Wednesday, August 30, 2006

DRANO BOMBS 2.0: Expert anti-terror education and our law & order society

Last week, DD blog set aside for special ridicule one example of "security training" in the war against terror. Produced in a master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, the work was judged utterly out-of-touch.

DD blog excerpted a paragraph discussing the teenage boy-fueled phenomenon of "drano bombs," the mixing of the popular pipe cleaner with balls of aluminum foil in capped plastic soda bottles. The thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School framed the same thing in the context of domestic terrorism.

Dick Destiny found this so absurd and intelligence-insulting, it decided to take another whack at the thing, entitled Common Chemicals as Precursors of Improvised Explosive Devices: The Challenges of Defeating Domestic Terrorism.

Once again, consider the excerpt:



DD blog, with GlobalSecurity.Org senior fellow T-shirt on, then produced a link to a video showing some nerds making drano bombs in a basement. It was so popular, now it's unavailable.

"Try again later," Google Video brightly recommends.

(Almost everything comical or stupid Dick Destiny blog links to goes poof in a couple weeks. Drano bomb demos, photo albums of Lafayette athletes and their women in drunken stupors, etc. Sheesh.)

However, an adequate substitute is found in the work of the River Road Rednecks, here. The River Road Rednecks set their drano bomb instruction and demonstration to country music, with the firing rangesetting in a white-trash country backlot.

Dick Destiny blog might have chosen Big & Rich's "Comin' To Your City" or something off the new Montgomery Gentry LP as background music rather than rustic "Deliverance"-style theme. That would have made it more attractive for coverage in altie weeklies, preferably located in the south, where the writers can take 250 words to marvel over the miracle of being able to mash popular music together with inane home-movie slices taken from American life.

But the River Road Rednecks appear to have done a bang-up job on drano bombs, one more momentarily entertaining than those available from YouTube in the same genre. The rules of journalism now require this article to tell you, or imply, that YouTube is the fountain from which all wisdom and culture flows.

In any case, what is to be thought when a graduate school is teaching courses in national security in which students are benightedly allowed to believe drano bombs are something connected with terrorism?

That's rhetorical.

In any case, careful with those drano bomb vids, fellows.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Nemo said...

I remember making a pair of "Drano bombs" back in 1991 or 1992, after downloading a text file of (one of many things called) the Anarchist's Cookbook off of an "anarchist" BBS. (Remember BBSes? Weren't they great?) The effect of the first was so underwhelming, to say the least, I made the second to see if I'd done something wrong. It also failed to live up to it's hype. :)

If people are worried about Drano bombs, then I can only imagine the fear that Axe bombs strike into their hearts?

6:32 PM  
Blogger George Smith said...

BBSes were great! The axe bomb is precious! Can a YouTube video be far behind?

11:51 PM  

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