Hot, hot hot!

If Frank is correct that he ate a ghost pepper, he is lucky to be here to tell the tale:

"The Naja Jolokia has been confirmed by the Guinness World Records as the most potent pepper on earth. It has a rating of between 800,000 and 1,000,000 SR. [See here for the Scoville scale for ranking the heat of chili peppers].This tongue-burner, also known as the Naga Morich, Ghost Pepper, Ghost Chili, and Bhut Jolokia, is found mostly in Northeastern India, and a few regions in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Equally as lethal as its red flesh are its seeds, which when ingested can literally leave one incapacitated for up to thirty minutes."  (From Fodor's Travel website)  According to Wikipedia, the Indian Defence Forces have apparently weaponized the ghost pepper.

Frank's post reminds me of a memorable graduate school ordeal-- fortunately, I was only in the audience for this one.  A distinguished professor in the Classics department at Cornell was also a brilliant chef.  He was a Brit who had lived in Austin, Texas, for several years before moving to Cornell and claimed to have developed a taste for spicy food-- a claim many of us graduate students  doubted because he was a Brit of the palest variety, and we all know the reputation British food has for being bland.   He decided to host a Mexican feast for the graduate students, and spent two full days preparing the food with several of his students assisting.  In the course of the preparations, one grad student, R (a former varsity football player with a macho attitude, not your typical Classics grad student) declared that nothing the professor could prepare would be too hot for him!   The professor admitted that he doubted he could impress R, but that he would do his best to come up with something 'rather special.'

At the end of a long evening, when much food and alcohol had been consumed and Ron had more or less forgotten the challenge, the professor appeared with a small dish of chili  and a huge bowl of rice. He said he know that R liked spicy food, and had made this little dish especially for him; he warned him that he should take it slowly and eat it with lots of rice to help it down.   Like Frank, R rose to the challenge, laughed off the rice, and downed several large spoons full of the stuff before his system registered the assault.  Like Frank, he coughed, wept, choked, tried downing water, rice, and beer, then retreated to the bathroom to recover.

The rest of the guests were reduced to tears of laughter, but were not sure what had just happened.  Was R not as used to hot food as he claimed, or was the chili the professor had prepared unusually lethal?   We realized it was the latter two days later, when R's wife confronted the professor to complain that Ron had been screaming with pain every time he urinated for the last 48 hours, and what had been in that chili?  It turned out that the professor had been reading up on  capsicum peppers and the various levels of heat they carry for years, and had obtained a small supply of the hottest  pepper he could find for his collection, which he had sacrificed to make the chili for R. 

At the time (and indeed, even now in retrospect) this struck me as a very strange joke for a professor to pull on a student, but all the precedents were there in the Odyssey-- the tricky host, the over-confident guest,  the public setting, the dissolution of challenge to authority through the laughter of the other guests.  In the end, it created a very strong bond between R and the professor, who remained friends for decades, long after R obtained his PhD, taught for some years, and  left Classics to pursue a career in business.