![[pretty thing]](hs.gif)
It had always been intended that part at least of saturday night be spent testing hairspray. It was past eleven when we finally got around to these test, Martin and the Beast were at this stage of the evening slightly hysterical, Jenny was very tired and I was merely resolved. I had mounted several light bulbs in lemonade bottle tops to make blasting caps. I also had several spare flashbulds, 10 metres of extravagently high quality speaker cable and the piezoelectric sparker from a bic electric cigarette lighter. Earlier in the evening I had shown almost Seargentson like ignorance of the scientific principals behind my invention, but the plan, improved by science, was this; the flash was to be mounted across the twin cable at one end, the sparker at the other; spark the sparker, flash the bulb, ignite the hairspray in a lemonade bottle and it fills with pressure and possibly explodes into reentry moduleens.
Sadly I wasn't to achieve such an amplification of my sparker sparking action. Our first test was to insert a flashbulb into the end of a big carboard tube, push one of its ends into the ground, spray in hairspray, stand back and watch the flash as the flash flashed. There was a flash, there was no ignition. We then began doubting (1) above. Spraying hairspray into the tube and dropping lit matches in after restored our faith. We then taped unlit matches to a flash bulb, put it in a the tube, sprayed only 2 seconds of hs and sparked. Rather than pust the tube into the ground we had by now decided that Martin is to first approximation a bipedal support device and doesn't deserve the dignity of further preturbation. He wasn't hurt when the butane caught and what steve called a pretty bijou mushroom cloud was, you might say, observed. It was, you might say, satisfactory. We had achieved a mushroom cloud effect. Next we tried firing the tube with rolled up newpaper in the end, phut and the newspaper sailed an exeptional 10 feet through the air. Beat that Steven Bennet!
We then tried a coke bottle. Martin sprayed hs into the coke bottle, the Beast fitted the blasting cap and was left standing alone with the bottle. A certain pity for this humble servant stayed my hand and I didn't spark the fuckiwhatsit until Steve was clear. I needn't of bothered, the bottle didn't expode. It wasn't bad, the explosion was contained, afterwards there was pressure, not near critical but not bad. The next 2 coke bottles failed. We achieved insight (2) and having used up all our blasting caps a period of Oldfieldien silliness followed, we tried to estimate the pressure from match ignition and discussed coal powered flight, communicating on this topic by tallking, waving our hands and setting fire to things. It was during this peroid that we filled the lemonade bottle with hs and in lighting it noted the pretty play of blue flame about the snout, the slow-moving ring of flame vortexing etherially along the bottle. Salmon Rushdie descibes something similar of lit spirit fumes, comparing them to djiinn, or whatever is the hindi for genii. The final excitement for the evening was provided when I light one lemonade bottle filled with hs some minutes after that filling. A phenomenal phenomenology was observed, the usual and lets say expected willow-the-wisp was replaced by a roaring welding tourch like flame. We had reached conclusion (3), we can be hopefull for the future. A corrollary of this final experiment, conclusion (4), came to me on the way home, ice helped and now I'm fine.
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