Reading enipla’s thread about accidental near self emolation made me think that there are probably more than 2 Dopers with “fire folly” stories. Here’s mine, post yours:
I was late getting off work and had about 20 minutes to eat, shower, change and get to where I was supposed to meet my wife and kids. I ran into the house, threw 2 Pop Tarts in the toaster and took off my clothes on my way to the shower. I started the water running in the shower and was headed through the kitchen to put my clothes in the laundry. I didn’t even notice the smoke but the 2’ high flames coming out of the toaster did catch my attention. I also noticed that the wooden shelf above the toaster was burning nicely and the flames were closing in on the curtains. Thinking quickly I unplugged and grabbed the toaster to remove the source of the flames. Flaming toaster in hand, I headed for the door until I realized that I was naked. A naked man with a flaming toaster may not attract attention in your neighborhood, but it certainly will in mine. Not having time to expain to the police why they should not arrest me on a “flaming public nudity” charge, I sat the toaster in the middle of the kitchen floor where it could merrily spew fire while I got a towel and beat out the flames on the wooden shelf before the curtains caught. Once the shelf was out I turned my attention back to the fire breathing toaster. Pop Tarts burn a long, long time. Amazing, really. The firewood industry should be worried. Using my best “man logic” I got a pan out of the cupboard, put the toaster flambe in the pan, filled a pitcher with water and poured the water on the toaster in the pan. 'Cause I wouldn’t want to get the linoleum floor all messy with frosted cinnamon ash water. Never mind that I had just melted a good square foot of linoleum in the middle of the floor. I was wondering idlely if my wife would notice the hole in the linoleum and whether I could drag the table over 4 or 5 feet to cover it up when I noticed I was having a hard time breathing. Smoke had filled the house from ceiling to about 2 feet above floor level. Burnt Pop Tarts stink mightily. Maybe that’s why the firewood people don’t fear the competition. I opened every window in the house and turned on the attic fan. By that time I had no chance to meet the family, so I got my shower and sat down to watch TV. I’ll have you know that when my wife got home she paid absolutely no homage to my heroics to save the house, opting instead to laugh histerically and make fun of my cooking abilities. This is the same woman who set a pot holder on fire and ruined a perfectly good kettle. One would think you’d have to work pretty hard to set a pot holder on fire. I mean, they’re made to withstand heat. But, no, she just laughed. There were no injuries except to my wallet, which was hit with bills for a new toaster (with “anti jam auto shutoff technology”), paint, and hardwood floors. I now prefer raw Pop Tarts. They’re less expensive.
Last year, at Porkapalooza/PorkDope, I was teaching some willing dopers (such as thinksnow and Beadalin) to breathe fire. I soaked a torch in lamp oil, lit it, took a goodly swig of lamp oil from the bottle, and proceeded to breathe out a fireball.
Halfway through it, one of my non-Doper friends looked and said painfully, “Ugh … just watching that makes my ass hurt.” I found that funnier than it had any right to be and began spluttering.
Spluttering does not project flammable liquids outward with as much force as spraying. As a result, the jet of flame burned back towards my face, singing my beard and eyebrows. For some reason, everyone found that hysterically funny.
This took palce when I was but a youngun. Our small town had no garbage pickup and a volunteer fire department. It was common to burn what garbage one could in a metal barrel in the back yard. One fine, but breezy, summer day my mom decided to surprise my dad by burning the trash while he was at work. She filled the barrel, lit the garbage and went about her business inside the house. A short time later she heard sirens. They sounded close by and getting closer. She looked outside just in time to see the volunteer fire department arrive to put out the fire which raged in the woods in back of our house. Apparently an ember had gotten out of the barrel and started a brush fire which reached the woods. A neighbor had phoned in the alarm. Now mom understood why dad always stayed outside and watched the trash burn. Dad was most assuredly surprised when he got home and found the volunteer firemen cleaning up. Especially since he was a long time member of the V.F.D. I don’t think those guys ever let him live that one down.
Hubby and I had been married about a year, and I had recently been confined to a wheelchair and had trouble walking. I got really REALLY sick with bronchitis, and Hubby decided to cook for me. He puts on some oil to heat and I decide to crawl in the shower so the hot steam can help me breathe.
Ya know what? When you have NO sense of smell, smoke and steam look a lot alike! After a while, I can’t breathe and go stumbling through the house, breathing thru my wet towel. The pan is on fire on the stove and Hubby is nowhere to be found. I put a lid on the pan and put the pan in the sink, open the back door and the front door, and sit on the front yard in my robe, surrounded by cats, coughing my lungs out as black smoke billows from the house.
After about 30 minutes Hubby pulls up the drive-way. He thought I was asleep and went to the grocery store, forgetting about the pan of oil heating on the stove.
He was very apologetic… but it seemed rather “convenient”. I’ve since made sure I have less life insurance that he does.
As a youth I found out the hard way that gasoline doesn’t burn… but it’s fumes sure as hell do. With some friends we’d cut brush all one summer until we had a low but wide pile that easily took up about half a football field. One night we decided to burn both it and a couple of cases so we hauled out several gallons of gas. We liberally saturated the center and then crawled back over some of the stumps and such a few feet and threw in matches until it lit. Well, most of the fumes had floated outward along the ground like a bad fog and to our brutal horror flames began to race past us and warm our hineys. Laughing and screaming at the same time we scrambled back to safety and proceeded to enjoy the biggest private bonfire I ever did see.
Later on, as one of my friends was in the middle of some rambling story, an aerosol container somewhere in the pile blew up and came screaming like a rocket and hit the friend right in his drunken chest. He looked down for a second at his impacted tit, opened his mouth, turned like a 200 lb. ballerina and ran screaming directly into a large trailer. He bounced off, backed up and ran at it again, this time tripping over the trailer tongue and flying past us in the air… still screaming. I don’t know what happened after that, as I was laying in the dirt going into convulsions.
Poptarts and toasters are dangerous. I think the Dave Barry found that the strawberry ones shot flames more then the other flavors.
I don’t remember what I was cooking but it might have been heating oil for something else. Ruined our cast iron skillet 'tho. It was the wife that left bone on to cook for the dog and then we left for something. Came back to smoke alarms wailing, a house full of smoke and a cat and dog that probably sat there and watched the whole thing. Lucky for us we just had soot on the range hood and a bottomless pan. The fire had melted the aluminum pot.
Hmm, I remember a long time ago when I was still high school, and my older brother had just moved into his own apartment. It was cool, because I could go over there and drink beer. He also had a fine collection of alcohol. One day, sitting around bored as usual, we were talking about the flammable qualities of grain alcohol (Everclear). There was empty coke bottle (yes there used to be GLASS coke bottles). My all too brilliant brother poured about an inch of Everclear in the bottom of the coke bottle and wanted to see it burn in there. He then lit a match and tossed it in the bottle. It was really pretty cool… there was a fire that hovered in the neck of the bottle, almost like a candle.
Well, my brother, never being one to leave good enough alone, decided what he really wanted to see was the fire burning at the bottome of the bottle. He figured the only way to do that was to get the flame to go down there. It what turned out to be mistake of the century, he took an almost full bottle of Everclear and poured it into the coke bottle. His logic is that the flame will follow the Everclear into the Coke bottle.
Boy was he wrong! In what can only be described
as a maltov cocktail gone bad, flames basically shoot out of the bottle. He does what any smart person would do. He throws the bottle across the room!
We managed to get all the fires out. It was a close one though, I thought for sure the fire departmetn was going to have to be called in on that one!
In the dorm, one of the guys procured a strip of magnesium. We decided to burn it in my room, in one of those heavy glass four-cornered ashtrays. We lit it, and much oohing and aahing ensued.
BOOM! The entire ashtray explodes, spraying us with shrapnel and possibly burning magensium. Much panic…
And here I thought, just before I clicked this thread that there would be some room to describe what has been called, “The Flaming Nipple Trick” that I have done…but I guess that is for another time…
