So I'm in my basement and, while playing with fire, notice that the matches I have seem to be leeching something blue. I conveniently have the bottle of 99% IPA I produced a few nights earlier by my side, so I soak a few matches in it, and get a blue liquid. Huh. Interesting.
Now I'm curious to get a sample of the substance itself, so I put the liquid on a watchglass, which is the only piece of glassware I'm daring enough to store at home. Hrm. No heat to evaporate it. OK, no problem. I take an empty vodka bottle and stuff its neck with napkins, which I then soak with IPA and ignite. OK, the flame's a bit bigger than I would have boped, but no problem.
Now, at this point I've realized that there's a reasonable chance the IPA in the watchglass will ignite when I try to evaporate it. I make a mental note not to try to blow it out.
OK, watch glass over flame.... A few minutes later the watchglass is damn hot, but most of the IPA is gone. So far so good. Ouch! Fuck that's hot! I shift the watchglass in my hand, causing a lone drop of IPA to dribble down the side/bottom of it. Instead the whole thing is on fire. SHIT!
Instinctively, despite my prior consideration, I try to blow it out. Naturally, burning IPA flies onto my desk, and from there onto my keyboard. Because I didn't have any glassware with which to dispense the IPA from the jar, I'd ended up making a fair mess of it when I poured it into the napkins, so there's a layer of it on the desk. Whoosh! It goes up in flames too.
OK. Priority 1: Keyboard. I have a small class of tea on my desk, which is instantly sacrificed to say my keyboard. Problem solved. Next I start frantically "mashing" the burning IPA with a plate on my desk, although at this point the desk itself is on fire.
Eventually the desk gets put out, and my keyboard lives (although there are some scorch marks).
What have I learned from this? If something seems like a really, really terribly stupid idea, it probably is.