The Methane Mamba
I will always be greatful to Mr. S for teaching me this one.

To create the methane mamba, you take a large bowl of water. You add washing up liquid, then use a hose to bubble methane from the gas taps through it. Because methane is lighter than air, the bubble tower rises fast. When it has reached a sufficient height, you prod it with a lighted splint on the end of a metre rule. FOOOOM and a huge fireball is the normal result.

The normal height to build the bubble tower is not above 2'.

Enter AT, RU and DR, all of whom are friends of mine.

In an incredible lack of foresight, Mr. S had decided to trust them with the mamba equipment while he went out of the room for a minute or two. This equipment included the oxygen cylinder. When you add 98% oxygen to methane it ceases to go 'FOOOOM' and instead tries to blow your eardrums out.

They, somehow, managed to make a bubble tower 7' high using a combination of oxygen and methane. Just as RU was advancing with a splint, Mr. S returns to the room. "NO" he screams. But it was too late. RU pokes the tower with the splint.

The entire ceiling of the lab was enveloped by an expanding, exploding fireball. The poster on the ceiling above the epicentre was the first to give up and burst into flames, shortly followed by most of the others, along with RU's eyebrows and all the hair on his arm.

The beauty of the whole event was that because Mr. S should NEVER have left them alone, he couldn't punish them without landing himself hugely in the shit...
( MatJ LOOK, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 11:43, 2 replies)

harr
I bet it was just like the old British Gas advert

NO!
( scoshi pretending to diet since, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 12:04, closed)

i lol'd
thanks for the memory lane visit
(kebabking - salad and garlic mayo pls, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 12:35, closed)