KIOSK HELLO

Update: There is home video!

We got to bring one of the bal­loons out­side to launch for the Sam and Jake’s birth­day — our won­der­ful nephews. My sis­ter and her then boyfriend made these for me when I was a kid and my friends still bug me about fly­ing these again. Back then it was a full day of cut­ting, glu­ing, and just gen­eral paper­craft­ing. Come evening it was time to launch. Our home­made bal­loons had metal cans that were filled with spirit-drenched cot­ton — all of the bal­loons we launched that way ended up in a Hin­den­burgesque flame — the last one flew great for a while, but since I had attached a string to it — I stu­pidly thought I could reign it in — pulling that string tilted the bal­loon so much the flames licked the paper and within sec­onds a scorch­ing hot piece of metal bounced down around my feets. Well, this bal­loon is sim­pler, stur­dier and frankly, the design is just much smarter. The flame sits up-inside the bal­loon, so dur­ing the launch phase the flame is shielded by the bal­loon itself, mak­ing the risk of a pretty flash smaller. You need to be at least four it seems — three to hold the bal­loon open, and one to light the can­dle from under­neath.  Do this on a colder day, the the­ory is that you need a bit of tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ence to get this thing off the ground. That night it was maybe 65f so it wasn’t even cold. The bal­loon get weight­less in a minute or two after light­ing up. And it takes off. Silently. Fast. Beau­ti­ful. Far up. It get’s tiny. And tinier. And tinier. We hardly said any­thing dur­ing ten min­utes of fol­low­ing it dis­ap­pear in to the hori­zon. It was so sim­ple. Hope the kids liked it as much as I did!

Excuse the crummy pic­tures, but no-flash pic­tures at dawn is not really our thing!

We found these bal­loons in Por­tu­gal, but I had seen them used in Mex­ico as well — my child­hood ones were in Swe­den — I have an idea that the Por­tuguese taught  the Mex­i­cans back in the day, and the Swedes picked it up in the good ol’ 70’s, when every­one bummed around and made kites and love. We *sell* these, how’s that for a pitch. Go get them here (and we don’t have many, but we are try­ing to get some more).

Swedes fly­ing trash­bags: