We at the ol’ raincoaster blog did not just fall off the squid trawler, ya know. No indeed, we were not hatched yesterday nor even the day before and are perfectly well aware of the mass moist madness that erupts when you get groups of excited, vigorous young people together in a consequence-free and water-and-stain-resistant environment stocked with bottled beverages.

Behold the world’s largest Mentos and Diet Coke experiment:

Honestly, it looks like an orgy at Hogwarts to me. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all!

There’s not a raging snotload of things to do in Belgium, if you don’t rustle mussels or brew beer for a living, so these enthusiastic, yet two-years-behind-the-meme students decided to go for mass quantities, rather than attempt to duplicate the balletic elegance of the original experiment. For this monumental achievement, they gathered in historic (and, presumably, easily hosed down) Ladeuzeplein Square in Leuven, Belgium. Note please, that Coke does not work as well and regardless of what the Torygraph article linked to above tells you, it must be Diet Coke.

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz were the famed mad scientists whose hypnotic Aesthetic of the Absurd video, covered extensively in this blog and millions of others, set the tone for memes to come, from the inexorable rise of lolcats up to and including Anonymous‘s current campaign against Scientology.

Not-Fleshed-Out-Yet-Really-Quite-Inescapable Conclusion: The dominant vernacular of civil engagement today defines itself directly against the current structure and forms of terrorism and is absurd in every sense, self-aware, positive in tone and gesture, meta-(not post-)intellectual, and a helluva lot of fun.

: : : : : : : : : : :