Abstract: The aim of this talk is to explore a rather explosive topic, namely what fireworks, balloons, and singularities  happen to have in common. All three can be "blownup". This talk will focus on blowing up singularities of curves in the plane, which is a valuable method of resolving singularities such as self intersections or cusps. I will touch on the generalization of this, which involves blowing up schemes. We will not get to blowing up balloons, that will have to be saved for a future talk.