Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Old-fashioned South Georgia Redneck Shenanigans

Can you even say shenanigans and Redneck in the same sentence? I think shenanigans has too many syllables, there's some kind of unwritten law about that I am sure. Anyway, that's besides the point, really.

A couple of Fridays ago, we set out to amuse ourselves the old school way - sitting on the tailgate of my SUV in the driveway(only because I don't have a pickup truck, and Fred's was parked in the street, thus we would have been on city property, perhaps inviting a public drunkeness charge...), drinking beer, and shooting off Coke geysers.

What is a Coke geyser you ask? Well, you take a roll of Mentos, drop them all into a 2 liter of soda - doesn't have to be Coke, any carbonated beverage would work, but we splurged for the good stuff. The Mentos cause a reaction, and instantaneously a fountain of coke spews forth into the air. The scientific explanation is that the arabic gum in the Mentos reduces the surface tension of the water molecules in the soda, thereby releasing the carbon dioxide that is in suspension - quite rapidly. We just call it damn cool.

Actually, we had a test run a few nights earlier, and were having difficulty getting all the Mentos out of the wrapper and into the bottle before ignition. So, Fred made a trip to Home Depot and procured the materials needed to create a MDD - Mentos Delivery Device. Basically, it consists of a length of pvc pipe joined to a coupler that has pipe threads on one end that you screw onto the 2 liter bottle of propellent. He drilled holes just above the coupler that 2 cotter pins slide into, and affixed a length of string to the 2 cotter pins. Problem solved. After loading up the MDD with ammo (a box fo Mentos) and pulling the detonator cord (hey, it sounds better than string), we acheived much better delivery of the payload and the attached length of pvc pipe acted as a barrel of sorts - not to mention the fact that it also made it look like a fountain with soda spewing forth from the drilled holes as well. We achieved heights that we estimated to be 10-15 feet high.

Sometimes you just gotta get back to basics to remember how much fun silly stuff can be. Posted by Picasa

2 comments:

Len said...

Hey, y'all, watch this!

This is too funny. Fred never saw the tater gun in action, did he? WIth his love of rojos and the Coke fountain, he'd be a natural.

What's with the extra comment security, have you been getting a lot of trolls?

Betsy said...

I saw this in the paper yesterday, so it's not just for rednecks!