[boris]

"My nephew tells me of a tale of a student at his high school who stole a calcium rod from the chemlab. The perp was caught an hour or so later during another class when his pants pocket caught on fire."

Alkali metals (calcium is one) are highly reactive with water. Sodium is even more so. One college trick is to take little slivers of sodium and put them in gelatin capsules (the pull-apart kind); then flip them into puddles while it is raining. Scares little old ladies and pooches.

Richard Feynman, while at Cornell, is reputed to have dropped a pound of sodium metal into one of the gorges...

--Boris

[ChefKeith]

At the machine shop I used to work at We would take bent/worn out exhaust valves(sodium filled stems) and crack the valve stem and toss them in a 5 gallon bucket of H2o.

Looking back I see that We had too much time on Our hands...