Nobody seems to have followed up on the question about poison gas.

When I was about 14 I had a heavy cold and was really bunged up. Tried mixing battery acid and glycerine for no reason I can remember. I did expect it to produce acrolein but didn't quite expect what acrolein does. It's a lachrymatory agent effective enough to use as a riot control gas. It got my nose streaming. In fact it cured my cold in minutes.

I got into official US government manuals about rocketry. Soon worked out that ammonium perchlorate and aluminium powder (detonated electrically by a fusewire loop from the mains) was going to be the safest and best bang I could get. Never tried to make a rocket but got some awesome bangs.

About 15 years ago I got the idea of doing O. Winston Link style photos of fishing boats offshore at night; I had a specific interesting and very remote location in mind. No electronic flash could do that, not even the sort of studio flashes they use for architectural work and advertising shots of cars. I asked on some photo newsgroups - turns out you can still get the sort of flashbulbs Link used, but the most interesting suggestion was to use the technology the US military employs for simulating nuclear explosions in battlefield exercises. Fill a trough with aluminium powder with an explosive charge underneath it and enclose it in a huge plastic bag filled with oxygen. The result is a flashbulb up to the size of a house. If I'd got round to doing it, it would have set off a flood of UFO reports from Skye to Ireland. I had no idea how to predict exposure, and since I'd only get one chance I would have needed to set up about a dozen cameras with different aperture settings, film speeds and filters to bracket the shot.