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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Where no cooler has gone before
A few months ago, my wife and I were walking the dogs in the park when, off in the distance, we heard an ominous rumbling noise moving in our general direction.
Confused and intrigued, we waited for several minutes as the rumbling grew louder and eventually, around a bend in the road, roared -- get ready to be impressed -- about a dozen Shriners in full dress uniform, each of whom was scooting along on -- get ready to be even more impressed -- a motorized beer cooler.
Yes, it was a precision drill team of Shriners riding a fleet of beer coolers that had been equipped with tiny engines, tiny tires and tiny steering wheels. Waving their hands in greeting, they zipped by us and joined a parade that was forming down the road.
As I watched them mosey into the distance, I quietly muttered "Wow!" because I knew, deep in my heart, I had just witnessed the most amazing manly achievement in the history of beer coolers.
Being a guy, it was a deeply emotional moment for me, but I can see now I was a fool. I say that in light of news stories I have just read concerning two amazing guys from Florenceville, N.B., who recently let their beer cooler go where no beer cooler has gone before.
Now, most people look at a beer cooler and think of it as nothing more than a way to keep their beer cool. But Brian McCain and his buddy, Jamie Allison, are not "most people."
When they looked at their beer cooler, they formed the following thought: "What would happen if, instead of beer, we loaded it with $150 worth of electronics, such as a digital camera and video recorder, then tied it to a $50 weather balloon filled with helium and let it go?"
As you have already deduced, that's just what they did, but not before taking the standard safety precaution of also putting a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap into the cooler before takeoff. (They were on a budget, so they couldn't afford a Yankees cap.)
The beer cooler drifted up through the clouds, 30 kilometres high, for about 90 minutes until the balloon popped as it hit the final frontier, then plummeted to Earth at 200 kilometres per hour until a parachute deployed, floating it to safety.
I realize some readers -- we'll call these readers "women" -- can't understand why anyone would launch a beer cooler into near space, but I can assure you Brian and Jamie had a scientific reason for doing this -- they're guys!
It's a fact -- guys love doing stuff, especially scientific stuff wherein you take ordinary household objects and, using principles learned in high school or off the Internet, exceed the boundaries of common sense.
For an even better example of exceeding the limits of common sense, we go to Sweden, where an unemployed 31-year-old guy named Richard Handl was recently arrested after trying to build a tiny nuclear reactor in his kitchen.
A news report I am holding in my hands states Handl was able to buy the radioactive materials he needed on eBay and kept a blog about his experiments in which he described creating a minor meltdown on his kitchen stove.
"I tried to cook Americium, Radium and Beryllium in 96% sulphuric acid, to easier get them blended. But the whole thing exploded upp (sic) in the air," he wrote on the blog called "Richard's Reactor."
Why did Handl -- who was only arrested after he contacted authorities to see if what he was doing was legal -- become interested in do-it-yourself nuclear science? Being a guy, he wanted to see what would happen. "I was just curious to see if it was possible," he is quoted as saying. "It was a hobby."
Which makes sense to me. Splitting atoms is a lot like collecting stamps, except it has the added bonus of allowing you to wipe out humanity. For safety reasons, anyone considering building a reactor in their kitchen should ensure that, if they do not have a degree in nuclear physics, they are at least an "avid hobbyist."
In our final true example of guys expanding the frontiers of science, we turn to two Ontario doctors who, while examining ultrasound images, say they spotted a face on a male patient's inflamed "naughty bits."
"While scrolling through the ultrasound images, the residents and staff alike were amazed to see the outline of a man's face staring up out of the image," the doctors wrote in the scientific journal Urology.
Not that we are skeptical, but we have to wonder if they made this medical discovery after a beer cooler mysteriously fell out of the sky and landed in their backyard.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 16, 2011 A2
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