Beer and Fire = Darwin Awards...

So today I learned how the Darwin Awards were issued.  I should begin with this did not start out as an alcohol related incident.  But honestly, what goes better together than beer and fire?  

So I leave what I used to call work, but now call a minor inconvenience in my day, somewhere around 3:00 this afternoon.  I manage to make it past Walmart and avoided spending $250, so I count this as a win.  After arriving home, I venture around to the back of the house and see that the fire from Friday night is still smoldering, so as any good pyro would, I rake up a handful of pine needles and throw it on the fire.  Nothing... Nothing that a little gasoline wont fix!  Wrong!  So my still smoking fire topped with dry pine needles (as dry as anything can be in Florida) with a kicker of gasoline gets me nowhere... Why not then, fill up a Diet Coke can full of said petrol, light it on fire the whack it onto the pile with a long stick?

WHOOSH!!!  And now we are cooking with gas... literally.  The gas drenched needles lasted all of about 37 seconds so it was time to locate other fuel. After combing the yard for tinder ("We ain't found shit!"), the 3 sticks I come up with are no help... nothing a log and a ton of gas wont fix though!  After 3 logs and $36 of gas (2 gallons), I have a nice small fire, nothing near what I wanted to burn the garbage that had accumulated in my fire pit.  

Here is where Darwin would have smiled.  As a rather intelligent individual, I understand that the three ingredients to fire are: oxygen, fuel and ignition.  Already having the three, I understood only one would make the fire better... I ran out of gas, so I had to settle with more oxygen.  An old air mattress pump and metal broom handle made for the perfect oxygen delivery system!  After only a few second of this thing being on, my fire burned hotter that I have ever seen!

So what else does one do than start drinking beer and burning shit in the fire?  Said empty beer can was no match for the extreme heat produced.  So naturally we switched to glass bottles.  These melted perfectly if they didn't explode sending molten glass slivers everywhere.  After creating a few price(worth)less pieces of artwork in melted glass, we noticed that after cooling they were more brittle than Ben Rothlisberger!  The slightest jolt would shatter them... We learned tin cans could not be melted by temperatures created by our supercharged fire, but an aluminum can or 9 would melt and actually make liquid metal!  

This addition of liquid metal to the night made for a number of discussions.  We obviously needed something to do with it so shapes is what we came up with.  We pretty much mastered crap but decided the market was littered with New Moon and Michael Jackson's This Is It, so we switched directions to hearts with burnt/dried in dirt.  After Tommy's girlfriend told me to take it outside we decided another method was in order.  Attempt number 2 will be done with plaster of Paris.  If anyone out there in Blogger-land has worked with this medium, I would be much appreciative of any advice...

P.S. How bad do you think a guy looks with no eyebrows?