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Revenge for the Foil Apartment?
GooseKirk asks: "Just over a year ago, my apartment was completely covered in foil. For some reason, this resulted in global media attention, and ever since, people have been asking me, "what are you doing for revenge?" A few great ideas fell through for various reasons (Ron Jeremy was booked, apparently), and sadly, I currently lack access to an orbital weapons platform, so let me pose this riddle to the great Slashdot collective: if you were going to cook enough popcorn to effectively, and let's say hypothetically, bury a small single-story building, how would you cook it and how would you deliver it, quickly and quietly, say, under cover of darkness? At the least, I think it's an interesting puzzle, and other wacky ideas are certainly welcome... just remember, people, mum's the word, OK?"
Anything involving popcorn is good. When my house full of crazy geek college students got involved in a prank war with another house full of geek college students, I'd have to say the popcorn prank was the best.
Our war started simply enough. They were the pirate house, they even flew pirate flag from their roof. So one night under cover of darkness we went over and stole it. The responsed by breaking into our house and waking us all up by turn our CD player on full blast and looping A pirates life for me.
Now that is annoying to wake up too.
The hacks on our various websites got pretty boring, as did the WEP cracking, so we decided to step it up a notch.
One of my housemates worked at a movie theater, so we had him bring home all the stale popcorn at the end of the night.
We snuck into their house, filled their whole bathroom with popcorn and went home happy.
We woke up to pictures in our e-mail boxes of the enemy playing NAKED in our wall of popcorn.
So my words of advice to you, popcorn is funny, but make sure you're prepared from strange naked popcorn prancing pictures.
Ewwww, the images are still burned into my mind.
And it took a CRAPLOAD of popcorn to do it. We borrowed several popcorn poppers and had them running every minute we were awake for about a week leading up to the prank.
We air popped the popcorn so that it wouldn't get grease everywhere, but we still got bits of corn all over. A few years after the prank, my friend's CD player quit working. He sent it in for repair, and they sent it back to him saying the problem was that a corn kernal had become lodged in the player somewhere.
IIRC, it takes about 120 pounds of popcorn to fill the passenger compartment of a 1964 Falcon, covering a building would take a heck of a lot more.
Good luck, if you can pull it off, the expression on his face when he sees it will be priceless!
...You're talking about burying the EXTERIOR of the building, not filling the interior volume.
A bit of basic math to calculate the volume required (keep in mind I'm a poli-sci major, not a math geek):
The minimum dimensions you'll be dealing with for a "a small single-story building" would be about 60' x 60' x 15' which gives you an exterior WALL AREA of 54 000 square feet. This is NOT including the roof. Just the exterior WALLS of the building, I'll get to the roof in a second.
For the sake of simplicity, and my own poor math skills, we'll assume your friend has a FLAT roof. That's another 3 600 square feet.
You're now dealing with 57 600 square feet of exterior area to cover with popcorn. Assuming that you want to be able to provide at least 6" of popcorn on top of the whole house and assuming you will have a way to KEEP the popcorn IN PLACE (i.e. not just pile it up) you're looking at 57 600' x 0.5' for a total of 28 800 CUBIC FEET of popcorn.
If you are EXTREMELY liberal in your calculations you can assume that about two bags of microwave popcorn will create one cubic foot of the stuff. Thus, 57 600 bags of microwave popcorn. I'm not quite sure how to calculate how much bulk popcorn you'd need, so I've put it in microwave bag terms to give you a rough idea.
If you actually need to PILE the popcorn up around the walls I suspect it would be reasonable to double this number for an approximate volume requirement. 57 600 CUBIC feet, or 115 200 BAGS of of popcorn is a FUCKING LOT of popcorn...
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Now, if you were talking about FILLING his house with popcorn...
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We'll assume a basic 1-bedroom single-story residence with kitchen, bathroom, living room, dining room, hallways, NOT including closets, and NOT including garage.
The layout of the house could DRASTICALLY affect the overall volume, so these are excessively rough estimates.
Bedroom: 20' x 20'
Kitchen: 20' x 20'
Living Room: 20' x 20'
Dining Room: 20' x 20'
Bathroom: 15' x 10'
Hallways: 35' x 5'
All Ceilings at 9'
(4)3600 + 1350 + 1575 = 17 325 cubic feet inside the house. Refer to my previous calculations regarding microwave bags / volume and you'll come to about 35 650 BAGS of microwave popcorn to accomplish this.
After all this, I seriously doubt you'll be able to do this on the kind of budget that I'd imagine you're on. Perhaps going for just your friend's bedroom / car / home-office would be a more reasonable thing to try?
--Nic