Sometimes, you never know where a party will go. Here’s what I did last night:
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And if you think that’s fake (along with this one and especially this one), well…
So, what did you do last night?
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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April 10th, 2009 at 7:33 am
I just try to stick to the spicy foods.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:34 am
Stay away from that Randi bloke, he will get you into trouble.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:36 am
I can see it all now. A new “Teh stoopid, it burns!” graphic…
BA is da life of da party!
April 10th, 2009 at 7:40 am
The life of even the “private” party. Your flickr pics are not viewable.
Takes …. courage (dutch?) to do with facial hair, I imagine.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:48 am
I can’t view the flickr photos? Says they’re marked private.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Dude, when y0ur breath catches fire, it’s time for mouthwash.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:56 am
Last time I tried that I had success: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZT5K1-r7BE
Followed by a painful fail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-9cFkzKAKI
Second degree burns to the face and loss of facial hair = not fun, but it was still a good party and I was drunk so what did I care?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Coincidentally, I watched David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:10 am
I’m guessing Penn gave you lessons. I hope that Penn gave you lessons. I loved the “eating fire” metaphor in his CNN op-ed.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Sarah Says: Takes …. courage (dutch?) to do with facial hair, I imagine.
Personally, I have too much of a beard investment to try a stunt like that.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:15 am
I found a weird failure mode in an SRAM; the upper 2 bits were stuck together, but only in certain address ranges. Apparently a row or column on the die went out. To find the problem I had to dump the memory and compare it with the listing. Do I get the geek award?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Ha! Eating fire? Last night, I rode in one of those 60 year old Ferris wheels at one of those small town traveling carnivals. You know, the kind that are assembled and disassembled every 4 days by people who, as far as anyone knows, are only qualified to persuade you to throw darts at balloons.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:23 am
I went to the Ottawa / New Jersey hockey game. Squidette had tickets. Then I came home and played with the amateur radio for a while.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Hmmm, I need to eat fire again. And juggle it. Now to find someone to do that with…
What did you use for fuel? I tend to use Everclear for eating, but the flame is not brilliant, and tends toward the bluish side. It also doesn’t work very well for blowing fire. Hey, I need to do that again, too!!
April 10th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Phil,
How many times do I have to tell you to stop putting so many habeneros in your chili?
Did you follow that up with putting a little liquid nitrogen in your mouth to have “smoke” coming out? Just don’t swallow!
April 10th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Tattoos, breathing fire…what’s next?
Taming tigers? Getting shot out of a cannon? A three ring circus?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:34 am
His last word was Ouch
April 10th, 2009 at 8:36 am
I do almost the same trick, only I light a potato chip on fire and then eat the chip while it is still burning.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:37 am
hate to be the party pooper….
But when one of my dumb friends did this particular party trick for the 50th time, he laughed and spilled the 151 (or whatever it was) down his chin which then burned it, so he has a stupid looking patch of hairless burned skin that will forever remind him and anyone around him that he is a knucklehead.
just sayin’
April 10th, 2009 at 8:48 am
I assume the marshmallows are already in your mouth in this pic?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Was another bet involved Phil? When are you going to learn? And I second “The Stupid It Burns”.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Putting on my skeptic hat again, how do we know that isn’t one of you many more talented identical twins? Like Richard Wiseman or George Hrab?
April 10th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Well… That would explain the haircut.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:06 am
I don’t know what party that was, but how high was the level of alcohol?
April 10th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Hey, as a fellow science nerd and fire eater, I gotta give you some safety advice. Hold the torch completely vertically to reduce the risk of injury. In the video, you looked as though you were about to stab the torch into the roof of your mouth. Straight down, head tilted back, make sure you never breathe in and lips don’t touch the metal.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:31 am
TychoF: ultra pure paraffin oil is the correct answer. You can get it at the supermarket. My younger brother is practically a circus act, so the whole lot of us have been taught to eat, breath, and juggle fire, as well as walk on stilts and a few other silly party tricks.
He’s the only one that can juggle pins (along with just about anything else. Know of a good juggler? Ask him to juggle pennies! It’s really impressive to watch).
I really wouldn’t recommend trying this stuff with alcohol. Sounds very dangerous.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:37 am
The Flickr pictures are private?! :-/
April 10th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Last night? I tore down the race bike. Not near as much fire involved.
Al least now we know why the hair and beard are the way they are!
April 10th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Last night, I drank skeptically with the Minneapolis Skeptics. http://mully410.blogspot.com/2009/04/minneapolis-skeptics-april-happy-hour.html
April 10th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Did Penn put you up to this? It sorta-kinda looks like him in the background of the one pic.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:59 am
The hell with the eating fire bit, what I’m goggling at is you in a suit. I am not sure I’ve ever seen you in a suit, Phil. You look hawt.
April 10th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Well we had it tough at our party! There were a hundred and forty seven us, every one drinking red hot molten lava and swirling it about our mouths with our tongues. We’d drink it up, spit it out, and dance about on the fiery puddles in our bare feet singing “Hallelujah!”
Huh!
April 10th, 2009 at 10:09 am
What did I do last night? Me? I watched TV. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but trust me. It was really … dangerous … TV.
April 10th, 2009 at 10:11 am
You took the easy way out. This is the way I did it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sos83OMisZE
(No, that’s not me in the video, but it’s from the same seminar.)
April 10th, 2009 at 10:14 am
That’s hot…lol
April 10th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Whoa! You psycho!
Do you have a death wish or something?
April 10th, 2009 at 10:30 am
[...] Blogs / Bad Astronomy « It’s my party and I’ll fire if I want to [...]
April 10th, 2009 at 10:33 am
What did I do, Phil? Well, let’s just say I’ve always been someone who likes to use handcuffs in a friendly way… TMI?
April 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am
You own a TIE???!!!
April 10th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Oh, and before we go thinking I have some exciting circus-y life: my amazing evening last night was to couch it up and watch a movie. In bed before 10:00.
I really wish I was living the life of a play boy astrophysicist! Must be nice!
April 10th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Phil, I think the time is nearing when I will have to stop reading your blog. First a tattoo and then fire eating, all in one week! You are too young to be having a mid-life crisis. What is next?…. going over Niagara Falls in a barrel!!!!!
What kind of a party was it that got you into a suit and tie?
April 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
what was i doing last night?
getting drunk with my college friends
April 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
My throat has been feeling like it has been capable of producing fire on its own for a few days so my fun evenings for the past couple days have been just taking NyQuil and going to bed. How exciting. Now I’m imagining what the sneezing and coughing could have been like though, thanks for that mental image!
April 10th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Hey, BA, give some credit to your teacher!
Just to clear things up, I am a professional fire performer (I even have shiny business cards!) and was there teaching Phil, Ms. BA, and a few other brave souls at the CWA party for fun after my performance. This wasn’t just drunken recklessness! (only the regular kind of recklessness).
To clear up a few misconceptions:
Fuel @spiv @tychoF:
Alcohol = Wrong and dangerous. Dim flame hard to follow (easier to burn yourself), and over the course of a performance you get drunk (bad).
Ultrapure Lamp Oil (AKA, liquid paraffin, AKA, C12-C14 aliphatic hydrocarbons) = Wrong (but less wrong, you can still use it, but you can only extinguish, not perform transfers or other “vapor control” tricks that really define fire eating. That is the preferred fuel for fire BREATHING, a very different process).
Naptha = our fuel for that evening. High vapor pressure and low flash point (compared to lamp oil) allows the torch to stay slightly cooler due to evaporation, and allows you to work with primarily vapors, instead of liquid fuel. Very flammable and not 100% non-toxic, but hey, thats why you don’t eat fire every day.
Torch Angle @concerned citizen:
Torch angle isn’t always vertical – you choose your torch angle based on what you want the vapor to do, and where you want the flames to go. Most transfer or vapor hold tricks require you to have the torch at a very shallow angle, like a plane landing on a strip. In these photos, Phil is performing a “candle” or a simple vapor hold by applying a small quantity of burning fuel directly to his tongue, which requires a shallow torch angle, rather than an extinguish, which would necessitate a much steeper angle. He’s perhaps a little more shallow than I would have done it, but its in the right zone for the act he’s performing.
So don’t worry, Phil is nuts, but not terminally so! That was some good clean fun, with a professional standing by (you can see me in the background of the photos, either looking on approvingly, or lighting another CWA attendee’s cigarette).
And of course, let me make my obligatory reminder that this isn’t something you just mess around with unless you have a teacher on hand, and proper safety equipment around. Like your mother told you, if you play with fire you will get burned, and nothing about what I do changes that, just makes it less likely. If you are drunk at a party, light some ethanol on fire, and dick around, the results will be predictable, and you will get no sympathy.
On the other hand, if you want to LEARN, get yourself invited to CWA, be nice to me, and we’ll give it a shot. I’ll be there next year.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
If you can get the flame coming out the top of your head or out your ears I’ll applaud.
Ah, for the bad old days when we could play with carbonyl sulfide – but it does dry your skin, damage your liver with long exposures, and naturally there are claims of being a carcinogen.
I think I’ll stick to exploding balloons like they do at the San Francisco Exploratorium – or I could spit out a high proof rum and make a nice fireball (i guess the sugar in the rum makes it visible – grappa would give a blue almost invisible flame). Mmm … fireball. I liked that episode of Myth Busters with the dust explosion – years ago (and long before that episode) I tried to convince people to do it on a much smaller scale with corn starch as a public demonstration but everyone else seemed too chicken. Of course confectioner’s sugar burns better but leaves an awful sticky residue.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Don’t try this while having hiccups. Rumor has that it will cause one to explode. BOOM!
April 11th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Ahk, reminds me of my fire walking daze,,,
GAry 7
April 12th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Perhaps a warning should be added since there are also young visitors here, Phil. As older people know, fire is very dangerous. It takes practice, skills, caution and adulthood to do things like this safely. A friend of mine suffered 2nd degree wounds on his arms and shoulders as a teen because a schoolmate decided to perform a stunt like this at a school barbecue. It went wrong and some spectators got sprayed with burning fluid when a bottle caught fire. There are also accounts of people swallowing or inhaling burning liquid in a reflex, sudden wind that throws flames in the face and clothes catching fire.
Always be careful. For the record, we once had an ordinary small candle that suddenly created an enormous flame which almost set the room on fire. We were amazed by this. Later we learned that this occasionally happens because over heated wax can ignite by itself. Since then we never ever let candles burn out of sight. The candle that did this was a small candle which (in Europe at least) is frequently used to keep a pot of tea on temperature.
April 12th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
This is actually reassuring news. My Kansas City Renaissance Festival boss (a jeweler) was going down to open his booth at Scarborough Fair in Dallas, and his 50th birthday was happening the first weekend of that fair. He told me, with great enthusiasm, that he was going to breathe fire for his birthday.
He did assure me it would be with supervision of Dr. Dumpe, a performer who does this kind of thing in his act. No idea what medium he uses, but he’s been doing this safely for over 20 years at renaissance festivals.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Wow. Serious nerdage. I bet you juggle, too!
When do we get to see the tat?
December 27th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
So, how did it taste?