— The 1938 Usaquen, Colombia crash, where an air force lieutenant attempted to dive through a narrow gap between two grandstands, failed, crashed and exploded, raining flaming debris down on spectators.
Blob-headed figures, tornadoes, flaming comets, exploding pieces of lumber, a volcano made of hair, a woman having sex with an amorphous black monster, burning bodies, a gunshot victim slumped in a corner: these and others evoke a wildly volatile world in which innocence is constantly being tested by things primitive, perverse and evil.
Esparza wrote that he won't be traveling again "anytime soon" and "maybe not at all," which considering the recent spate of exploding engines, cracked windshields, flaming carry-ons, smoke-filled cabins, and abusive flight attendants in the air might not be such a bad idea.
But Ballard's fervid skill in conjuring up the sensation of silica on silicate was about to be eclipsed; Hollywood imagineers have a rapacious appetite for displaying the deluging, flaming, death-raying, exploding and otherwise laying waste to the central business districts of American cities.
In the ensuing commotion he and six others from the group end up back in the terminal, where they watch the ascending plane explode and sprinkle the ocean with flaming debris.
Most fireworks are labeled with terms like "shoots flaming balls", "rocket with report", "explodes", or "emits showers of sparks".
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Newspaper articles record more than a century of nautical mayhem: flaming houseboats, leaky fishing boats, an exploding yacht.
To maximize their effect, the shells explode some tens of meters before they hit the ground, sending 116 flaming wafers over an area up to 250 meters.
And then it climaxes perfectly with archive footage of a Nasa test rocket exploding during takeoff in 1962, with the camera tracking the final flaming piece of debris as it falls back to earth.
