Fire
was likely the single most fun thing when I was young (okay, besides lego).
I remember looting my friends parents' shed for bottles containing flammable fluids and pooring it out on the sand in the bushes and setting fire to it. Ooh the magic of the flames....
Or pooring ethanol into ant nests and seeing the tiny charcoaled corpses curl up. Later we discovered bunsen burners and magnesium.

But the apex was always New Year's eve in The Hague, notorious for its riots with the police and setting fire to huge piles of christmas trees, pallets and cars. In the weeks before New Years' eve, we would make bombs out of heavy fireworks and metal pipes. The trick was to stay away from the police cars and even helicopters once you let one go off. In school breaks, we sometimes threw one of these in the pond behind the school, causing dead fish to come float to the surface. Our maximum fish count then was about 85. Sad, yeah.
But about the Eve fires....I'm talking fires 60 feet high here. Everything up to garden fences, cars and whole house interiors were sacrificed to the flames. Once a 'slightly' pissed bloke threw a whole barrel of petrol on an already huge fire, causing it to explode of course, knocking out the windows of dozens of surrounding houses and flats (the closest one a couple of hundred metres away) and making the mailbox lid at my mates house clapper. He lived about ten blocks further on. Even the mayor of The Hague came over to see what had happened that night. It was the biggest and hottest fire I had ever seen. I was sure the main reason the mayor came over was because he wanted to see it for himself. He was sniggering I tell you.
( mediocre ha ha ha, you're reading this, Fri 4 Nov 2005, 9:54, Reply)