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Dumb & Deadly Gender Reveal Stunts

escargot

Disciple of Marduk
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There's been a bit of a backlash against the fad for 'gender reveal' parties. This incident might help that along a little; a guest at one has been killed by, one assumes, some kind of gimmicky explosion.

Woman killed in explosion at Iowa gender-reveal party

A woman in Iowa has died after she was hit by debris from an explosion at a gender-reveal party.

The sheriff’s office in Marion county, Iowa, said the 56-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene at a home in the city of Knoxville.
 
More details on the background to the fatal Iowa gender reveal explosion have surfaced in this CNN report. It suggests the family members who assembled the pyrotechnic device inadvertently made it into a pipe bomb ...
Partygoers thought they'd built a clever gender reveal device. It turned out to be a deadly pipe bomb

Family members had hoped to build a contraption for a fun gender reveal party in Iowa, but they instead built an explosive device that killed a grandmother, police said Monday.

"This family got together for what they thought was going to be a happy event with no intent for anyone to get hurt," Marion County Sheriff Jason Sandholdt said.

Pamela Kreimeyer, 56, was killed when a piece of shrapnel from the device struck her in the head at the Saturday soiree in rural Knoxville, about 40 miles southeast of Des Moines.

Members of Kreimeyer's family got together Friday to begin experimenting with "different types of explosive material" in hopes of creating a gender reveal device and recording the unveiling for friends and family on social media, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

"On Saturday afternoon five family members and the expectant mother gathered and placed gunpowder in the bottom of a homemade stand that was welded to a metal base plate," the sheriff's statement said.

They drilled a hole in the side of the stand to install a fuse and placed a piece of wood on top of the gunpowder, before adding colored powder indicating the baby's gender, the statement said. The idea was that once the gunpowder ignited, it would launch the powder into the air -- typically blue for a boy or pink for a girl.

But when the family members placed tape over the top of the metal tubing, they inadvertently created a pipe bomb, authorities said.

Once the device was lit, the metal tubing exploded, sending shrapnel flying, the sheriff's office said.
A piece of metal hit Kreimeyer, who was standing with family members about 45 feet from the device, killing her, the statement said.

The chunk of metal moved with such velocity that after slamming into Kreimeyer, it continued to travel more than 400 feet through the air, landing in a field.

Kreimeyer was killed instantly, police said. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/28/us/iowa-gender-reveal-death/index.html
 
No mention of why they had guncotton in the house.
 
No mention of why they had guncotton in the house.

??? ... Neither of the news stories linked above, nor any other account I've seen, mentions guncotton.
 
??? ... Neither of the news stories linked above, nor any other account I've seen, mentions guncotton.

Yes, it was gunpowder. Also a strange substance to have lying around.
 
You are correct, It doesn't mention guncotton. I wonder where that came from.

Time to see a psychiatrist.
 
You are correct, It doesn't mention guncotton. I wonder where that came from.

Time to see a psychiatrist.

The first time I heard of guncotton was in a book called The Sea For Breakfast by Lilian Beckwith, which is her memoir of going to live on a remote Hebridean island.

The locals go beachcombing most days. One recovers a toilet seat - something never seen on Bruach - which he uses as a picture frame, to the author's author's amusement. Another finds a big felt mattress which he dries out and puts on his bed.
A neighbour visits and is called upstairs where his friend lies comfortably smoking his pipe. On his new mattress, which is actually made of guncotton. Cue panic and hilarity.

(It's not all fun and games: another day, a dead Norwegian sailor washes up.)
 
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Yes, it was gunpowder. Also a strange substance to have lying around.

Clearly mea culpa.

I may have made a subconscious connection because at one time I worked in a quarry with polar amon gelignite. Both, essentially,

have a nitro cellulose base.
 
I'm missing something .. why is someone on the floor farting what's probably talcum powder a 'gender reveal' ? .. is it something to do with the balloons?

It's blue, hence the baby is a boy! What better way to let the world know than with a fart!
 
Gender reveals, I think they're fucking stupid, but maybe I'm out of touch with the world of parenting these days. However, this one takes the concept to a whole new level. Watch in awe ( a little NSFW) ...

The only good thing about "gender reveals" (which surely are "sex reveals" anyway?) is when they get it wrong, serves you right for making a fuss in the first place.

That video is pretty funny though, so I'll let that one slip. As it were.
 
A gender reveal party ignited a 10-acre brush fire in Florida, fire officials say
By Nicole Chavez, CNN
Updated 2050 GMT (0450 HKT) April 4, 2020

A gender reveal party in Florida went wrong and sparked a 10-acre fire, CNN affiliate WESH reported.

Firefighters were called to a home in Brevard County, Florida, last weekend after reports that a blaze was possibly ignited by fireworks, fire officials said.

But when they arrived, firefighters realized some explosives had been in the mix.

"We were informed that it was caused by a gender reveal using Tannerite and a weapon," Brevard County Fire Rescue Chief Mark Schollmeyer told WESH. Tannerite is a highly explosive substance often used as a rifle target


Full Article:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/04/us/gender-reveal-party-fire-florida-trnd/index.html
 
It's where instead of just telling your friends and relatives if it's a boy or a girl, you invite them over and do a big dramatic thing to show it. Such as an explosion with pink smoke.
 
It's where instead of just telling your friends and relatives if it's a boy or a girl, you invite them over and do a big dramatic thing to show it. Such as an explosion with pink smoke.
Oh, I thought it might be a scenario where someone announces to their friends 'tada - I'm really a bloke' or whatever.
 
That's what I thought too when I first heard of them. I can understand celebrating that, but making such a big deal out of a sonargram just seems like another form of conspicuous consumption.
Why, in my day you had to wait to learn if it was a boy or a girl, and if you were really unlucky, you found out at the last minute that you had twins! That was in the days when everyone had to walk 10 miles in the snow to get to school.
 
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