Drink Rum

I haven't done a Friday's Amazing Retard Trophy in a very, very long time. Today, the 13th of the Fridays... I've got a new one.

It's me.

I know I usually reserve my bitter angst and scorn for heads of state or assorted members of popular culture, but I think I get the award this week for truly acting like a retard.

So last night, I received a shipment of frozen meat (thanks Phil!) packed in it's own styrofoam cooler and everything. I eagerly cracked the cooler open to behold the wonderment of pound upon pound of glorious glorious meat. I was a bit distracted on the phone while I was unpacking the cooler and for some reason missed the green wording in a huge font that said, "WARNING - DRY ICE! DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT GLOVE!". So I just reached on in there and grabbed me a handful of dry ice. I feel sorry for the person on the other end of the phone because I'm sure my vocal explosion couldn't have been a comfort to one's ear.

That in and of itself... not retarded. Stupid... but not retarded.

It was when I had the, "Hey! I've got a pound of dry ice to play with!" moment that things began to unravel.

I plopped a small piece in to a mug of hot water and giggled insanely as it started smoking and making my Alice in Wonderland coffee mug look like something out of a mad scientist's lab.

"Tee-hee", I said.

If dry ice in hot water looked cool in a coffee mug, I sure did think it'd look cooler in a tinted liquor bottle! Luckily, I had an empty Grand Marnier bottle handy. I filled it up with hot water and plopped in a few chunks of dry ice. (Also, leather sword gauntlets are the most perfect dry ice handlers ever.) So the Grand Marnier bottle erupted in bubbly smoke and fun.

"Tee-hee-hee", I said.

And then I thought... I bet this would look super uber cool if I were to cork the bottle up so when I uncork it nifty smoke would come out. So I put the cork in the bottle and plugged it tight.

Now... anyone whose taken physics is probably thinking something along the lines of... "hey, you've got an endothermic reaction going on there... as that piece of solid dry ice turns itself into a gas... it's expanding... exponentially... and you just sealed that expanding gas inside a bottle... a glass bottle.

Let's take a brief trip in the way back machine... about 17 years ago I had decided that a good use of my time was to take a CO2 cartridge and place in into a 16oz Coke bottle and then put the cap back on it. When the CO2 was pierced, it would bubble and such. Every now and then it would stop bubbling, but if I tapped the glass bottle, it'd start bubbling again. Well after about 15 minutes, the bubbling stopped and went to tap the glass... and I tapped it and it exploded. My face was about 4 inches from the bottle at the time as I was looking in to see if more bubbles were en route. Boom.

I remember not being able to see. Everything was black and I remember hearing the explosion and being very wet. I figured I'd blinded myself... but I hadn't. When the bottle blew my eyes shut and stayed shut... once I opened them both and saw that I could still see, I was happy. I went into my bathroom to get a towel and that's when I saw that I have several pieces of glass in my face and was bleeding quite a bit. Three pieces were within an inch or two of my eyes. I got some tweezers and spent a very long time fishing glass out of skin. Not pleasant.

So the Grand Marnier bottle starts hissing.... like a very angry cobra. And I get the flashback of the exploding Coke bottle. In slow motion I reached for the cork to release some pressure before it blew, but I was too late. There was an amazingly loud boom... it sounded like someone fired off a shotgun in my kitchen. I hit the floor (hard) and then something hit me in the head. It was the cork. The Grand Marnier bottle was still intact but had fired its cork like a cannon straight into the ceiling and then on to my head.

Sadly... I'm now out of dry ice.