I don't know how many of you here remember me but I'm going to tell you that at one point in human history it wasn't as good to be a science geek as it is now. No, it's true. I remember being sort of a less cool version of Sheldon Cooper and given the unfortunate clothes of the late 1960s I cringe when I look at old photos. But there were certain visceral advantages, to wit, my grade 8 science project of a volcano.

I guess from a teachers perspective, kid shows up with a model volcano, you figure there's vinegar and baking soda involved, some white foam, ok, great, looks realistic, next. When's lunch; are we having fun yet?

But noooot really so much in this case. I'd learned mixing potassium nitrate (that you could get from Skyway drugs for $2 - back when comic books were 12 cents mind you) with icing sugar burns like fireworks but with a pink flame and TONS of smoke and had also read potassium chlorate was "a more rapid oxidizing agent". It didn't come right out and day "WAY better for fireworks" but on paper it was so I knew that's what I had to use.

I had to get my mum to sign for this stuff, this wasn't a can of saltpeter off the shelf, I'd had to order it and the pharmacist wouldn't actually let me have it, I needed a parent. As he was handing me the package a full pound of this stuff, not the puny 4 ounce cans the saltpeter came on, and he muttered to my mother "he's gonna blow himself up one day".

My dad was always picking up weird odds and ends and we'd had a cylinder of metal about a foot tall kicking around the house, made of titanium. That HAS to be the right stuff to use, right? I spent a week building up a wireframe and paper mache model of the volcano and painted it as best I could to look like Krakatoa.

Now, you have to understand when I messed around with little piles of saltpeter and icing sugar I'd always made little piles od the stuff an inch or two tall, light them and you pretty much had to cool it after that. Do that twice and some adult is gonna do something. Ask me how I know.

I think it was a weekend day because I remember this taking place in the afternoon. I'd mixed up the potassium chlorate with icing sugar - I had a huge amount of this stiff. You mix two parts icing sugar to one part salt peter, so before I'd mixed half a poind of icing sugar with a can of saltpeter. But now I had three pounds of this mixture. It made me a little nervous. It wouldn't fit in any of the jars I had and I had to put it in two mayo jars, fairly big ones. I put the cap on one and put it on th bench. The other one I put on the garage floor, near the door and the light. Nearer the entrance of the garage I put a board down and thought I'd just do a little test firing to see what this stuff does. I put a small pile of if there, and lit it. Yup, it burns better than saltpeter, man look at it go... POP

It was shooting out sparks and one just flew into the jar with a pound and a half of this stuff in it. Now, in a container like that, with that amount of the stuff it pretty much acted like a rocket motor, and it was a good thing it was on a concrete floor. it shot a pink column of flame straight up, continuously from floor to ceiling. Man was that awesome. Although that thought was replaced very very quickly with, man, that's gonna burn the house down. So I did the only thing a 10 year old would do: I watched it. It actually went out pretty quickly and probably only actually burned for a few seconds, but during the duration of having a rocket engine going in your garage, time slows down, trust me on this.

The flame went out, and I'd now managed to fill a good portion of Forestwood Crescent with a browny gray smoke that smelled a bit like sugar. Some grownup came running out asking if they should call the fire department and I explained no, it was alright, I was just doing a chemistry experiment FOR SCHOOL and it was over now and it's ok. She bought it. I'm not sure I would have.

I looked at the jar this was in, hmm, gonna need a little cleanup there, it seems to be in pieces and there's hot black crap everywhere. I looked up. There was a large black star shaped stain on the stucco ceiling. The last time I checked in the early 1990s, it was still there. I considered the test successful ad figured I was ready for school the next day.

So the next day when it's time in science class for me to present my project I say it's a volcano and we have to go outside and nobody seemed to question that so we all moved outside to the blacktop and I pointed out further away would be better and we all moved away to the field. I put this thing down on the ground, undid the other jar with a pound and a half of potassim chlorate and icing sugar in it and dumped it into the titanium cylinder.

I hadn't thought to bring matches. Oops. But I knew several people smoked (wth?) and said "anybody have a match?" and which point the teacher - and I don't remember who it was - said "hang on a minute". This propelled us into something like it was out of a movie, we had about one second to light this thing before the common sense of a teacher would kick in and there'd be no burning of odd white chemicals at that elementary school that day please and thank you. But no, somebody, and I think it was John Altorf (sp?) threw me a book of matches with surgical precision, I tore one off, struck it all in the same movement and raced my arm down to this thing. All I had to do it light it. I lit it, and then started stepping back.

At the first sign of smoke everybody else stood back. When it shot a pink flame eighteen feet into the air poeple began running. The titanium cylinder was a lot more narrow then the mayo jar and it seemed to burn differently. It - filled - the field with smoke to the extent that it looked like world war I - flames, smoke, people running and screaming. This was right before lunch so I quietly snuck out of the smokey field and went home.

Nobody. Ever. Said. A. Thing.

I don't know if they felt silly for letting some kid light off God knows what or what the reason was. But it was never mentioned again.

You can't buy saltpeter in a pharmacy any more. Well, you can, but you have to order it and sign a register. Oddly enough you can get it at the hardware store as stump remover, and it's 8x cheaper that way. Just sayin'