Never mix bike pumps and gasoline. I learned that lesson as a kid. One fine summer day a friend and I were innocently playing with my dad’s bicycle pump, and somehow a stick got stuck in the end that the air comes out and it got dipped in gasoline (I don’t know how), and apparently spontaneously combusted. If you were a kid with a stick magically on fire, attached to a bike pump, with the pump handle extended up to the top (just like that thing guys in cartoons use to explode bombs), what would you do? Yep, that’s what we did. Our flaming projectile flew across our yard, over our back yard fence and into our neighbor’s yard (remember, mind you, we were COMPLETELY innocent).
So it went a little farther than we had planned. Oh poop! Not good! Being extremely smart, however, we immediately recognized that sending flames into your neighbor’s back yard is generally not considered a good thing (even if it was completely by accident). So I ran over to the fence and got up on something to make a short kid tall enough to see over the fence. You know how in movies people shoot flaming arrows at enemy castles to set them on fire? Well, that’s totally fake! Or maybe they use something better than a little gasoline on a stick. Because there was not a single straw roof on fire. Or anything else for that matter (luckily). And having confirmed that we were not going to need to hide from the fire department, we went back to playing with something a little safer – firecrackers! That science experiment was over, and a lesson was learned – if you’re playing with bike pumps and gasoline, don’t aim too high!