U.K. Man Sets Fire To Apartment Trying to Turn Feces Into Gold, Receives Jail Time

Despite what you may have assumed, alchemy is not dead. While there’s pretty much no doubt that it will never work, people are still trying it. 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. In what I can only imagine was an extremely sparse defense, Moran’s attorney had insisted that Moran was a man of “considerable intellectual ability,” but also that Moran was battling with drug abuse. Presumably several simultaneous uphill battles.

It’s a toss up as to whether or not Moran is actually a man of considerable intellectual ability, but one thing is for sure: The man does not have a grasp on supply-side economics. Turning lead into gold is already a somewhat useless endeavor considering that the massive influx of gold would destroy its market value, but lead, at least, is still a somewhat finite resource. Human feces on the other hand, are essentially limitless. From a supply and demand standpoint, turning poop into gold is ultimately a value proposition no better than turning gold into poop.

Of course, he could have maintained the recipe as a trade secret and established a cartel, but the man set his house on fire with poop. Let’s be realistic here.

(via Yahoo! News)

Relevant to your interests in insanity and fecal matter

• China is reportedly transmuting dead babies into supplement pills
• This woman transmuted the ashes of her late husband into dinner
• A Japanese scientist transmuted poop into meat. But really. He actually sort of did.