6 Things That Shouldn't Explode (But Did Anyway)

Michael Bay is right: Somewhere, right now, something is exploding.

And we're not talking bombs and tankers either. As it turns out, there are objects all over the place that will suddenly explode the shit out of themselves for absolutely no reason at all, and often when you least expect it.

Things like...

Imagine this scene: You sleep through your alarm and have to skip a shower to make the bus on time, only the elevator to your apartment jams and you miss the bus anyway and have to take a cab. The cabbie helpfully ignores your directions and instead takes the long route to run the meter up. Then you step into a puddle off of the curb and soak both socks through before finally making the mad dash upstairs to your cubicle only to find that you just missed the regional manager's visit because you were late.

Basically you are Peter Parker. Without spider-powers. That is sad.

Utterly defeated, you sink into your ergonomically designed desk chair, which then blows the fuck up like Danny Glover's toilet in Lethal Weapon 2.

Sound like John Woo's Office Space? Wrong. It's science. Evidently, the pneumatic cylinder in an office chair can become too pressurized and, in extreme cases, leave the person sitting above feeling like they were just anally raped by Superman at the speed of sound.

"I heard a sonic boom and suddenly my asshole was pregnant."

How worried should you be? Well, there was a famous report that a boy in China was killed in such an incident when shrapnel from the chair's base tore into his rectum and caused him to bleed to death, but most have written that off as a hoax (or maybe viral marketing for a horror movie we never, ever want to see).

We suppose that should make us feel better, but all we can think of is if it happens tomorrow, we'll have the added bonus of going down as the first person in history to die from anal chair rape.

Recently, people in Hamburg, Germany were astonished to discover a pond filled to the brim with thousands of exploded frog corpses, which, according to the encyclopedia, is not typically how frogs enjoy their habitats.

So what had happened at this pond of death? Was it a genetic defect? Some kind of virus? A fat guy with frog-stomping boots? As it turns out, none of these are correct. The real culprit was a crow.

"Get my frog-stomping boots."

You see, this species of frog has an overzealous defense mechanism. When threatened, they puff up with air to several times their natural size in order to scare away enemies.

Terrifying.

This seems like it would just make them look fatter and thus more appetizing to larger animals, but who are we to question evolution?

Anyway, crows are smart motherfuckers, and they've learned (possibly from the same encyclopedia) that the frog's liver is the best-tasting part of the animal. And not to waste any effort, they don't actually kill the frogs. They just swoop in and tear the livers out of their still-living victims with their beaks.

The frogs, aghast at the frog equivalent of waking up in a bathtub full of ice with one of their internal organs missing, go ahead and puff themselves up in a hilariously delayed defensive response, neglecting to consider the gaping holes where their livers used to be.

The result is a sort of offal cannon (or meat shotgun, if you will), spraying out entrails in every direction like the silly string of the damned.

Tropical paradises are never what they seem. Coconuts rocket down from the sky like cannonballs, sharks infest the shark-infested waters and the island beaches are entangled in vague pop-philosophy references and psychobabble.

"It's the Jungian, ah, parallel to our own sub-need... fuck it, I've been holding in diarrhea for like three hours."

On top of all this is the most unexpected menace of them all: fucking exploding fruit.

Native to the tropics is the Sandbox Tree, a 100-foot tall exclamation point to the phrase "Do not touch." Every inch of this towering monster is poisonous, and its trunk is laced with so many spikes it looks like a gladiator weapon. If this tree could walk, it would enslave humanity.

Climb me. I fucking dare you.

If somehow you manage to get beyond its toxic bark and leaves (and the spikes, never forget the spikes), you still run the very high risk of getting pelted in the face with the natural equivalent of a fragmentation grenade.

You see, the Sandbox Tree's seed pods are fist-sized fruit that, when ripe, explode with such force that they routinely wound nearby people and livestock, which is unsurprising when you look at the shrapnel they put out:

Evidently the Sandbox Tree watched the fruit picking scene from The Wizard of Oz and decided that if Dorothy ever tried that shit with it, she'd be walking away without a face. Either that or it just felt like lobbing bombs all across the beaches of Costa Rica like the Green Goblin. This is what is known as a "correct" or "real" defensive mechanism, frogs. Take a note.