2006 Archives

I remember being a lad of about 6 years old, trying to hang out with my big brother as most small boys probably do. He had all of his older friends, and they were all cool, doing cool things, saying cool things and I guess I just wanted to be around them and pretend like I was cool too.

There was this one day when he and a few of his friends were in the bedroom, huddled around the newest "toy" or activity of interest. It was the "Junior Science Kit" complete with a lovely array of laboratory slides, beakers, concoctions and a nifty little book of experiments that all young Einsteins could experiment with.. in the privacy of their own homemade labs. Now, let me stop for one moment and explain what was going on here. Obviously from the very special toy manufacturer named "What Were You Thinking?" came a kit full of different liquid and powdered chemicals, and these geniuses were under the assumption that children, minors, would follow instructions to the letter, and never, NEVER mix any of these substances!

Anyway, I can remember moving as close as I could to the small huddled mass of boys as my brother (whose eyebrows are completely intact) was engaged in this unprecedented experiment. Apparantly, he had soaked a small cotton pad in several of the liquid chemicals, and he had a burning bare light bulb right in the midst of all of us. Then, he laid the pad across the top of the hot, lit, 75 watt electrified luminarious piece of glass. It instantly glowed in captivating colours, which quickly turned to a lava-red, right before the bulb exploded into fragments all over us, and the bare electric wire nearly flamed up to a dangerous flash, which would have burned our house to the ground, left us all homeless, and, we would have been excommunicated from our family!

Instead, it made a bit of a mess but caused no permanent damage. The Junior Science Kit was retired from circulation by our father, who probably aged a good few years that day!

My brother, who still obviously never outgrew that love of danger and the unexpected, now spends many of his days traversing our local forests in search of rare mushrooms, which he studies under microscopes before he cooks and eats them. Apparantly, he's studied the differences between the good ones and the poisonous ones. I'm glad I hate mushrooms, and I never did want a Junior Science Kit, and I grew to hate chemistry in school.

The moral of the story? Light bulbs are for turning on, turning off, and for appearing over your head when you have an idea. And mushrooms... mushrooms are just weird!!!

Features

IOM Magazine

Related