Something on the Lighter Side

It was eleventh grade, and I was sharing a lab table with Greg B and Troy F in AP Chemistry. My lab partner had dropped the class, so Greg and Troy and I ended up together. Of course, we were at the farthest lab table from the teacher, so that meant mischief was always afoot.

Some fun memories were: creating THE aqueous solution -- now, for the chemistriacly uninformed "aqueous solution" generally means "a solution in water" but ours was whatever "bad drugs" we could get our hands on (the definition of "bad drugs" in this case being "any chemicals, the higher concentration, the better). We would pour it into a certain flask (which originally contained Ghostbusters' Ecto-Plazm) along with anything we could get our hands on. Whatever it ended up being, it ate small amounts of metal, and it made the Ecto-Plazm look like a piece of chewed gum).

But that wasn't what I was really going to write about. I was going to write about one of Greg's great decisions -- instead of simply burning the excess alcohol out of a wick, he decided to blot it with a paper towel... and then toss the paper towel onto the still-burning wick. Flames shot out at least, well, a foot on each side, and there was Troy, playing junior fire-fighter, spraying the (alcohol) fire with water from a tiny spray bottle...

Good times.