Going out and about in public with no electronic devices on my person. (My watch is not battery powered.)

Ahh, the good old days before the turn of this century

I've never had a ballast blow but I've seen a couple do it . I have had a capacitor release the magic  smoke inside my Norelco 180w SOX streetlight . Also , back in my teen years , I wired a 50w HPS ballast improperly causing the lamp to grenade into schrapnel all over my bed room !!  I wasn't allowed to mess with lights in my room after that one !

Oops   

Never had a problem here, the good old magnetic lumps here were built to last, I've known them still work after 50 years half submerged in water in the base of a lamp post 

In my area I’ve noticed several houses where commercial grade post top fixtures were being used in people’s yards.

There are a few GE Town and Country style fixtures at some houses… I’ve seen black ones and white ones, both HPS and MV.

There are a few houses in my neighborhood that have the GE space ship looking ones, I believe they’re all MV. One seems to have disappeared, and one sadly got the glass broken after hurricane Irma and got replaced with either an LED or CFL bucket light on a post top adapter.

There’s one house on the back way to the next town, and it has two GE Town and Country LED post tops on either side of the gate. There used to be a lot of wooden poles going down the driveway… it’s a very long driveway… and those had MH yardblasters on them.

That house sold a few months ago and I recently noticed all of those yardblasters got replaced with more GE post tops matching the ones at the gate! I was really surprised they would do that.

It must’ve cost a fortune? And where would the buy them? You can’t just order them at the home center or hardware store. lol

One of my neighbors a few doors down also has a black post top HPS fixture in their back yard by the lake… I haven’t seen it on in years though. Not sure how old it is, but it was likely installed by the previous owner or two. They used to also have an ITT cobra fixture somewhere in the yard… I remember it being put out for trash when I was a kid… I saw it riding my bike one day, of course my dad said “you are NOT taking that home.” 😂

For some reason they're not very popular. If you'd have been local, i'd gladly accept a couple. They're surprisingly hard to find here in *any* size or power rating.
I just found an 18w T8 in a garage fixture with remote ballast, very happy with that, but the total of 3000k halophosphate lamps i've encountered for sale in a full year, is 4 (including the garage lamp, excluding the Crompton ones that appear to have an additional phosphor).

That's in contrast to the dozens of 4000k ones i could've gotten, but i don't care much about those...

 All of my clearbanders consist of /DX MV , /D HPS & /C Metal Halide .

 One of the local schools had a pretty major fire a few years ago which was traced to an old ballast in a fluorescent fixture .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVZ2P0KsLic

Sadly right now I can't hear it with my hearing in a bad place, but I can feel the sound wave bass vibrating thru my headset

I am at the point now to where I am happy to see HPS being phased out.  To me the Orange light is not very useful.  I would have rather they kept things MV but when HPS is replaced with 3000-4000K LED, it looks great. 

Smashed up several hundred used and EoL 3000K & 4100k T8s in the dumpster.   
A contractor changed out all the tubes in one building from 3000K to 4100K.  I thought they were going to upgrade to LED, but they decided to go one more round with fluorescents, for which I am glad.  The 4100K look good in this particular church building because it recently got new blue carpeting which reflect the 4100k much better than the old 3000K.  The old 3000K were mostly 2nd and 3rd gen Sylvania Ecologic/Octron & 2nd Gen GE, as well as some 1st gen Philips Altos.  (the Philips were EoL a long time ago but were high up in an area that I could not access) 

They installed the latest gen of T8 4100k from GE which, like Philips and Sylvania latest gen, don't last as long as previous generations, sadly.  It's the manufacturers way of encouraging people to go with more expensive LED, I suppose.  <sigh> Though I do like how bright these 900 series are, and that they are not as dim at cold start up, as the 700 and 800 series were. 

I've personally witnessed a number of T12 and T8 ballast failures.  The T8s were always the electronic.  I've turned on fixtures and POOF- the fuse inside blew.  Heard it.  I've also seen a few that failed when I had them on.  Have had a few Advance T8s and early generation Sylvania T8 ballasts that would smoke and get very hot when they failed. 

As for T-12 Magnetic.. oh man do those things go!  fire hazard.  Those tar burners would get very hot and a few would flash arc when they failed, the others just got super hot and dripped tar out the ends and when I would go to change them, there was heat damage to the fixture from how how they got.  And they smelled HORRIBLE.