Frank , I believe these guys have got them beat (and I work with some graduates from Undue Purversity ....) - lighting barbecues with LOx
Nuclear Picnic
by Dave Barry
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995
Today's culinary topic is: how to light a charcoal fire. Everybody
loves a backyard barbecue. For some reason, food just seems to taste
better when it has been cooked outdoors, where flies can lay eggs on
it. But there's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a pile of
balky charcoal.
The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to ignite
the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method, wherein you squirt
lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light the pile, then wait until
they have turned a uniform gray color. When I say "they have turned a
uniform gray color," I am referring to the hamburgers. The briquettes
will remain as cold and lifeless as Leonard Nimoy. The backyard chef
will keep this up - squirting, lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting,
waiting - until the bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the
point where the potato salad rises up from its bowl, Bloblike, and
attempts to mate with the corn. This is the signal that it's time to
order Chinese food.
The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict consum-
er-safety guidelines, is one of the least-flammable substances on
Earth. On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals have ex-
tinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it. Your back-
yard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a pile of rocks.
Is there a solution? Yes. There happens to be a technique that is
guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly, although
you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the following
criterion: You are a complete idiot.
I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko, who
sent me a letter describing something he came across on the World Wide
Web, a computer network that you should definitely learn more about,
because as you read these words, your 11-year-old is downloading
pornography from it.
By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world. One of these is a guy named
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University
engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other
engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook
hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began looking for
practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.
"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me
in a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light
faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."
If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you
know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from
cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then
an acetylene torch. Then Goble