Wait, is this reliable? Shouldn't it matter what the temperature of the surrounding air is?

Putting it another way -- for what range of briquettes is Jim's rule of thumb reliable? I strongly suspect you can't burn a pile of 1000 briquettes and get a 40,000°F fire. I'm also pretty sure you can't put a single briquette in an oven and make a nice cool 40°F refrigerator. (Or no briquettes at all for a 0°F freezer!)

These are very little harder to make and don't require charcoal. Obviously, they're less useful if it's cloudy.

They do work quite well - I've used one for quite a bit of dyeing, which requires moderate sustained heat, but you can get them much hotter if you want.

The apparatus -- based on local experience -- is reliable for the range of temperatures in which New Hampshire Girl and Boy Scouts do their camp cookery, which is to say from the mid-eighties down to freezing. While New Hampshire scouts, being a hardy lot, have been known to camp out in temperatures far lower than that, at that time of year there's usually deep snow on the ground, which renders tinfoil-box-oven cooking problematic.

The interpreters at Old Sturbridge Village showed me how they can fairly accurately measure the temperature in the wood-fired kitchen ovens. You stick your hand inside one and hold it for as long as you can, counting the seconds out loud. Individual pain tolerance may vary, but after a very short time of experimentation, you will end up with a personalized, reliable temperature gauge.

The rule of thumb is +/- the unit of heat from roughly room temperature. After that the deviation calls for an additional unit of fuel when the outside air is colder, two extra units of fuel if it's really REALLY cold out.

Notice I said colder...as forty degrees above room temperature seems to rapidly diminish the desire to "cook" anything for a scout of either gender (except maybe actually frying an egg on a rock just to prove you can do it).

As for the colder situation, once past two extra briquettes you have bigger issues with the thermal column created by the cooking. For weird reasons that I can't explain with any justice, below zero Fahrenheit the escaping warm air doesn't actually escape and the oven starts to have difficulty maintaining a sufficient amount of oxygen vs carbon monoxide to facilitate combustion.

I've been told it has to do with air pressure differences between the cold and the warm air when the outside air is really cold...but again...not my area of expertise and that part of the answer could be wholly and utterly off base.

I can tell you that at -10 Fahrenheit on a calm winter day in the woods of central Idaho, this did not work at all. After about 30 minutes the weird airflow (you could see the air gasping in from the top) started to make the briquettes flicker, without cooking a darn thing.

Could 10,000 briquettes make a 40,000 degree oven? No, the aluminum foil would melt at a much lower temperature than that, igniting the cardboard and poof, now you just have a pile of briquettes and no reflective heat amplification. (yes, I know you were being silly and already knew that.)

Yeah, that sounds like my old Scout troop, all right.

Apologies to Andy if he's genuine, but I Think Not.

I suspect that the spammers pass around lists of URLs to try, and they're probably not systematic about it. A URL that they tried once, or where the message stayed live for a few hours, may keep getting tried just because it's on the list.

The stat log shows a search engine query for a random series of silly words, which I never put on the site myself.

So I suspect that someone posted that series of silly words in a comment as a marker that means "here's the place, let's all pile on!"

3:O(((>

I've seen something like that happen on my blog-- someone posted something that was actually on point, but very brief (i.e. a human had probably looked at the post, and then dashed off a sentence), but that had a commercial link with the poster's name.

I let it stand at first, but eventually I saw in my referer logs that some people had come to the blog in search for that commercial link.

I then deleted the link (but let the post itself stand), and since then, I've been nuking such links in people's names when they're commercial (unless they're clearly for *that commenter*'s personal business *and* relevant to the comment). I've sometimes just nuked the whole comment, but to date haven't always done so when they've made some effort to be relevant. I may change my mind if it gets too prevalent.

(I suspect this sort of thing is what those "get paid to write online!" jobs entail; very fast quasi-"relevant" comments with an ad-link payload.

I nuke 'em all.

And sometimes, when a thread becomes nothing but call-and-response spam, I just close the thread.