Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

This report is a follow up to the Pop Rocks and Coke event BASS held on Bruinwalk on Wednesday, June 3rd and Friday, June 5th. -The Eds.

Part of my current difficulty with job-hunting is that I’ve done things like this. Who the hell wants a super-villian when she can’t even take out a bunch of college kids in an attempt to boost her own GPA?

At least I got Herbert’s* whole, “plans within plans,” thing right. Shaun and I only tabled so we could hang out. Then we had to come up with something better than, “Ask an Atheist.” Then we had to come up with something better than polling BruinWalk about invisible dragons. It just so happened that we came up with something that let me slip a nefarious plot in there: Feeding the student body Pop Rocks and Coke.

A brave student ingests some Pop Rocks and Coke. Amazingly, he survived.

Genius, right? Everyone knows that Mikey from the old Life cereal commercials died when his stomach exploded after having Pop Rocks with a Coca-Cola chaser. You know all the smartie-pants are going to be all, “nuh-uh,” take it and then their stomachs explode, adjusting the grading curve accordingly. I’m like Snow White’s evil stepmom, except way more evil and substantially less hot. And lots of high fructose corn syrup instead of apples and poison combs.

We set up our table on Wednesday morning with a nice little tag line of, “Stressed about Finals? Free Pop Rocks & Coke!” Shaun insisted we add a polite request saying, “(Please, try not to die). A few people who came up were gravely concerned. Frankly, I was more concerned about my escape plan. Would I be able to get out of there before UCPD showed up and tazered the hell out of me? Was our cover of, “Doing it for science,” enough? And what of this photographer for UC taking pictures to promote the University? He took a lot of photos of us. If I pulled my plan off, this’d totally blow my alter-ego’s cover.

Spencer and Shaun man the handing out of the deadly coke and pop rocks to stressed students.

Eighty-four people had Pop Rocks and Coke. Zero died.

I went and cried in the third floor Ackerman bathroom as my dreams of super-villian grad school burst like so many Pop Rocks in the mouths of so many would-have-been victims.

But hey, what else was I to do but buck up and try again, right? Besides we still had more Pop Rocks. So, out we went again on Friday.

Fifty-three lived. Zero died. Again.

I’m just not very good at this, I think.

Things that could have been done better:

Gloated over my plan and revealed all the details to a super hero
Know a superhero
Checking Snopes
Doing something like this at the beginning of the year, not tenth week of last quarter (you hear me, little BASStards?)