[pritch]

I've seen two blow up, one up close and personal. When we first hooked up, my wife had this POS '75 cougar and the battery was weak. I went to visit my friends, but they were not home, and sure enough, that cougar woundn't start. So I pushed down thier driveway and out into the middle of the street, figuring that the next guy by would either have to give me a jump or turn around and go back the way he came. My plan worked perfectly. Some old guy pulled up and rolled down his window and I said I needed a jump. My hood was up and the cables were hooked up to my battery. Now, at the time I had owned a slew of lousy cars, and I had plenty of experiance at jumping them. He popped his hood, and I had a cable in each hand. I guess it's not recommended practice to connect each of them at the same time, because that's what I did and his battery went off like a stick of dynamite! It dang near blew my left thumb off, and being winter I had on one of those nylon and down parkas and it was shredded and feathers went everywhere. I looked down and all I could see was the bottom half of his battery and the cables were still attached to the posts. I still had ahold of my jumper cables, so I went ahead and hooked them to what was left and ran around and fired up the cougar. By that time, the old guy had gotten out of his car and was wondering what had happened. I had a 20 in my pocket so I gave it to him and took off. I only had a short ways to go, but by the time I got home, the rest of my parka had disolved and I looked like I had been tarred and feathered. My thumb was a bloody mess, I had cuts and bruises all over my face and neck and by then my eyes were burning pretty good. It was a good lesson.