Alchemy - You're Doing it Wrong

Here's another one of those "what was he thinking?" stories. It seems that a man in Northern Ireland decided that the best way he could possibly spend his day was attempting to transform excrement into gold by mixing it with fertilizer and putting it on top of a heater. Because alchemy, really! The result of his experiment? He started a fire that consumed his apartment and threatened those of his neighbors. Because that shit burns!

Recently, Paul Moran from Northern Ireland attempted to put a twist on the old lead-into-gold trick by turning feces into gold. No word on whether this modification to the recipe was out of necessity or a indomitable sense of adventure.

Either way, the process involved leaving feces, along with fertilizer, on top of a heater. While this process did not manage to transmute the feces into gold, it did manage to transmute his entire apartment into a blazing inferno.

Upon his arrest, Moran admitted to arson and endangering the life of fellow residents in the building by starting the fire, which is estimated to have caused £3,000 worth of damage. Judge McFarland who presided over the case commented that Moran’s endeavors were an “interesting experiment” but that they were obviously doomed to fail. He then proceeded to transmute the next three months of Moran’s life into jail time.

Here's what probably happened. Moran at some point sat down and watched Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain, in which an alchemist does in fact transform feces into gold in a process that appears to involve a lot of heat and some additional chemical reagents. Knowing that Jodorowsky is revered by many as a genuine mystic, he figured that the film must have revealed the True Secret of Alchemy (TM) and went about trying to replicate the process with the materials he had at hand. As Paul Moran unfortunately found out, just because you see it in a movie doesn't mean that it's real.