But being kimchee’d to death has got to be pretty bad.
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“He’s in a pickle” takes on new meaning.
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Yeah, I had the same phobia from the same source as you. I’m sure there was an In Search Of about this topic that also scared the crap out of me.
https://youtu.be/onZsS_goilg?t=41s
Thanks for re-invigorating that unnerving fear.
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How can we be sure that those farmers were not liars liars?
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(Severe burns on) hips don’t lie.
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Prior art:
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Another option that sometimes comes up is oxygen-saturated clothing, which can happen if you’re e.g. on medical oxygen and it leaks into your clothing. Not in itself enough to set you on fire, but it does make your clothing both ignite easier and burn much faster.
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Is that near Fenchurch Street?:
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short fuses are always the worst to unravel
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U had good reason to have been terrified of SHC pix when young, Rob. It is horrific to contemplate, and to view. Such pix of burned-to-dust people amid undamaged combustibles terrifies many adults in the forensic sciences to this day. We know. Some run away when handed such photographs, others choose to ignore the evidence and - in the case of wick theory advocates - are willing to lie about their ‘successful’ debunking. Whether Mr Nolan spon-com’d and burned internally, as initial reports say, or succumbed to an unusual but conventional ignition source remains to be ascertained; too little info has yet to be released publicly. All info to that end will be welcomed by this poster.
A few years back, a noted medical journal in the UK published a relevant article on this. (wish I could find it again!) People on a low carb diet can actually have enough alcohol in their breath to trigger a breathalyzer. (true, it’s not ethanol, but it’s pretty much just as flammable) That, coupled with lots of acetone in the system can ignite very easily. (static electricity could do it, same with cigarettes) Since the gas is emanating from the lungs, the fire kills pretty quickly but gets fueled by body fat. (the reason the person was on the diet) Note that most reports of spontaneous human combustion are dated after the low carb diet craze of the 1960s. https://proteinpower.com/drmike/2007/05/21/low-carbers-beware-the-breathalyzer/
Based on the “toxicity in humans” section for sodium chlorate I’m a trifle surprised that people spraying it copiously or carelessly enough to have it saturate their clothes didn’t start noticing somewhat subtler horrible things before hitting exactly the right combination of factors to reach ignition.
“Meh, I’m better than ever without my proximal renal tubes”; said nobody ever.
(Also, while I’m sure this is just a side effect of having basically zero acquaintance with agricultural terminology; “soil sterilant” sounds less like a herbicide description and more like a particularly grim heraldic element)
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Despite having read this already, today I managed to mangle the headline to “May spontaneously combusts” and excitedly clicked on it hoping to read about the impending collapse of the Tory government.
Maybe some other day 
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A torch without the fire immunity teamed up with a guy who can stretch without the elastic return, a woman who can make her internal organs invisible, and a thing of immobile living rock. “It’s paperweight time!”
The almost Super Heroes.
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It was the '30s - I’m sure they exercised due caution when handling the material and wore protective clothing. Lie, say, a cloth in front of their mouth to keep from breathing in too much of it.
That’s sounding an awful lot like the Fantastic Four analog in The Venture Bros. The Invisible Girl can make her skin invisible (only her skin, allowing you to see her muscles underneath), the Human Torch is a guy who spontaneously catches on fire, screaming, when outside a low-oxygen environment, and Professor Impossible is a science-obsessed psychopath…
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You’d be surprised how casually people still toss around dangerous compounds. Even now. But it was pretty wild in the past. Marine hull paint can often be pretty dangerous. You can buy a can of the shit down at west marine and toss it on yourself. Professionally painting boat hulls requires some sort of hazmat certification/license (I know some people who investigated it as a business). But you know. You can just go buy a can of the stuff and apply it yourself. The older style stuff used to be even worse. And was pretty nasty to the environment.
My grandfather painted his barn with it. In his normal cloths. While chugging schlitz and chain smoking.
Mrs. Impossible can’t make her skin transparent. Her skin is transparent and she has the power to make it non-transparent. But she has trouble on that front when stressed.
And there’s the analogue for the Thing. Her mentally handicapped younger brother who has become a giant walking callus.
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