Yikes. Lucky for me Utah’s liquor stores don’t carry that stuff.
2 Likes
In my misspent youth, my friends and I would do this with 151, or Spirytus or Everclear. Then we took to doing the firebreathing thing.
Well, then we read if you mess up fire breathing with very pure alcohol, you can melt your lungs, and you should use vegetable oil.
Well, we started practicing with that and… It was kinda messy and gross. So that was that.
3 Likes
Yeah it might have worked if they rigged a champagne bottle or something.
1 Like
I’m partial to the Crunchy Frog. Crunchalicious!
1 Like
The Disgusting English Candy Drill
…He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he’s biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, “Oh, I thought we got rid of all those—” a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue’s thewse—“years ago,” at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.
“You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!” cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror’s speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. “Just for that I shan’t let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams.” Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.
“Serves me right,” Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy—oops but that’s a mistake, right, here’s his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry… mm, which oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can’t begin to take away that bitterness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he’s been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, “Oh mercy that’s really sour,” hardly able to get the words out he’s so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who’s supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can’t even see it’s up his nose and whatever it is won’t dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four. She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.
“Now you’re getting the idea!” Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, “you see, you also have to enjoy the way it looks. Why are Americans so impulsive?”
“Well,” mumbling, “usually we don’t get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see…”
“Oh, try this,” hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.
“Gosh, it must really be something,” doubtfully taking this nastylooking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.
“Go on then,” Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to shove it into his mouth.
“Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested.”
“And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone.”
Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. “Poisoned…” he is able to croak.
“Show a little backbone,” advises Mrs. Quoad.
“Yes,” Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, “don’t you know there’s a war on? Here now love, open your mouth.”
Through the tears he can’t see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going “Yum, yum, yum,” and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like: gin. “Wha’s 'is,” he inquires thickly.
“A gin marshmallow,” sez Mrs. Quoad.
“Awww…”
“Oh that’s nothing, have one of these—” his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it’s tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.
“More tea?” Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.
“Nasty cough,” Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. “Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can.”
The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.
Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air. Slothrop lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past, his groin now against her warm bottom. The one candy he did not get to taste—one Mrs. Quoad withheld—was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste—“salted plum” to one, “artificial cherry” to another… “sugared violets”… “Worcestershire sauce”… “spiced treacle”… any number of like descriptions, positive, terse—never exceeding two words in length—resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, “sweet-and-sour eggplant” being perhaps the lengthiest to date…
— Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, pp. 114-119.
6 Likes
Forgotten about this. Gotta go scare up another copy of GR.
Pouring it into empty vanilla extract bottles and taking them to work in your socks…
2 Likes
Meh. 307 ale will get you drunk before you even open the bottle (according to Tom Smith anyway)
1 Like
If you want to go hardcore, go with 98% ethanol for ultraviolet spectroscopy. The purest hooch you can get wide and far.
We drank it at high school, a classmate was… obtaining… it in some lab. We called it, roughly translated, “Hundredperc”.
Pro tip: dilute before drinking.
2 Likes
[quote=“shaddack, post:30, topic:67122”]
If you want to go hardcore, go with 98% ethanol for ultraviolet spectroscopy. The purest hooch you can get wide and far.
[/quote]I used to have access to the stockroom where they kept cases of pint bottle of lab grade ethanol, and you knew it was good for human consumption because it had the state tax stamp on it. But nobody I knew ever drank the stuff because we all sensed that it was certain ruin.
2 Likes
Germans or Brits, doesn’t matter. Ones played black pieces, ones had white ones, both did some quite interesting moves.
1 Like
When you don’t have the money or vast expanses of litterbox-grade desert to figure out the world’s most destructive weapons, you gotta get inventive.
2 Likes
If you’re actually up to 98%, that’s past the eutectic point, which puts it in a slightly less safe category, as it can’t just be distilled straight. It needs to be co-distilled with benzene to purify it that bit further, and residual benzene is even worse for you than 98% EtOH.
3 Likes
The spectroscopy grade has pretty low amount of impurities. While there may be some, you may get more by a whiff of something burning.
There are also other ways than codistillation. Zeolites are a popular drying agent, for example.
http://homedistiller.org/distill/polish/dry
2 Likes
See, every time I read an excerpt of Gravity’s Rainbow, I get all enthused & start it again. Then I get sick of bananas & give up. I should stick with it, really.
3 Likes
I was very happy when I finished it.
I’m not reading it again.
2 Likes
I know, I keep trying to read Moby Dick, but I never get past “Call me Ishmael.”
1 Like
It’s pretty disconcerting when the main character vanishes a couple chapters before the end of the book.
1 Like
I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I’ve made three attempts at Moby Dick and never even reached the halfway point.
1 Like
It shouldn’t take an entire chapter to walk up a damn beach and buy a pint.
4 Likes
