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re: Aggies - Question about bonfire
Posted on 12/19/12 at 11:19 am to TreeKiller86
Posted on 12/19/12 at 11:19 am to TreeKiller86
quote:
I think if off campus build 20 in a row with no accidents you might look at bringing it back.
I'm kind of the opinion that the reaction to the accident was overblown in a way. 90 years and several million man hours on a heavy duty construction project produced 12 deaths. That rate is lower than the commercial fishing industry. Working on bonfire is statistically safer than driving.
This is the type of attitude that will prevent a return to campus.
quote:
You made some good advocacy points for bringing it back on campus, especially the regulatory compliance learning/training. Where else would kids get equivalent, hands-on regulatory/safety training AS STUDENTS?
On the flip side, Bonfire represented the burning desire to beat the hell out of t.u. I know most of us NOW have a burning desire to FORGET those arrogant cocksmokes. So, Bonfire will need to take on a new meaning and spirit, WITHOUT reference to the feghots in Austin. We are the rulers now. Let them make it all about us.
To me it was as much about tu as it was just coinciding with the last game of the year and the effort lasting all semester long. We can still do that, Bonfire is more important than any other school or our rivalry with them. It could be against LSU the last week of the year, Arkansas the last week of the year, etc.
I have a feeling again someday we will be playing tu on the last week of the season. It'll be a while though.
2
Posted on 12/19/12 at 11:46 am to jlbasm
It was pretty freakin awesome. Only got to see it in person once...my senior year of HS.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 11:49 am to Cajun Ag
Bonfire was off-campus and unofficial for it's 25 years or so. The university moved it on-campus at some point in the 30s so that they could oversee it. The locals were pissed because cadets were stealing lumber off of their barns for it. At least that's what I remember hearing when I was in school.
As it was when I was in school, and I am class of '94, it was a disaster waiting to happen. On Fridays during push, we would go to parties and get loaded on everclear punch. We would go to midnight yell, and then we would work on bonfire... still shitfaced.
One of the dorms had a tradition, I think it was Moses Hall, where they would set their freshman on fire as an initiation to bonfire. The idea was to slather something flammable on them, let that burn for an instant, and then throw something along the lines of a towel on them to put out the fire before anything other than the flammable substance had burned. I think it was 1993 when something went wrong and one of their freshman wound up in the hospital with 2nd degree burns.
I worked on bonfire. I loved bonfire. We lost so much in the way of tradition and identity and nothing unified our campus like bonfire. There was just so much reckless and stupid shite going on, that I don't think it will ever come back.
A few years ago, I had a student worker who was involved with the off-campus bonfire. They are really doing things right. I think that it's a shame that the university bars organizations from participating. I don't see a reason that it some of the yell leaders want to go that they shouldn't be able to. The same goes with our football players, coaches, etc.
I think that off-campus bonfire could restore a lot of what has been lost and become a positive event for us.
As it was when I was in school, and I am class of '94, it was a disaster waiting to happen. On Fridays during push, we would go to parties and get loaded on everclear punch. We would go to midnight yell, and then we would work on bonfire... still shitfaced.
One of the dorms had a tradition, I think it was Moses Hall, where they would set their freshman on fire as an initiation to bonfire. The idea was to slather something flammable on them, let that burn for an instant, and then throw something along the lines of a towel on them to put out the fire before anything other than the flammable substance had burned. I think it was 1993 when something went wrong and one of their freshman wound up in the hospital with 2nd degree burns.
I worked on bonfire. I loved bonfire. We lost so much in the way of tradition and identity and nothing unified our campus like bonfire. There was just so much reckless and stupid shite going on, that I don't think it will ever come back.
A few years ago, I had a student worker who was involved with the off-campus bonfire. They are really doing things right. I think that it's a shame that the university bars organizations from participating. I don't see a reason that it some of the yell leaders want to go that they shouldn't be able to. The same goes with our football players, coaches, etc.
I think that off-campus bonfire could restore a lot of what has been lost and become a positive event for us.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 1:12 pm to KaiserSoze99
quote:
On the flip side, Bonfire represented the burning desire to beat the hell out of t.u.
Outsider perspective, but I think this point makes bringing it back a bridge to far. I don't doubt that it had a huge effect on fall semester. Football alone seems to make the fall a little more magical, so I can only imagine the run up to the Bonfire was a distillation of the environment football season generally conjures on campus. However, now that the main impetus is gone and the last official one ended in tragedy, an effort to shift the tradition to a new team that can never represent the same history would just cheapen a great memory.
Maybe instead of bringing back an old ritual it is time for a new one? They have to start somewhere.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 1:18 pm to LuciusSulla
quote:
Maybe instead of bringing back an old ritual it is time for a new one? They have to start somewhere.
The problem being you can't just create something out of nothing and say "poof, its a big deal tradition". At this point, I'm not sure anything really needs to 'replace' it. The fans are almost unanimous behind the move to the SEC, the season tickets are sold out (including the largest student section in the country), Sumlin/Heisman/whatever buzz is amazing, not sure what can or should be created that would do anything to improve that.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 2:19 pm to Cajun Ag
quote:
I think if off campus build 20 in a row with no accidents you might look at bringing it back.
I'm kind of the opinion that the reaction to the accident was overblown in a way. 90 years and several million man hours on a heavy duty construction project produced 12 deaths. That rate is lower than the commercial fishing industry. Working on bonfire is statistically safer than driving.
quote:
This is the type of attitude that will prevent a return to campus.
How so? Looking at the actual safeness of the construction instead of letting it be sensationalized?
Here's my back of the napkin math. 92 years of tradition. First cut typically had 1500 - 2000 people working for about 5 hours.
10,000 hours. Then you had fewer than 1000 people doing the bulk of the work the rest of the semester. Say they averaged 15 hours/week total.
That gives you 200,000 man hours to build one bonfire. Multiply times 92 years and you get 18.4 million man hours. Bonfire wasn't as extensive in the early years so let's adjust it down to 12 million man hours produced 12 deaths.
That's one death per million man hours worked.
The mining industry has a fatality rate 5 times this number. The commercial fishing industry has a fatality rate 10 times this number.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 2:23 pm to John Maplethorpe
quote:
That's one death per million man hours worked. The mining industry has a fatality rate 5 times this number. The commercial fishing industry has a fatality rate 10 times this number.
I think the point he may have been getting at is that fishing and mining are professions, whereas Bonfire is a bunch of college kids.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 2:32 pm to TreeKiller86
quote:
I would like to say I really appreciate the respect that our new conference and its members have shown for Bonfire.
I must admit, I have no respect for what happened.
I remember at the time, it was as if it were some terrible accident, when it was simply arrogant negligence at best.
A lot of schools had a bonfire tradition, including LSU at Homecoming. But now because the Aggies had to do everything bigger and better than everybody else, most of these bonfires have disappeared.
It was certainly a tragic loss of life, but it was as avoidable as it was inevitable.
I'll not mention it again.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 2:59 pm to WildTchoupitoulas
quote:
I must admit, I have no respect for what happened.
I think what he meant was that nobody is making classless, stupid jokes about it, unlike our past conference mates.
I agree that it was poorly handled, a show of arrogance, inevitable, and even foreseeable.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:03 pm to KaiserSoze99
quote:
It was certainly a tragic loss of life, but it was as avoidable as it was inevitable.
You must be some kind of sage then. It's easy to say this after the fact.
Before '99 nobody had ever been killed working on bonfire. Not 1. There was one related death when a student was killed in a traffic accident on the way back from cut.
Up until '99 you were more likely to get killed driving to bonfire then by working on it.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:23 pm to John Maplethorpe
I think he was more speaking to the fact of trying to make it bigger every year, and it was inevitable that constructing a bigger and bigger bonfire becomes very dangerous after a while. That is what I assume with the arrogance remarks but I may be wrong.
Regardless, anybody that thinks its coming back on campus will more than likely be disappointed. Especially in today's media environment and PC society, traditions that have even the remote perception of being unsafe will likely be scrapped at some point.
Regardless, anybody that thinks its coming back on campus will more than likely be disappointed. Especially in today's media environment and PC society, traditions that have even the remote perception of being unsafe will likely be scrapped at some point.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:34 pm to KaiserSoze99
quote:Maybe a good reason to quit it is that it only helped your burning desire to beat Texas 31% of the time. That's a 69% failure rate.
On the flip side, Bonfire represented the burning desire to beat the hell out of t.u.
By the way, we'll know that you've forgotten Texas when you quit using the obligatory aggie abbreviation "t.u". You can't forget UT and you know it.
This post was edited on 12/19/12 at 3:38 pm
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:38 pm to Big12fan
Have fun with Mack bitch 
Also why in the frick are you here? Go back to shaggy or some other Big 12 circle jerk site.
Also why in the frick are you here? Go back to shaggy or some other Big 12 circle jerk site.
This post was edited on 12/19/12 at 3:42 pm
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:47 pm to Big12fan
quote:
You can't forget UT and you know it.
I don't know, the way Tennessee is playing these days, one might consider them to be quite forgettable.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:50 pm to WildTchoupitoulas
quote:
You can't forget UT and you know it.
Wait...
You mean that we haven't forgotten about a team that, until this season, we had played since 1894. By Mobilehoma standards, you're a fricking genius.
We tried to keep them on the schedule, and DeLoss wants to part of it, so it's not our problem.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 3:57 pm to daboman of Aggieland
He's a Texas troll, he just changed his team because Oklahoma pounded that arse and it made him embarrassed.
This post was edited on 12/19/12 at 3:58 pm
Posted on 12/19/12 at 4:19 pm to Big12fan
What do you know? A fricking burnt-orange bitch that can't let Daddy go. Get used to those burnt-orange tears, cocksmoke. We're your frickING DADDY now and will be in perpetuity. The fact that a buttfricker like you is on the SEC Rant (not a Big Twatever board) is more indicative of your obsession with your Daddy, A&M. We're the "Joneses" now, you little bitch. Get your shine box, Burnt-Orange Balyor....or do you prefer A&M Lite?
Posted on 12/19/12 at 4:19 pm to Big12fan
you might want to see what the success rate was like once we stopped being an all male military college and when the scholarship limit was put in place, you know, the universally understood beginning of modern college football
Posted on 12/19/12 at 4:25 pm to WestCoastAg
Don't argue with that buttfricker. The lopsided head-to-head, which includes 17 wins in 22 games accumulated before the first game was ever played in College Station, is all these little cock jockeys have left. Leave these bitches with something to hold on to as their once-great program gets further marginalized by their institutionalized arrogance, and the success of Daddy. I don't want a suicide on our hands.
Posted on 12/19/12 at 4:27 pm to WestCoastAg
And you will refer to them as Burnt-Orange Baylor or A&M Lite.
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