I could solve all your problems....
I do a lot of fire juggling, so much of my free time is taken up with accidentally setting fire to myself then rising (unsteadily) from the ashes saying "I think I know what went wrong!".

Recently I decided to try fire breathing. I filled my mouth with neat parraffin, held a burning torch in from of my mouth, sprayed the parraffin from my mouth... and blew the flame out. None of my mocking friends realise how difficult it is to extinguish a large, steady flame using nothing but paraffin vapour.
(Not very much gravitas at all, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 15:05, Reply)

I set fire to myself
I had a large can of lighter fluid, and not much to do at the time, so as any fule kno, you cna put a little lighter fluid on your hand, light it, and watch it burn off, while leaving your hand unsinged.

Cleverly, though, I thought that while a little lighter fluid might make a little flame, a BIG amount might make a BIG flame. Unimpeachable logic, I feel.

So I poured a load of fluid over my hand, till I could cup it, and set fire to it. For ther first few seconds, everything was cool, until I noticed that my hand was getting hot, which made me jerk my hand a bit. This in turn made the pool of lighter fluid run down my hand and down my arm. This wasn't good at all, as there was now a streak of flame running from my hand to my arm, encasing my hand totally, and partially covered by my jumper. Because I couldn't see my burning arm inth ejumper, I panicked, and started waving my hand around, which started throwing fire around the room. Luckily wiser counsels prevailed and told me to smother the flames with my jumpersleeve, which worked, although hair is reluctant to grow back on the arm now...
(Swandive, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 15:02, Reply)

Nasal Inferno
Butane lighter gas sprayed into mouth (not advisable), then blown over an open flame. Result: One burning head, 2 burning curtains, and worst of all, I burnt the hair up my nostrils which I could smell for days. Luckily my friends came to the rescue and laughed the flames out.
(POBBER, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:45, Reply)

2 house fires in 2 weeks
I've had a death defying start to the year.

Split up with my girlfirend of 5 years 2 days before new year.

Crashed my car into a wall a week later.

Next week I came home from the pub and put some food in the microwave. timer is broken and it staeyd on - I passed out on the couch and woke up at 10:30 am with the microwave on fire. Room full of smoke and me feeling very ill.. took all day to clean it up.

If the bag that was next to the vents (and the scorch marks up the wall) had ignited I'd have bought the farm.

And the worst thing is that I did something even more stupid the following weekend.

Again I'd come home from the pub a bit hammered - Only this time I was using a mini blow torch to light cigarettes since I'd broken all of my lighters. Unfortunately I must have passed out wilst the blowtorch was still burning and dropped it on the table next to me.

All my remotes all burnt to a crisp. mobile and house phones gone.. Burning plastic splattered onto my arm and all across radiator, walls, even on the ceiling. I actually found the TV remote had been blasted 10 feet across the room when the blow torch exploded... lucky thing was that I normally have a can of lighter fluid on the table - but it was sat on the floor that night.

So I woke up and the whole rooms black with smoke. I'm black as coal. I'm still cleaning up the soot a month later.

Worst thing was that I'd met a german girl that night and she'd given me her phone number - which was on my now rather crispy mobile.... Got her number back after a few calls to her friends luckily...

but it turned out that after seeing her a few times she told me her boyfriend was coming over from germany ! hence losing the local boy pretty sharpish...

beyotch !
(TheGoodStuff, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:38, Reply)

Yep, but it was the ants fault..
I was in a friends house, playing with lighter gas (spraying gas on clothes, then lighting it - laughing at each other running round the garden) - when we noticed some ants - we sprayed them with gas to see what happened... They froze, then thawed out and wandered off. This intrigued us, and remembering seeing ants in my friends front room went to freeze them. Found the ants around the fireplace, started spraying them and they froze. More appeared so I had the great idea of doing a wide spray across the whole of the fire - which I did. I then found the pilot light... This was obvious from the huge ball of flame that enveloped me, the rug, the fireplace... I fall backwards in flames - my friend is rushing round putting the carpet out and cursing me - I'm trying to put myself out and cursing the idiot brain I've got. We managed to get everything doused, then spent the afternoon trying to get the smell of burnt carpet out of the house and cleaning the mantelpiece. His mum could tell something had happened, but never knew what - we managed to persuade her the smell was us burning food in the kitchen, by accident..
Then there was the time we blew another friend up with fireworks - but that's not really a fire story....
(thebadangel, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:32, Reply)

Lighting Fires
On the 8th day of a recent quest to the North Pole which i took with a few random friends (Funded by my Aunt Bet as an early Christmas treat), we found ourselves at the point of starvation. My quick thinking saved us. I used my uncanny knack for animal impressions to lure a seal from the Ice beneath us. Using the sole from my shoe and an egg whisk i was able to create a small fire and cook the said seal saving the day, my hungry friends and also getting myself a shag for my efforts.....I'm great!
(Mapper, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:20, Reply)

Never on purpose
Sunday school got cancelled on a wednesday morning, I had to get back to a friend, as my mum was not home. We must have been both about 9 or 10. Feeling a bit peckish we decided to cook ourselves some flambee bananas. In the pan went the bananas,and we decided it would be a good idea to put the extractor on, that way the nanny would not know what we were up to. We decided to warm up the rum before setting it alight since we'd seen our parents do it, so in goes the rum, in goes the match, the next thing we know, there are huge flames rising up from the pan and into the extractor.
A few years earlier we also managed to set her parents new car on fire while playing with the cigarette lighter, they were not o pleased about that.
We once had a power cut so I decided to put a candle in my parents bedroom, I only realised where I'd put it when I heard my mum screaming, I had left it under a lampshade, which then went on to catch fire.
(sandrine, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:07, Reply)

Building fires
Never build an impromptu fire following 3 litres of Frosty Jacks on a crappy concrete path. We did one night. The fire kept on blasting apart. We just kicked the embers back in and threw more stolen wood/tables on top. We hadn't a clue that the concrete path was basically made up of air pockets, and I crawled to the fire to light my cigarette (thought I was v.v.clever at the time). I didn't catch fire because the bits went flying so far. Big holes in t-shirt though. The next morning we were giggling about the exploding fire and had a look at the path. It was just a crater in the garden. Not only that, but the back of the house was pretty much all black. Funnily enough, the landflord gave us all our deposits back!
(ell, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 14:03, Reply)

Exploding room
My folks dragged me off to Camelot for the day. my brother (older than me)was left at home. He found a table lighter (big piece of rock, with lighter in it) and decided to fill it up. he filled it and shook it. Nothing - empty?? Kept on filling it. Shook it. Empty! He kept going, filling, shaking, filling, shaking. The room had filled with gas, and upon testing said lighter, the room 'blew up', removing facial hair, hair to hairline, burning face etc. He ran to the sink and stuck his head under the tap, promptly knocking himself out. What a sorry site - a boy with no hair, burned and bruised, trying to fit his face into a bowl of water.
Fool.
Oh yeah, and it was about the time of year he needed to have photographs taken for the yearly school bus pass.
(ell, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:56, Reply)

A person i know
Who will remain namless. Got home one day tired and hungry after a day at work. Hmmmm what to eat thought the nameless individual, 'Chips' was the reply.(you can see where im going now). Anyway the chips were frying away nicely when our hapless hero decides to see what televisual delights are on in the next room. So the telly was turned on and much to our friends delight a game of cricket is on, after about 20 mins of intense sporting action a strange smell wafts across the living room and the hungry cricket fan goes to investigate- result one huge inferno where the kitchen used to be and a £10,000 bill.
( Terry Oblong There's nobody here but us chickens on, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:50, Reply)

Woopsie doo...
One day when the folks were out (I was about 12), I decided that I was cold so wanted to put the fire on. But this was a "real" fire not a gas fire back then. So....confident that I had seen my dad do it a few times, I grabbed handfulls of newspapaer and a few bits of kindling (not enough it turned out) and shoved them in the fire. Then lit the lot. Cut to lots of smouldering paper and smoke but no warmth...and my mam coming up the drive. Being a resourseful little so and so, I decided the best way out of this was to run to the garage and use the small fire extinguisher that was in there to "dispose of the evidence". Sprayed said extinguisher in fire place which caused lots of little bits of burning paper to fly ALL OVER the lounge. Try explaining that away. No damage caused though (remarkably!). Also set light to a wastepaper bin in the lounge - the type surrounded by felt to match in with furniture. Didn't match after the bin melted and the felt went black tho...

Sorry for the long post but my arsonist past has to be revealed!
(ruttiger, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:48, Reply)

I was one of about three people that my grandfather actually remembered.
He would forget most people existed the moment they walked out of the room.
I kind of liked that he would say "Alex!! Have you joined the army yet?!" each time he saw me. At least he recognised my face.
For this reason, I thought I would make him happy during his final few years by signing up to the C.C.F. (Combined Cadet Force) Army Section... thus enabling me to say "Why yes i have Granddad!" the next time we saw each other.
Now i should explain that I didnt't really want to sign up... i only did it to make him happy.
Anyway... as expected, he was thrilled that i had joined, so much so i half expected a salute each time i said hello to him.
A couple of years later when he'd finally had his chips and popped his clogs, i was left drowning in the overwelming homo-eroticism that is the British Army CCF. I didn't really want to be a cadet anymore. However, something i failed to realise when i signed up, was that you have to be a member for at least 4 years (so they told me 2 years into it), so i requested a tranfer into the RAF section instead.
It turns out the RAF CCF is even more GAY than the Army CCF, so i made it my goal to be chucked out of it as fast as possible.
Here's where the fire comes in.
We went on a 3 day expedition on a proper forces training ground somewhere in derbyshire i think.
We had been supplied with 3 day ration packs and a bivawac for sleeping in.
We were marched in squad formation to the area our sections camp was based, which was fine, except I was at the back of squad with three of my friends, who were just as bored with the whole thing as me...
We stopped marching. Everyone else carried on without noticing and within 20 seconds we were stood alone in the woods watching our squad left-right-left it around the corner.
Oh what fun we were going to have.
As predicable as can be, we set about making a camp for ourselves. This consisted of a four shoody bivawacs and a fucking MASSIVE fire... and that's about it.
We kept the fire going for a day and half with a well-thought out fire wood collection rota, this worked well, as at one point the flames were three times the height of me. it was great.
Now I think back, it's amazing we didn't get found sooner... but halfway through the second day we were discovered.
A female american CCF NCO who we knew from school walked into our camp just as one of my friends was completing his 6th "Watch me jump through the fire" routine and screamed "WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN DOING?!?! EVERYONE IS LOOKING FOR YOU!!" apparantly, the weekends activities had been cancelled and our entire squad had been made to march around searching for us. We were not popular.
"I'LL BE BACK IN A MINUTE... DONT GO ANYWHERE!" the NCO bellowed.
Yeah right. As soon as she was round the corner we were all either jumping on or pissing in the fire trying to put it out.
And would you beleive it... it worked. The fire went out and we threw earth all over it... and you really couldn't tell there had been one. We packed up the bivawacs as quick as we could and just ran in the opposite direction to the NCO.
We rounded a corner about 100 metres away and lay over the crest of a hill to watch what would happen when the NCO came back.
A couple of minutes later she returned... with 4 very official looking army blokes in tow.
I was giggling to much to realise how much we'd pissed these people off and watched with great satisfaction as the NCO started making "BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND! THEY WERE RIGHT HERE!! THE FIRE WAS HUGE!!" body language.
We thought we'd got away with it when one of the scary army blokes rummaged around in some leaves and pulled out a smoking twig no more than 4 inches long. That was it. We were fucked.

"GET YOUR ASSES OVER HERE!!" he yelled randomly into the air, obviously hoping we were still in the area.
Well... this is it lads. We all got up and sheepishly walked back to the camp and got the most severe bollocking of my life off one of the now aubergine-faced army chaps.
Myself and Tom, as the biggest members of our breakaway squad, were made to walk 10 miles with a massive plastic container as punishment.
For the first 5 miles, we thought it was a piece of piss and were laughing about how the Forces were so GAY, but then after arriving at our destination, were told to fill the container with water and take it back to where we had just come from.
That sucked. I dont know if you are aware of this, but massive containers full of water are REALLY FUCKING HEAVY it turns out.
Hours later, we arrived back at the camp with the fucking heavy water container and were made to pour it all over the ground where we had lit the fire. It was pointless... the fire had been out for hours by this point but that didn't stop them making us do it.
In retrospect, i suppose it was a great punishment in regards to the crime we had committed so i don't hold any grudges. Anyway, it is a great memory of mine so thanks CCF.
Best of all, after those 10 miles, i was never made to do CCF activities again.

GOAL ACHIEVED!
( biscuits_alive taste my rainbow, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:42, Reply)

Fire Face
After a busy day at work I got home and as with any good boy my feet and shoes were giving of an ungodly stench of death. I thought it would be sensible to spray some deoderant into them to remove the smell, this bit worked, what i didn't expect was the end of my ciggy to break off and fall into the shoe thus giving me a shoe filled with fire. In a panic I did what I thought was the sensible thing and blew into the shoe to put out the fire. Physics caught me out and with nowhere to go my breath just turned round and came back out with it's firey friend and burnt off half a beard and my eyebrows and lashes. Oh how i laughed.
( The Doctor Why is it big and why is there grass?, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:41, Reply)

bah
due to subliminal messaging, i was persuaded to start a fire in a disco. I also set fire to a Taco Bell in the early hours of monday morning.
(Market Man, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:38, Reply)

Long time ago
At a friend's house and we were larking around with those lame indoor fireworks. Anyroad, I tell Tom that I know a trick with safty matches. Put match, head down on striking bit of box, flick and watch in slow-mo horror as the lit match traces a graceful arc across the room of Tom's mum's quite posh house, and lands directly in some pampas grass on the mantlepiece.

Woof. Dry pampas grass goes up like a bastard.

Later, after we'd finished bricking ourselves, we discover a small burnt circle on the painting that was on the wall behind the pampas.

I've been towing that secret around now for 17 odd years, feels great now.
( bowdie, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:35, Reply)

fire
It all happened about 5 years ago, while I was living in halls in edinburgh. There were about 6 or 7 of us sitting in this small rom in halls smoking, all a bit the worse for wear. My friend Radi (tall skinny bloke, always stoned and never moves quickly) was sitting cross legged filling up his lighter with the can of gas and lighter balanced between his knees. His girlfriend was sitting next to him, playing with a lighter. Anyway, Radi slips, and gets a big damp patch of lighter gas on his trousers, in the groin area.
Colin, then said, as a joke "oh just burn it off".
Immediatley Radis girlfriend leaned over and sparked the lighter, setting fire to her boyfriends crotch. The flames were a good 60cm high, with a line of fire from knee to knee.
Radi started screaming and flailing his arms. His girlfriend saw that her byfriends crotch was going up in flames, and thought this a bad thing. She decided to put out the fire, but with her fists. So radi has big flames coming out of his crotch, and is being punched in the balls by his girlfriend. an image I will never forget. Once the flames were out, all was silent for about half a minute, when all the girls in the room started to giggle. None of the blokes thought it was funnny - more scary.
(blank, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:31, Reply)

it seemed like a good idea...
one new years eve it seemed like a good idea to kick a big burning box at each other.

luckily it wasn't going to spread as we were on a frozen beach
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:29, Reply)

oh, the joys of fire
You ever seen these fireplace lighters that are about 30cm long ? Well, we had one of these and found it much fun to tease people with.

A girl in our group had fallen asleep on an armchair and we had great mirth waving this long lighter from afar, to see if the heat would wake her up.

Well, it didn't. But her hair did catch fire !! After the initial spong from the group, we where soon wacking her around the head trying to beat out the flames. This woke her up, and she had no idea why several people where battering her around the head :)

She was none to happy when she realised we had burnt almost half her hair off. Woopsie.
(JBoom, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:16, Reply)

Hammered at the Reading Festival one year...
...I stooped down to tie my shoelace next to our roaring campfire. Something made me look across to the base of the fire - where I saw a lighter. Just as I was about to ask who had put a lighter on the fire (and no, i didn't think to move away) the bugger exploded. With a quite impressive (so I'm told) noise/blast radius. Goodbye fringe and eyebrows.

PS. First post!
(Super Oaf Petit filous?, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:12, Reply)

Heh
In high school everyone had those BIC lighters that could be modified to produce huge flames, you probably know the trick, take off the metal hood, lift the little regulator and rotate the gear that controls the flame's height...

One day this really cute girl wearing a coat with fur on the sleeves asked me for a light.. I forgot to warn her that my lighter was slightly modified... Her right sleeve caught on fire, she fell to the floor and her friend started stomping on her arm to put out the fire... Amazingly enough she didn't get hurt from the fire, but needless to say I don't modify lighters anymore.
(ben___, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:07, Reply)

Neighbours... (edit: just realised this is a bit lame - it was funnier at the time!)
Our neighbours decided to burn some garden refuse with the aid of 5 litres of petrol. The poured the majority of the petrol onto the pile of leaves and then trickled a fuse of petrol up the garden to the front of their house. They lit it and the force of the petrol catching was enough to knock them all off their feet and made our house shake - and it rained leaves for about an hour.
(Crazyshark, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 13:06, Reply)

Here we go again....
Sorry about this BUT I have spotted a number of flaws in Mappers recent post.

1) The destruction of Pompei was caused by the eruption of a nearby volcano, NOT his great-great grandad accidentally setting fire to a small bush.

2) Assuming that there are 30 years between each generation (ie Mappers Dad was 30 when Mapper was born) then his G-G-Grandad would have been alive in the mid Nineteenth century and not 79 AD as stated. Indeed if he was alive in 79 AD this would mean that (if an average human lives to the age of 75) each member of Mappers decendants lived for almost 417 years.

3) The only known being to have lived past 413 years was the Queen Mother, and for the last 6 years of her 'life' she was replaced in public by a cyborg. This replicant was cunningly created from egg boxes and ready brek by the A-list celebrity Rod Hull (of Emu fame).

Will Mapper please stop posting blatant lies, and also stop using the word 'wanker'. I dislike the word 'wanker' and have never used the word 'wanker' in any of my posts and intend never to do so.

I now prefer brussel sprouts to peas.
( insignificantsnivellinglittleturd I Like Peas, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:52, Reply)

HELP HELP
-I'M ON FIRE!
(foxdaniel, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:51, Reply)

A mate of mine...
last year went to sleep leaving some candles burning, and managed to burn her room down - losing all her possessions, her boyfriends laptop (that she had her dissertation on), and resulting in her and her housemates having to move because the house was uninhabitable. I bet the people who were supposed to be moving in a couple of months later weren't too impressed :)
(basshedz2, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:29, Reply)

Lighting a fire
My great great grandad took a trip to Naples in roughly 79 A.D. which his mother very kindly paid for as a special birthday treat. The accident prone twat managed to set fire to a small thicket of gorse bush, resulting in the destruction of the total population of the nearby hamlet of Pompei..... What a wanker huh?
(Mapper, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:27, Reply)

a mate of my ex had a penchant for mooning
particularly when the ex was on the phone to his mother.
On one memorable occasion the ex had his lighter handy. As the bloke beared all, click went the lighter and set his arse hair on fire.
Cue howls of pain from him and much laughter by the rest of us.
( Lynxkitten, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:26, Reply)

fire
when i was at school we had this one old chemistry teacher who liked to burn stuff, so we thought we'd be clever and try it ourselves. Using a gas tap and a lighter, the flame was amazing and started to burn the varnish on teh bench, when he saw he slame the gas cut off valve and no one was allowed to use gas in the school until a plummer had checked it.
(Bored, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:25, Reply)

Puppadums give off a surprisingly impressive flame if you leave them under the grill to long.
I can't match the serious pyromania demonstrated by most on here. I did have a bunsen burner lit up the side of my head once though - just a bit of singeing, no serious burns...
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:15, Reply)

My Ex
Who for the purpose of this post I shall refer to as "Harriet" (for that was her name), left two tealight candles burning on top of my flatmates rental telly, which we had in my room while he was on holiday. Suffice to say, I woke up the next morning coughing and surrounded by little wisps of flying black plastic stuff, the TV spouting flames at least a foot high.

I asked her to go over to other side of the room and turn on the light and I proceeded to extinguish the flames using merely my own breath. I then felt a bit faint and my other flatmate came down to find out what was going on. He saw the burnt out telly and rolled his eyes, saying "You do know Jerry will be back in about an hour, don't you?".

TIP: Do not try to put out a fire with just your lung capacity.
( Bud Muhnquai Update your profile or fuck off, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:11, Reply)

Just remembered another one
and this one was actually all my fault. When I was still in school, me and some mates found a 'friendly' off-license that believed our really shoddy and obviously fake IDs that we'd made. So, every Friday we'd go home from school, get changed, meet up down the shops at about 4.30 and buy as much booze as we could afford.

One drunken Friday evening we decided to harass some of our acquaintances who used to go to this shitty youth club nearby. We quickly got bored and took off, and walked a short distance up the road before turning into an alleyway which took us between the playing fields of a primary school on one side and the back gardens of some houses on the others. We were fucking around climbing into the school fields to play in the sandpit and just standing about being rowdy. I flicked a cigarette end over the fence into someone's back garden, thinking nothing of it. Back to the sandpit, but ten minutes later we noticed that someone appeared to be having a bonfire in one of the back gardens. We went back to our fucking around and drinking and took no notice.

Only after another ten minutes or so when the flames are clearly visible over the top of an eight foot fence and we can hear someone who sounded very, very surprised, shocked and angry do we decide that now might be the time to run. We legged it for a half mile or so, then stopped to catch our breath and to debate whether it had actually been our fault. The general consensus was that we were probably going to get blamed anyway, so we briskly made our way out of the locality.

We later found out that the local youth club that we had terrorised earlier that evening had taken the blame for this incident, but we continued to deny all knowledge. If the Police are reading this, you'll never make it stick, you bastards.

Bloody hell, another long one, very sorry. I promise I'll never do it again.
(JamScones, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 12:09, Reply)