Guy on our oboe/bassoon list sent me this- all you Westy campers should
appreciate this one!

>"   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
>consumer- safety guidelines, is one of the lease-flammable
>substances on Earth. On more than one occasion, quick-thinking
>individuals have extinguished a raging house fire by throwing
>charcoal on it. Your backyard 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 started using
>compressed pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much
>faster, because as you recall from chemistry class, fire is
>essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with the cosine to
>form the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those
>lines).
>
>By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the
>world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not
>cut the mustard. Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get
>ready - liquid oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket
>engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as
>regular oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid
>oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel
>into a room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers. On
>Gobel's World Wide Web page (the address is
>http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs and
>a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long
>wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in
>stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit
>cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive
>charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball
>that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The
>charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world
>record - 3 seconds.
>  There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same
>technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's
>left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.
>"Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking
>of returning it to the store for a refund."
>   Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American,
>all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live
>anywhere near the engineers' picnic site. But also, I was proud
>of my country for producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in
>less time than it takes for guys in less-advanced nations, such
>as France, to spit.
>
>Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up
>with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's
>something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside,
>chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the
>direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom
>cloud.
_____________________________________________________________________
They didn't say if air pollution was less with liquid oxygen :>  !!
My trusty frying pan and gas stove is a lot faster....MB in NJ