5

Molasses

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The Boston Molasses Disaster is both tragic and stupid, and it's a remarkable piece of history. How does molasses, known for being as fast as a legless monkey rolling uphill, manage to kill not just one person but 21 and injure 150 others? Impeccable comic-timing and ridiculous mass.

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I should probably clarify: It killed 21 without the aid of flour, butter, and decades of inactivity.

On Jan. 15, 1919, the temperature in Boston rose above 40 degrees. This was January, and the previous day had been remarkably cold, well below zero. That sharp shift in temperature acted on a massive tank of 2.3 million gallons of molasses being held in a shit-shack of a tank that was known to leak so badly they painted it brown to hide that fact at the Purity Distilling Company.

Boston Public Library
Which no doubt threw authorities completely off the trail when they went looking
for the source of Lake Diabetes.

4

Chocolate

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"Death by chocolate" is an expression that is probably playing off of "death by misadventure" and has since been given to desserts, a short film, an album, and probably some kind of really perverse sexual maneuver you're better off not knowing about. It can also just be used to describe a literal situation, such as the case of Vincent Smith, who went full body into a vat of chocolate at a New Jersey plant and never came back up again.

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Calm your shit, "I'd love to drown in chocolate!" comment guy; this is about to get grim.

Smith was over a tank loading chocolate into it when he slipped and fell in. Unlike the rivers of chocolate at Willy Wonka's factory, this vat was filled with boiling chocolate that was being mixed by massive, brutal mechanical arms. Even though his co-workers managed to shut the mixers down, Smith was in the boiling brew for over 10 minutes before rescue workers arrived.

3

Hot Dogs

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Every year America celebrates its independence by making people watch in disgust as strangers gorge themselves on wieners like starving dong addicts with no shame or gag reflex. The hot dog eating contest is a weird tradition, made all the more weird by just how many hot dogs some humans can actually eat in a single sitting. Eat more than three on your own and you'll call yourself all kinds of awful names for being such a gross monster. Competitive eaters will then sit down and eat 50 -- 50 wieners; can you even imagine that? That's so many chicken assholes, you don't even know.

Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin.
Meanwhile, Babe Ruth needed only 12 to get sent to a hospital,
which is disappointing for athletes and fat guys.

2

Beer

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Do you like beer? Imagine standing in the middle of a narrow, cobblestone street in England. Quaint little houses on either side of you, a depressing gray sky above, some dribbled bangers and mash on your blouse, because it's 1814 and that's what people in England wear. A blouse and pantaloons. And you're just standing on Little Quidditchshire Lane like you always do, waiting for the haberdasher to come by on his donkey cart. Only the sound you hear approaching is not donkey hoofbeats on cobblestones, it's the sloshy galosh of 323,000 gallons of brew as it devastates the local brewery and rips buildings to pieces before it drunkenly tsunamis you and your fancy blouse into oblivion. That was happy hour on Oct. 17, 1814.

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I assume there were also cheap appetizers, but in 1800s England
that probably amounted to gruel and orphan meat.

How did 323,000 gallons of beer end up rolling down a street, taking nine lives and a number of structures with it? Probably the exact way you think it happened -- really crappy quality control.

1

Chilies

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The first time I ever went to a restaurant that had a spicy food challenge, I saw that they had waivers that patrons had to sign before they took part, just in case anything terrible happened. This was, of course, bullshit and just to add a bit of flare to the whole thing. How do I know this? Because no one has ever died from eating spicy food in the history of humankind -- except one guy. And that guy didn't go to a restaurant.

Rickywood
Though facing chili-death at a Chili's would've been the kind of depressing event
monuments are erected for.

Scientifically speaking, it's entirely possible that spicy food could kill you, but it's in that way that eating stones and going swimming could kill you -- how likely are you to let it get that bad, anyway? The discomfort from eating chilies would make you stop well before it became lethal, at least in most cases. But not so for Andrew Lee, who made himself a home-brew hot sauce and promptly died as a result.

Hot sauce, and the capsaicin in it, can cause a severe allergic reaction at high levels, which can lead to anaphylactic shock. You can kill rats with high-dose capsaicin if you're a really vindictive exterminator, and the official cause will be shock; the body just can't handle high doses of the stuff, especially since it starts messing with how you interpret nerve signals.

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Though if you view bukkakeing your tongue with ghost peppers as a good idea, your brain
may already be receiving shitty signals.

While it's possible spicy food has contributed to other people's deaths, Lee wins the award for being the guy who definitely died from it; he'd had a recent physical, so it's known he was in otherwise good health. The problem was, as a tough guy who thought he could handle hot foods, as so many of those type do, he mixed up a brew of super hot sauce and decided to ignore the usual safeguards, like eating it with bread or really anything that would protect his stomach lining. At high enough levels, capsaicin will just plow through your stomach lining, and then it's in your blood stream, where even if you've never shown symptoms of an allergy, a severe reaction can occur and knock your ass flat.

So what the hell did Lee eat? The story didn't say, but rumor has it his dad recently sent him some seeds for the kinds of chilies like the Carolina reaper that are usually only grown in the yards of houses from Stephen King novels that rack up 1.5 million Scoville units on the heat scale, compared to your average habanero pepper that is only a couple hundred. These things are even hotter than ghost chilies, which were your granddad's hottest chilies until people started making insane new hybrids a few years ago that can, for all intents and purposes, actually burn your asshole off.

For more from Felix Clay, check out 4 Most Sexually Uncomfortable Characters From Your Childhood and 4 Sex Lies Everyone Needs to Stop Telling.

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