Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: The Peeps Saga

I knew, last week, when I was telling everyone about how much I loved me some peeps, that a lot of you weren't Peeps fans. And while I will never understand this, I fully accept the fact that you are marshmallowphobic. Frankly, I embrace it. I mean, if you're not eating the Peeps, then that saves more for me, right? Win win, baby.

And while the movie I showed last week was cool and all--you know, the one where they had the Peeps and it looked like they were various types of fireworks and whatnot--it wasn't really blowing shit up. So, why not blow some Peeps up this week?

You know that it pains me to watch Peeps ruined in such a way, but I'm doing it for you, the people who loves them some splosions and such. Don't say I'm not a giver, because I'm willing to sacrifice some of my favorite disgustingly sugary treats for you readers. It's like a written hug or something.

The key to this expansion thing is that marshmallow, for all it's sugary goodness, has a lot of air whipped into it. When you microwave the Peeps, the air gets hot and expands. Okay, let me rephrase that. Water vapor in the air within the Peeps gets excited when you microwave it, which causes those hydrogen-oxygen bonds to wiggle back and forth a lot more, which causes heat. As the bonds wiggle more and more, more heat is produced. As the heat is produced, something needs to absorb it, so the air heats up. As the air heats up, it expands. Since it's trapped in a somewhat solid matrix of sugar, the air pushes out on the soft marshmallow, which causes it to expand like that. The heat also helps to melt the marshmallow, giving the added blobby effect.

The heat that melts the marshmallow, though, is probably caused by the vibrations of the hydrogen-oxygen bonds in the sugar itself, but that would also contribute to the overall heating, expansion and melting effect seen above. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It's the polarizability of the -OH bonds that causes the microwave to have any efficacy at all.

The same thing (minus the melting) happens to a marshmallow when you put it in a vacuum. Except, here the air is expanding because it is being pulled out of the marshmallow instead of expansion through heating. Put a marshmallow in a Bell jar and evacuate it, and it swells up huge before collapsing upon itself.

While all of that is cool, it's not really blowing anything up, per se, is it? No, it's not. It's expanding due to heat and pressure changes, but not a true explosion.

So, what happens when you shove a firecracker up a Peeps' ass and light it?



That was so much more satisfying.

EDIT: I had to pop the word verification back up yesterday. I had some asshole dillweed Chinese fucktard spamming my comments. I'll probably drop it again in a few days. Sorry for the inconvenience.