling sparklers after they signed the Emancipation Proclamation or the Magna Carta or whatever piece of paper made all of the states combine like Voltron and form the United States of America and whatnot.  Basically, there are three kinds of fireworks: the kind you can light off in your hand, the kind that launch up into the air and go off in the sky, and the kind you need to run far away from after you light the wick.  The only kind you can light off in your hand is a sparkler.  These are long metal sticks with a magical coating on one end that, once lit, emits fiery sparks while you run around screaming because the sparks burn when they hit the skin on your arm and hand.  Make sure you are holding these on the correct end!  If someone gives you something that looks like a firecracker and they tell you it's a sparkler, do not be fooled like RavenTresses was that one time.⁵  The kind that launch up in the air and go off in the sky are like bottle rockets or the expensive fireworks you see at fireworks shows.  These can be dangerous if you are clumsy and knock the launching mechanism over on its side after you light it and it ends up pointing towards you or your audience.  The kind you run far away from after you light the wick are called firecrackers or roman candles or "free trips to the burn ward at the local hospital."  Generally, because they explode violently or shoot colored flames out all over, you don't want to be anywhere near them when they go off.  All I can say is be careful and have the paramedics standing by.  I don't have any factual statistics, but I estimate that approximately 50% of all Americans die each year from fireworks related injuries.⁶

TIP 7 - GETTING BURIED IN THE SAND.  One of my favorite things to do on the beach during a nice, sunny summer day is to bury my friends in the sand.⁷  With or without their consent, it doesn't matter -- it's all in good fun!  The important thing to remember when burying your friend in the sand is that the hole you dig should actually be long and shallow so they can lay in it horizontally.  If you dig a deep hole and make them stand vertically in it while you fill it back up with sand, it becomes much more difficult to get them out the next day after you go home and wake up in the morning remembering you left them out at the beach.  Also, always leave their head above ground... it seems to help them breathe.  You usually want to bury them in the wet sand near the water, because the dry sand is hot from baking in the sun and probably contains tons of fire ants, so it's harder to bury someone in sand when they're squirming all around in pain and trying to get away.  The wet sand near the water keeps them cooler in the sun, although you need to make sure they're far enough out so the waves don't keep crashing over and drowning your friend.  A fun thing to do is to strategically place a hot dog sticking out of the sand and then tell a nearby police officer about this indecent exposure.  When your friend is buried in the sand, it is your primary responsibility to keep dogs from urinating on their head and to help dig them out when they've had enough of your immature hotdog shenanigans.  If you become buried in sand and your friend leaves without you, or worse yet, it wasn't a friend who buried you in the first place, the first thing you should do is scream for help.  If you are lucky, someone will come to help dig you out if you are unable to move yourself.  If you are unlucky, you may attract the attention of a puppy dog with a full bladder.⁸  If this happens, keep your mouth and eyes shut at all costs until the whole unfortunate ordeal is over, and hope no one posts the video on the internet.  I think I just gave Parker over at Parker's Point her next idea for a rant.

TIP 8 - ATTACKED BY SHARKS.  If you like to go swimming in the ocean, you need to be careful not to get eaten by any sharks.  Sharks are mean fish with shark fins on their back that have about a million razor-sharp teeth, and they swim around in the ocean looking for people to eat.  The first thing you should do when arriving at an oceanside beach is to check for circling shark fins sticking out of the water before you enter the ocean.  I have developed a simple saying to help you remember when it's safe to swim:  "If you see a fin, don't go in."  Be sure to ask the person in charge of everything if there have been any recent shark attacks.  If he says yes, then they probably aren't that hungry anymore and I'm pretty sure it would be safer to go swimming than if there hadn't been any recent shark attacks.  Another good idea to avoid being eaten by a shark is to empty out your friends' suntan lotion bottles and replace the lotion with grease from cooking up porkchops or hamburgers and whatnot.⁹  That way, when they go swimming, they smell more like tasty meat for the sharks than you will, so that will buy you some time to swim back to shore.  If you're like me and have no more friends because you got them all eaten by sharks last summer, then I would put some juicy porkchops in a bag and go swimming with those so if you see a shark fin coming towards you, you can start tossing them around like a jet plane avoids missiles by shooting out flares.  Despite following all of these safety measures, you will eventually find yourself carried out to sea by the undertow and surrounded by hungry sharks.  If you are attacked by a shark, simply refrain from putting any parts of your body into its mouth while you are swimming to shore.  I need everyone's help on this... if more people would just stop putting parts of their bodies into shark's mouths, the sharks wouldn't attack so much.  They'd just give up and go eat some jellyfish or whatever sharks like to eat besides swimmers.¹⁰  You careless people are only just encouraging them. 

TIP 9 - GETTING RUN OVER BY BUGGIES.  Just because you've decided to stay out of the water and avoid the sharks doesn't mean you're clear of danger.  The last thing you want to have happen after your friends rub porkchop grease all over them and jump into the ocean to get eaten by sharks while you hastily toss diversionary hot dogs out around you while you swim back to shore is to crawl out of the water only to get run over by a careless driver in their buggy.  I told you summer is dangerous!  If you hear a buggy coming towards you -- this is where indecisive people get weeded out of the gene pool -- commit to going either left or right and dive out of the way.  Running towards the buggy is usually met as a challenge, and by narrowing the distance between you and the buggy even faster, gives you less time to react should you regain your senses and realize you're about to be hit by a buggy and you should probably get out of the way.  Running away from the buggy only tires you out before you get run over.  Remember, there's no such thing as a "forcefield" in real life, so don't just stand there wondering if everyone became a vegetarian if cows would start to eat people because they began to consider themselves superior to us on the food chain and expect the buggy to harmlessly bounce off of you when it hits you.  If a buggy is coming right for you and one of your friends buried you in the sand like in Tip #7, you're pretty much screwed unless they had the foresight to build a ramp in front of you.  If the buggy driver is like RavenTresses and they missed you the first time, they may come around and set up for another pass.  Use this time to courageously run off towards the nearest group of trees to protect yourself from being run over.¹¹  Another way to avoid being run over by a buggy is to eat a lot.  While you may not be able to dodge a buggy as quickly, most buggy drivers would generally not try to hit anything or anyone that may actually cause severe damage to their buggies.  On the other hand, people who look like a bag of coat-hangers like Calista Flockhart from Ally McBeal are perfect buggy targets.

 

TIP 10 - ESCAPING HUGE MAN-EATING SPIDERS.  If you do decide to take refuge in a group of trees, you may encounter a huge, hungry man-eating tarantula.  These monster spiders hide in the trees and wait for unsuspecting beachgoers to get too close.  If you're playing beach volleyball, beach frisbee, or beach duck duck goose or whatever games people enjoy playing on the ouchy hot sand, roasting in the sun while dodging speeding buggies and teasing the hungry sharks in the water, never be the guy who volunteers to go get the errant volleyball, frisbee, cue ball, hockey stick, or whatnot if it lands near the trees.  This would be a worse idea than inventing coughing medicine that has the side effect of mild coughing.  If you do happen to disturb a huge man-eating spider, especially while it's trying to mate, it will run and jump after you, inject its poisonous venom into you, and cover you with silly string -- or whatever comes out of a spider's butt -- until it's ready to eat you.  This is most likely payback for clicking on all of those "Squash the spider and win an XBOX 360!!!" pop-up banner ads on the web.¹²  If you do get bitten by one of these spiders, try to make sure it's on a body part from which other people would want to suck the venom out of the wound in case you are able to escape somehow.¹³  If you are caught up in a spider web because it's saving you for later, I would consider that a compliment because it considers you a tasty dessert not to be eaten on impulse, but to be savored later.  The only way I can think of to possibly escape a huge man-eating spider is to stick your hand out, with your palm facing up and hand bent slightly down, and placing your middle two fingers to your palm as if you were about to shoot a web out of your wrist like Spider-Man.  If you can get the spider to believe you are Spider-Man, and therefore all cool with spiders, it might leave you alone.  If this doesn't work, then at least you will probably be bitten in the hand or arm, and most people are cool with sucking the poison out of wounds in those locations anyway, so either way you win!  

If you follow all ten of my summer safety tips, you have a fairly good chance of surviving the next three months of fun in the sun with only minor burns and lacerations.  I would have combined all the tips into one article, but RavenTresses was using my computer to type something up and left White-Out lines all over my monitor, so I had to buy a new one before I could finish the whole thing.¹⁴  I sincerely apologize to anyone who was severely injured by fireworks, sharks, buggies, or huge man-eating spiders over the last week waiting for the second part of this article.  If you're still buried in sand and don't know how to get out, I don't suppose you'd be able to read this anyway.

 

COMMENTARY IN FOOTNOTES BY RAVENTRESSES:

¹  "I know, right?!"

²  "Oooh, I can't wait for Labor Day presents!"

³  "Those are pretty much all the reasons why Rick doesn't mess with fireworks."

⁴  "He means like the Vikings who landed at Plymouth Rock and whatnot."

⁵  "Now I know the difference between a sparkler and a bottle rocket, at least!"

⁶  "Uhhh... that's like one out of every fifty people or something like that."

⁷  "No, his favorite thing to do on the beach is whine about sand in his crack and that it's too hot outside."

⁸  "Hi puppy!!!  Uh oh..."

⁹  "See, I knew you were full of crap when you said steak-flavored suntan lotion was all the rage!"

¹⁰  "They probably eat like, uh.... peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches."

¹¹  "Just because you cleverly throw 'courageously' in there doesn't make you less of a sissy."

¹²  "I click on those all the time and all I win are spyware and viruses!" ''mad

¹³  "On me, that would be anywhere.  Because I'm pretty!"

¹⁴  "That's pretty useless if you have to buy a new monitor every time you need to white something out... who designed that Mickey Mouse system?!"