How to blow up a whale

"Eh, you never know what you're capable of. I never thought I could shoot down a German plane, but last year I proved myself wrong." -Abe Simpson

You tell 'em , Granpa! Why i'll bet none of you reading this would have thought that you could carry out a magnificent explosive fukcup on the scale of the video in our We Like It section. But by the end of this article, you'll have the skills and knowhow to do just that!

First, we're going to need some explosives. I'm not talking about the kind of showy nonsense you get on Bonfire night. If we're going to disintegrate a large sea mammal we're going to need some heavy duty shit. I recommend an explosive called ANFO. ANFO gets its name from its main ingredients, Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. The more horticulturally inclined of you may know that Ammonium Nitrate is what fertilizer is made of. In fact, you can make homebake ANFO from fertilizer and diesel. Although it might be best if you didn't try that, kids.

You can get 25kg bags of ANFO from Dyno Nobel for around £630 each. The reason we're using ANFO is that it is a relatively slow explosive, which will give our chunks of whale blubber a good loft, so that they can rain down and cause maximum devastation to the surrounding area. A faster-moving explosive (such as a military explosive like RDX or Tritonal) would probably just blast a useless hole straight through our poor dead cetacean.

To achieve a similarly cataclysmic blast as the 1000lb detonation in the video we're going to use about eighteen of those 25kg bags. That's a shedload, in case you're wondering. The tricky part is making sure the whole lot goes off simultaneously.

To achieve this, we're going to do the only sensible thing: use more explosives. Our ANFO may be grunty, but it lacks finesse and control. In fact, like most explosives, it's actually quite hard to set off. Hit it with hammers and it will do nothing. Set fire to it and it will burn. What we need to do is hit it extremely hard, and the best way to do that is to use another smaller explosive, which is itself easier to initiate. We then use a smaller amount of an even more volatile explosive to set that off, and so on. This is called a chain of detonation, and should eventually give us something so touchy that we can set it off with the fart of a diabetic mouse, but in such small quantities that we can have a high confidence in finishing our task in the smallest number of pieces possible.

So into each bag of ANFO goes one of these pretties: a booster. This is a solid cast chunk of high explosives into which we can insert a little device called a detonator, or det for short. These dets are twitchy little creatures, and can be set off electrically. Whatever you do, attach your dets ("det up") last! I apologise for the rampant textual emboldification, but if you get that wrong you'll probably be getting about in a teaspoon afterwards. If nothing else that would probably cramp your style down the disco.

So now that we have the technology, let's discuss the practicalities. We don't get a lot of dead whales lying about in London, so there's no established etiquette. Nevertheless, I would say that it's good form to at least tell your neighbours of the impending explosion. Some sort of leaflet through the letter slot, perhaps? Definitely keep all pets inside until after the event, if only because the sight of their puppy merrily gnawing on a whale's eyeball can be distressing to small children.

If possible get your neighbours to help, as you'll have to dig down under your whale so that the ANFO gets the right loft needed to spread the whale far and wide.

When you've got all your charges in place and you've detted up, calmly walk back to your safety point. It's considered poor form among explosive experts to run away from your own work. Be staunch. Saunter back as if you had not a care in the world.

Attach your initiation device. Old-fashioned exploder sets have good theatrical value, so why not use one of them. With a bit of luck you should be rewarded with an utter clusterfcuk of similar magnitude to that brought to us by the fine men and women of the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Congratulations!

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