My friend in Wales sent me this unintentionally funny article he found on the BBC website:

A man suffered internal burns when he tried to launch a rocket from his bottom on Bonfire Night. Paramedics found the 22-year-old bleeding, with a Black Cat Thunderbolt Rocket lodged inside him, when they attended the scene in Sunderland. He suffered a scorched colon and is now recovering in hospital, where his condition is described as stable. A spokesman for the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) said the prank could have been fatal. Douglas McDougal, from the NEAS, said: "We received a call stating there was a male who had a firework in his bottom and it was bleeding. He sustained fairly significant injuries in the fact that there's huge damage to that particular area."

Damn, people do such stupid things. We can't blame MTV's "Jackass" for this spate of idiotic behavior. We've all had moments of unexpected and outrageously dumb behavior. And we can all preface it sincerely with, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time..."

I've done many outright stupid things, most of which I will need to bribe she of the long memory, MaryCatherineFullofGrace, not to reveal. But my brother Marv, bless him, is the master. Maybe it's reckless nature in him (which makes him so good in his work), but those same attributes have resulted in some truly goofy episodes. Here's a sampling that come to mind (and oddly, many of them seem to involve beer and fire):

-The night he put a full capped bottle of beer into a roaring fire, just to see what would happen.

-As a kid, he was always waging war on the ant trails in our back yard and patio. On day I was in the kitchen. He comes in and gets some lighter fluid. He comes back and gets some hairspray. He returns one more time to get a lighter. Two minutes later, the patio is in flames and he's trying to put it out with a dish towel.

-The time we got locked out of the house and Marv thought he could shimmy down the chimney to get in. Yeah, that one was bad. He was stuck for almost two hours.

-Multiple occasions of falling into fires. Once was an improvised fire walk.

-Working on his old '66 Mustang, he kept the engine running while tinkering under the hood. The clutch popped and the car barreled into him and took down the whole garage door. That was bad too.

- The famous fart lighting trick. Someone needed to tell him that you don't hold the flame THAT close.

-He enjoyed riding sprawled across the hood of a car when we would drive around the park. He wasn't prepared for the abrupt braking that one time. He took off both windshield wipers when he flew off..and had a nasty case of road rash as a result.

-Riding his moped in a swimsuit only. He now knows that riding over piles of leaves may cause a wipeout and additional road rash.

-Fly fishing while quite inebriated one time on a camping trip. Hooks were involved. That's all I'm going to say.

It sure is easier recalling Marv's antics than my own. I'm sure we'll get to that soon enough. But since we're on the subject, what about you?