Renaldo Returns

My Mom's family used to have a great tradition, called the Renaldo award. I am not equipped to explain the origin of that word, and will defer to greyer heads who may be able to elucidate in the comments. But the award itself was a traveling prize given each year to the person who did the dumbest thing. We all have funny stories of people in our families doing dumb things. But the Renaldo was a way of memorializing and formalizing these misadventures, making it easier to always remember the stupidity of the recipient, which is clearly a good thing.

I've been thinking for a while now that we need to reinstitute the Renaldo award. Some events in my own life yesterday reminded me of that desire.

On the 24th of July I often show up at the joint Barker-Bell party with a few bottles of pop, some mentos, and a little device that aids insertion of the former into the latter, with explosive results. It's for the kids. Usually it's an uneventful piece of entertainment, with a healthy dose of science tied in too. Last night, things took an interesting turn. While you can't really see the accident well from this footage, Liza did a good job of capturing the moment:


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What you can't really see there is that after blowing the mentos down into the pop bottle, I took a minute to look directly into the cylinder to verify that the mentos had indeed fallen. With my eye. Open. Somewhat to my surprise, the mentos had fallen when I had blown them in, and started a chemical reaction that released all of the carbon dioxide in the bottle, along with a jetstream of liquid black cherry magma out of the bottle with an immense amount of force. At that moment, my open eye was staring down into the bottle looking at all the pretty bubbles. The soda burst out of the chamber and literally filled my eyelid with pools of burning carbon dioxide with a cool cherry flavor. I never knew I had taste buds in my eyeballs, but I am sure I do, because I tasted that stuff WITH MY EYE. It was the weirdest thing. And it hurt like nothing I've ever felt before. All the kids screamed at the geyser, and I staggered around in the background wondering if I had permanently lost my sight. It was horrible. The carbonated pain only lasted for a few seconds, fortunately, but my sight didn't come back right away. Man, that was a crazy experience. I'm better now.

Anyway, I lay in bed last night thinking about it and just started laughing and laughing at what I had done. So I figured I'd nominate myself.

I'm not really worried. There's enough stupid stuff going with everyone else I know that I doubt I'll be holding the trophy at the end of the year, but I'm definitely proud of my entry. So with this, I announce the opening of nominations for the 2008 Renaldo award. This will not be limited to family, but welcomes any family, friends, and generally, readers of this blog. If you want to nominate someone in that category for something really cool and stupid they have done this year, please do so. What have you got?

On advice of my parents, and good phonetic sense, I've changed the spelling of the award from Ronaldo to Renaldo. Sorry to the commenters below who adopted my original spelling and now look like you mis-spelled it.