J-J-J-Joker Face J-J-Joker Face

Alternate Title: In Which Nocturnal Gardening Becomes the Subject of Much Puzzlement

In my experience, "normal" gardening time is either early in the morning, or in the evening (or if you live in Texas in heat so bad it melts ice cubes through the freezer, at night around ten or so). Two nights ago, after finishing my Calculus homework (wait, "finishing"? I'm sorry, I meant "being beaten up by"), I heard a weird noise outside of my window.

Considering I live on the seventh floor of a gargantuan, generally impenetrable  fortress dorm, this was quite a noise. I couldn't tell what it was for a minute, and then it hit me--someone was mowing the lawn. At two a.m. Pardon me, did I miss something? I thought normal gardeners mowed the lawn at normal times. Oh wait. We're at university. Where nothing is normal. This explains why I've never seen a lawn mower on my walks to class. And why I will not be hanging around outside of the dorms at two a.m. I'm too paranoid about being run over by some vicious lawn mower gone rogue.

Also strange things outside at late hours: eighteen wheelers. These massive trucks bring food and other assorted necessities to the dining halls and market, and so they don't have to navigate around thousands of students making their way to class, they show up, you guessed it, at odd hours of the night.  The end result is me looking out my window at around 1 30 in the morning, already exhausted and sleep-deprived, and my mind conjuring up an image like this:

Yes, that does happen to be a fearsome Dragon Truck. It's true. Haven't you noticed that eighteen wheelers look like dragons from the side? And from the front? Or, anywhere, really, except that giant rectangle they happen to be dragging along? So the next time you're on a road trip, every time you pass an eighteen-wheeler you can just think about how it's a decapitated dragon head pulling things along behind it. Powered by magic, or the souls of dragon-slayers. Whichever.

And here's an artless segue into another strange thing about life: working retail. It's bad enough working for minimum wage and having to go through a Monster Trucks like competition to find a parking space in the overcrowded parking lot. It's even worse when customers with a sense of entitlement and superiority look at you like you're some kind of vile insect oozing pus that needs to be squished. It's not very flattering, and leads to:

Verona's Tips for Job Success

1. Suppress your urges. 

Applicable Situation: You walk into your job after a long day at school, and a customer is wandering around the store aimlessly, looking at merchandise. Since you're a good little sales associate, you decide to say a chipper, "Hi! How are you?"

What do you receive in response?

Stony. Silence. You can hear crickets chirping in the background,and the withering look he/she's giving you is enough to melt anyone's sunshiny happy day into something resembling a graveyard at midnight with black pus oozing out of the headstones. 

My First Urge: to draw a massive smile on his/her face with permanent marker. Why do I suppress this urge? Because one, I'm not really big on violating people's space; two, I don't fancy getting thrown in jail; and three, I fear the results would turn out something like this:

 

In which case I would end up laughing hysterically, making the customer even MORE furious and the likelihood that I would go to jail about 100%, give or take a swift punch to the head. On the positive side, I wouldn't have to worry about ever getting a job in retail again.

"Here, truly,  there be dragons." --Neil Gaiman, Stardust

The Origin of Combustible Cake

com·bus·ti·ble (adjective)

1. capable of catching fire and burning; flammable: Gasoline vapor is highly combustible.

2. easily excited: a high strung, combustible nature.

cake (noun)

1. a sweet, baked, breadlike food, usually containing flour, sugar, baking powder/soda, eggs, and liquid flavoring. 

2. a really freaking amazing substance made of magic and rainbows that will make your day fantasmical: This cake is beautiful! I only ate one slice and glitter is coming out of my arse!

Combustible cake = easily excited conflagration of magic and rainbows.

It turns out showing up to your morning lecture that you hate does have some benefits: namely wtf?! moments that result from zoning out for thirty minutes and jerking back into reality, only to realize that your professor is talking about pipe bombs made of cake (and other assorted anomalies of the scientific world). Apparently while I was off in la-la land dreaming about what life would be like without Chemistry exams, my professor was talking about calorimetry (measuring heat involved in chemical reactions), getting all excited about how combustion reactions are just so cool and everyone should love them the next time a Chem exam decides to play cricket with their brains, only instead of using a cricket bat, it uses a pickax. You know, a sharp one. Gleaming menacingly. 

He was trying to demonstrate that you can use calorimetry in a number of situations, not just with specific groups of reactants and products, and he went so far as to say, "You know, if you wanted to, you could put cake in that system, and you'd be able to measure the caloric content of it. You'd probably have to dehydrate the heck out of it and add TONS of oxygen, but you could do it." At which point the class started to pay attention, because at 1:30 in the afternoon, in a crowded lecture hall, any mention of food is enough to have college students frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs faced with the prospect of a nice, juicy steak (that happens to be the next-door neighbor's kid). (The quote was all paraphrasing of course, I'm not some sort of robot that automatically records every word the professor says...or am I?)

 And, even though I picked up nothing from the lecture but that (and even though I won't even remember HOW combustible cake is possible by the next exam) I thought it was hilarious, and then thought about how stupid anyone who decides to dehydrate cake is. This smartass would have a train of thought like this: "I'd love to know what the caloric content of this food is--let me ruin a perfectly good slice of cake by dehydrating it and pumping it full of oxygen, then doing something to it to make it explode...instead of just googling it, because someone's already done this and I'm just being a shameless copycat!" And while exploding cake is awesome, I would probably just end up eating the experiment before it ever made it to the combustion stage. (free cake!)

So naturally, faced with the possibility of combustible cake, I have decided that all of those Food Network competition shows could get a heck of a lot more interesting, if you just add a little science.

Case in Point: Would you rather watch Extreme Cuisine as it is now, or with many more explosions and/or watch that lemon creme pie he just made turn into a sculpture of Houdini? Should Food Network Challenge remain the simple cooking show, or should it turn into a Conflagration and Obstacle Course! show where you have to dodge exploding entrees? 

Now that this is sounding like a Harry Potter + Galaxy Quest + Food Network mashup, you want to see it, right? Right?!

Welcome to how my mind works. Also, I'd definitely watch a lot more TV if things turned out like this. 

Then it occurred to me--way more crazy things than the mention of cake that bursts into flames happen at college. I am a witness of this, and even though they say witness accounts of goings-on aren't reliable (contrary to what every single CSI-like show on the planet seems to think), I'd like to think I'm a reliable source. Also, random happenings are entertaining, and I want to remember them! Also, I just like talking. (If you're out there, reading this, find someone and make them give you a hug! Because you're awesome, and this is new!)  

--And that is how Combustible Cake! came into being. 

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." --Douglas Adams