Unlikely ways in which to almost maim yourself - part one in an occasional series
or: Elementary lessons in chemistry and physics

So last night it occurs to me that before I went away I failed to empty out my thermos, which I took to cricket on that really hot Saturday. Which was 2 weeks ago. I realised it still had quite a bit of orange juice in it. Curses, I thought, it shall be a mouldy thermos. So after coming home from practice last night, I took it out of my cricket bag to clean it out.

My thermos is one of those stainless steel vaccum flask jobbies with an ingenious plastic contraption at the top consisting of a funky button in the middle you push, which then clicks in and allows you to pour the stuff within out through the 360 degree spouty bit. Thinking to empty the juice in this manner, I took it over to the kitchen sink, and pressed the button. Or attempted to press the button. The button was not going down. It was stuck good and really showed no inclination to allow itself to be clicked (this should really have been a clue).

All right, I thought, and decided to unscrew the ingenious plastic device bit (which is what you do when you need to access the inside of the thermos, to fill it up for example). However, this was not unscrewing. It was stuck tight. This should really have been an additional clue. But no, I decided that it must be threaded on wrong, and possibly gummed up with mouldy orange juice.

So I struggled with attempting to unscrew the plastic bit, seeming to make very little progress. It was at the point that I was beginning to wonder what to do next that there was an extremely loud bang (heard by Karen from out in our back yard), followed immediately by a general sort of cacophany, and everything went dark.

Let us turn at this point in the narrative to the Miriam-Webster dictionary:

ex·plode

intransitive senses
1 : to burst forth with sudden violence or noise from internal energy: as a : to undergo a rapid chemical or nuclear reaction with the production of noise, heat, and violent expansion of gases b : to burst violently as a result of pressure from within

Indeed, b: up there sums it up pretty well. This was your pretty classical chemistry lab explosion, physics in action and all that - like that experiment everyone did in chemistry with dropping magnesium into hydrochroric acid, sticking your thumb over the test tube to build pressure and then making the hydrogen go 'pop' on the bunsen burner . Obviously, I loosened the top enough with my exertions sufficiently so that the seal of the expanded metal (yikes) was broken, and pressure within burst the top off. Violently.

However I feel these definitions, while accurate, do not tell the whole story. I don't know about anyone else, but due to a long and continuing exposure to Hollywood movies (and indeed television news), when you hear the word 'explosion', you think flying debris, pyrotechnics, and possibly of Bruce Willis jumping out of a window. So it was only appropriate really that when the explosion took place, the plastic (plastic, mind you) thermos part off flew upwards off the top with sufficient force to utterly disentegrate the kitchen lightbulb some metre or so above it, buckle the fitting, and rend a hole in the metal lampshade. (You can come to my house and look at this if you doubt the veracity of my story). All-in-all it was quite a sudden and most definitely unexpected shift from struggling with a thermos in a brightly-lit kitchen to standing in the dark saying "Jesus Chriiiiiist!!!, suddenly aware of the bits of glass that had rained onto my head (and indeed, everywhere else in the kitchen).

Quite glad am I that the thermos part did not hit me in the nose / eye / teeth or something, (visons of placing it between by legs to get a better grip, and then...) because even if I had flukily escaped serious injury, that would have hurt. If I'd been knocked unconscious though it might have been quite amusing, because on hearing from the lounge an explosion (complete with those Hollywood prerequisite smashing / scattering glass noises), my parents would have rushed into the kitchen and found me on the floor with quite the logic puzzle exercise to solve in order to have any kind of idea about what had just happened to their son. As it turned out they instead found me standing in the dark with a thermos full of exceedingly fizzy orange juice in my hand, unable to stop laughing. (Probably should have tried it. I'm sure it might have had a reasonable alcohol content).

After we cleaned up, Mum pointed out that it was probably just as well I had remembered when I did. I'm doubtful enough gas and thus pressure could have been built up to make it happen (it would always go at the lid first, presumably), but a full-on steel-thermos-shredding explosion (when my cricket bag had been left in the vicinity of a children's birthday party, probably) might have been interesting, much the same way that getting shelled in World War I was probably interesting.

Anyway, the lesson is: clean your thermos promptly.

Tales of New Plymouth and other such exotic locales to follow shortly. But now for your amusement, I quote in its entirety a synposis for Criminal Intent on Sky 1 that was in the Listener this week that I spotted last night:

After a wild night, a rich girl is found by the corpse of her father.