Don’t try this at home

Klonie

WARNING. DO NOT ATTEMPT ANY OF THE THINGS DESCRIBED IN THIS COLUMN.

REALLY, I’M NOT KIDDING.

I imagine many of us have had, at one time or another, a really stupid idea or two. Perhaps it was a concept that we thought would either make us filthy rich, or would somehow make our lives easier. Or maybe it was just some hare-brained notion that seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe it was just for fun or to “see what would happen.”

When I was a kid of junior-high age, I had one or two brilliant notions – the kind that make your parents wish they had purchased more life insurance on you, the kind that has the emergency room doctor consulting “The Big Book O’ Weird” to try to figure out how to treat that type of injury.

One of the “see what would happen” ones involved a can of aerosol spray paint, some matches and ignoring the warning on the back of the can that clearly states “do not incinerate.”

“Wonder why not?” I said one day.

“Cause it will blow up, you moron, that’s why not,” my friend said.

“Well, not if we do it in a controlled environment,” I responded, picking up the can and marching toward the sandbar at the river.

“What are you going to do?” my friend asked nervously, using the same tone a patient might use when asking that same question during a first-time visit to a proctologist.

“Well, we’re going to bury this thing in the sand, light the nozzle and see if it really does blow up,” I answered.

At first the plastic nozzle just sort of flamed and flickered, kind of like a candle.

We backed away.

Then the can started to make this whistling noise, sort of like a skyrocket.

We backed away a little farther.

Then there was an extremely loud-pitched squeal.

We ran, full-bore, for cover.

We dived behind a tree right before the KA-WHOOOOOSH-KA-BOOM.

When we sheepishly stuck our heads out from behind the tree, the can was gone and there was a considerable-sized hole where it had been.

PLEASE REVIEW THE FIRST PARAGRAPH.

It was during these years that we became fascinated with the effect that heat has on various objects.

For example, we came up with another stupid idea involving the concept of hot-air balloons. We figured we were pretty smart, so how difficult could it be to build our own hot-air ball-oon?

Not a full-sized one, of course. What do you think we are, stupid? But an actual working scaled-down version.

We didn’t have access to the kinds of materials that professional balloonists use, so we tried the next best thing. We took an aluminum pie tin and crafted a makeshift balloon from some thin plastic. Then we filled the pie tin with – holy mackerel, we were idiots – LIGHTER FLUID.

Then we lit the panful of lighter fluid and held the makeshift balloon open over it and, believe it or not, it slowly but surely lifted off the ground. But turns out it wasn’t very airworthy. It became what the folks at NASA might term “unstable.”

Now the only difference — OK, not the ONLY difference, but a BIG difference — between us and NASA is that NASA installs self-destruct devices on its experimental aircraft. We were not afforded that luxury, a fact that became painfully obvious when the pie tin tipped over and spilled flaming lighter fluid on the roof of the garage.

AGAIN, I’M GOING TO HAVE TO INSIST THAT YOU REVIEW THE FIRST PARAGRAPH.

Needless to say, that day we learned a lot more than we wanted to know about the effect heat has on various objects.

And speaking of painfully obvious, perhaps I don’t need to tell you how my dad expressed his feelings about our scientific experiment later that night.

After we got the garage put out, of course.

(Klonie Jordan is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at klonie@gaffneyledger.com)