Collage 096               H u m o u r N e t                    1995

Back again, kids--this time with Collage 96, c/o Geoff. It's a
Dave Barry article from the Boston Globe Magazine. In the article,
Dave provides a URL for a Web site from which you can DL pictures
and movies of a unique method of lighting your charcoal grill;
naturally, I checked them out: the pics are okay, but the movies
are *almost* worth the 2-to-3-day DL time.

Also, the Colossal Web Page now contains a link to Dave Barry's
home page, as well as several other entertaining sites, such as
the Worst of the Web page.

Enjoy!

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
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          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
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                             Nuclear Picnic

                              by Dave Barry

                        The Boston Globe Magazine
                             June 25, 1995

Today's culinary topic is: how to light a charcoal fire. Everybody
loves a backyard barbecue. For some reason, food just seems to
taste better when it has been cooked outdoors, where flies can lay
eggs on it. But there's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a
pile of balky charcoal.

The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to
ignite the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method, wherein
you squirt lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light the pile,
then wait until they have turned a uniform gray color. When I say
"they have turned a uniform gray color," I am referring to the
hamburgers. The briquettes will remain as cold and lifeless as
Leonard Nimoy. The backyard chef will keep this up--squirting,
lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting, waiting--until the
bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the point where the
potato salad rises up from its bowl, Blob-like, and attempts to mate
with the corn. This is the signal that it's time to order Chinese
food.

The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict
consumer-safety guidelines, is one of the least-flammable substances
on Earth. On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals
have extinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it.
Your backyard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a
pile of rocks.

Is there a solution? Yes. There happens to be a technique that is
guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly, although
you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the following
criterion: You are a complete idiot.

I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko, who
sent me a letter describing something he came across on the World
Wide Web, a computer network that you should definitely learn more
about, because as you read these words, your 11-year-old is
downloading pornography from it.

By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world. One of these is a guy named
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University
engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other
engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they
cook hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began looking
for practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.

"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told
me in a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would
light faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."

If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general,
you know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting
shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light
the charcoal.

From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch,
then an acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure
oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as
you recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid
combination of oxygen with the cosine to form the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers (or something along those lines).

By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the
world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut
the mustard. Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using--get
ready--liquid oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket
engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as
regular oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen
on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a
room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers. On Gobel's World
Wide Web page (the address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can
see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached
to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen
(not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal
and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most
impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large
fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees
Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in--this has to be a
world record--3 seconds.

There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same
technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left
is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.
"Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of
returning it to the store for a refund."

Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all
choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere
near the engineers' picnic site. But also, I was proud of my
country for producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in less time
than it takes for guys in less-advanced nations, such as France, to
spit.

Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up
with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's
something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside,
chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction
of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom cloud.

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