This one time
Some friends and I decided it would be an absolutely phenomenal idea to make a flamethrower. I say my friends, but I do them a disservice as I was in fact the architect and driving force behind the idea.

Having observed that spray paint creates a foot-long yellow flame when applied to a cigarette lighter, and that deodorant creates one about half the length and blue, I was much enamoured of the idea of sticking a metal pole on the nozzle and seeing if, by concentrating the blast of deodorant, I could create a weaponized spray can. I have no idea what I was expecting to achieve, to be honest.

In any case it ended up with one man at one end of a two-feet long hollow pole wielding his can of Lynx Africa, and another at the other end with a lit match, and myself holding the pole up with both hands and one glove on in a pathetic nod to safety. I haven't the first clue about the physics of what happened next but a firestorm erupted in front of me, a tongue of flame shooting from the match backwards towards the deodorant end of the pipe. My hands, of course, were neatly contained within the inferno and I dropped the pole like it was on fire, which it was.

One red and blistered left hand later, I had learned an important lesson in not being as thick as pig shit.
(StapMyVitals wouldn't mind a bit of that, Wed 29 Sep 2010, 16:40, Reply)