Can you freeze nuclear waste?

Like any responsible human being, I don’t let my friends do stupid things. I’m happy to be the Jiminy Cricket voice of reason that prevents them from doing something that’s certain to cause irreversible harm. I’d speak up and stop them from, say, smacking themselves repeatedly in the face with a frying pan, or jumping off a building face first into a pile of bricks.

Unfortunately, my friends don’t always do the same for me.

Take today, for instance, when a supposedly good friend of mine treated me to lunch at a nearby Indian restaurant. I’d never been to the restaurant before, so he ordered for the both of us. Ten minutes later I was staring down a plate of innocent-looking Basmati rice encircling a pile of meat in a dark brown blob of sauce.

“It’s pork Vindaloo,” he explained. “You’ll love it, but be careful. It has a bit of a kick.”

Now, I’ve tried chili peppers. I’ve tried nachos with jalapenos. I’ve even tried hot wings smothered by a sauce that had the word “inferno” in its title. I figured I was ready for just about anything a neighbourhood Indian eatery could throw my way.

Milliseconds after the first bite touched my tongue, I knew I was dead wrong. The pain in my mouth started mildly, but in seconds it steadily turned into a sensation fast getting out of control. Fiery doesn’t come close to describing it. In twenty seconds I was in agony, a searing fire raging in my skull. After about a minute I became frightened I might die. Two minutes later I became frightened that I might not. My eyes were streaming tears. Molten lava was pouring out of my nose. My entire esophageal system was liquefying with every breath. Even my hair follicles felt aflame.

Trying to keep calm, I downed my entire glass of water, then my friend’s. Things only got worse. Desperately I stuffed fistfuls of bread into my mouth trying to quell the conflagration. Sweat poured out of me as my body tried to realign its natural internal temperature. It was ten minutes of pure agony.

Even now, hours later, I still feel weak, and I didn’t touch a second bite.

On the official Ad-libbed scale of Things That Are Hot, pork Vindaloo ranks as absolutely absurd. It’s a devastating mix of curry, garlic, and Bhut Jolokia chili peppers, listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the hottest pepper in the world. At least that’s what I’m told the ingredients are. I don’t believe them. I think it is basically pork seasoned with plutonium, pepper spray and a dash of sulphuric acid.

It’s not food. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.

The waiter wrapped up my meal in tinfoil and made me take it home. It’s sitting in my fridge right now and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want to toss it in the garbage, as it’ll end up in the landfill where a bulldozer might accidentally rupture its thin metal packaging and cause an ecological disaster. I don’t want to flush it down the toilet in case it ends up contaminating the community water supply.

I think I’ll take it to my friend’s house and leave it on his doorstep, throw a match on it and let him deal with consequences. If things go bad and he’s fatally wounded trying to dispose of it, at least the jerk had it coming.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.