Froggy Bomb!

This is the soon-to-be Mrs. Mullet's favorite story about me in my youth... it is quite possibly one of the most absurd things you will ever here, but keep reading.

In my science class when I was in eighth grade we had this crazy teacher who loved to show us weird stuff. This relates to this thread because he showed us how to make a hydrogen "bomb". What you do is this... you get a big bowl of water, and then an equally big funnel. Drop a 9V battery into the water, invert the funnel over the top to direct the gas released, and put a gallon milk container over the top of the funnel to catch the gas. Now, does anyone know what happens when you run an electric current through water? Yep, it produces H and O[sub]2[/sub], so, the milk jug fills with H (edit: because the hydrogen is lighter than the oxygen). If you don't invert it, you can then prop the jug on something, and, using a match on the end of a yard stick, ignite the H and make a very big boom!

Now, I was a very inquisitive child, and thought it might be fun to put this little tidbit of information into use in another way. Oh, let me also mention that at somepoint in this class, I also learned that NaCl will burn very easily and produce a pretty sweet little yellow flame. OK... fast forward to the summer time... Mullet Man has a little science set that somone has bought him. It includes some powdered chemicals (nothing truly harmful... at least under adult supervision), a little sad microscope, some slides, and, most importantly, one formaldehyde-preserved frog for disecting. Now, we had already disected frogs in school, so I wasn't super interested in the frog... until one summer afternoon when it was raining, a friend was over, and we got really bored.

What ensued next has only recently been revealed to my mother. You see, my parents were divorced when I was very young, and so I spent a lot of time caring for myslef from about age 12 on... good for me... better for my mischief.
OK, on with it... so on this boring summer afternoon, my friend and I were at my house, and we were trying to figure out something to do. We were in my basement looking for a baseball bat or something, and he came across this science set. The original suggestion was to take the frog out of the set and play some sort of prank... a good suggestion, but I came up with a better idea. Using my scientific knowledge, I decided that we might be able to construct a "frog bomb" as I had recently learned that all organisms are essentially open from one end to another (you know, through the GI tract). So... we gathered up our materials:

1 Frog
1 canister NaCL
2 funnels
1 bowl
1 9V Battery
1 Gallon water
Matches
Duct tape

... and proceeded to my garage.

OK, so the assembly of the frog bomb was fairly simple... I figured that the Hydrogen needed to go in one end, and the fire into the other. We put the water, funnel and 9V battery together, and duct taped it shut so none of the hydrogen could escape. We then put the top end of the funnel into the frog's anus assuming that this would fill the frog with hydrogen (and, as we soon found out... it did!). The frog was somewhat limp, you know... having been soaked in formaldehyde and all, and so, we sort of duct taped him up a bit as well. Into his mouth we inserted the smaller funnel filled with NaCl... this was to serve as our fuse. We lit several matches, dropped them into the top funnel and stepped back... actually ran, but whatever.

So the NaCl was burning, the water was bubbling, but nothing was happenning. After about 2 or 3 minutes, we thought it was a dud. We started to walk closer and realized that the frog was much more bloated than when we had first stepped back (many years later in an anatomy class, I would come to understand that there were several sphincters that the hydrogen needed to open in order to get through the GI tract but I didn't know that at the time...). We were encouraged by the bloating, so we stepped back, waited a few more seconds... and then... a garge window shaking BOOM!!! The hydrogen ignited, the frog exploded, and we had froggy bits everywhere!!

Now... has anyone caught the one little problem with our froggy? That's right, he was soaked in formaldehyde... highly flamable formaldehyde! Now, suprisingly, there was no warning (that we'd bothered to read) suggesting that our frog was flamable, but he was! And now we had flamming froggy bits all over the inside of our 75-year old wooden garage! After about 5 minutes of laughter, we realized the frog wasn't gonna stop burning. In a sheer panic we ran about trying to figure out what to do. Totally ignoring the bowl of water, and the garden hose hooked up to the faucet on the side of my house. Eventually it damned on us that water would put out fire, and we turned the hose on our little bits of flaming frog! Crisis averted, froggy destroyed, a true victory for science!

The look on my mother's face when we told her about it 15 years after the fact was worth every moment of planning, execution, and aftermath.