Ask Lemmy

I set fire to my house because of a Cartoon Network ad.

At some point there was this animation that Cartoon Network used as an intermission between shows or ads. IIRC it was just stop-motion of some gray clay or play-doh thing that changed shapes, and became various characters from the CN shows, then in the end it transformed into the CN logo, but I was a very young kid so I'm really not sure I remember all the details correctly.

Anyways, one day when I was around 6 or 7 years old an aunt and uncle of mine were visiting, and they were smokers. I had just watched the aforementioned intermission and was wondering how I could get that magical grey mass that transformed into the various CN characters. Everyone else was in the 2nd floor and my uncle was showering, so I looked around the 1st floor trying to find something that I could use to create this magical play-doh.

When I saw my uncle's lighter on top of some cabinet, for some reason my 6 year old brain thought that I could set some styrofoam on fire to get the magical grey mass. The styrofoam box was on a shelf made of wood and straw, so you can probably guess how well that went.

After holding the lighter against the styrofoam I saw that the flame started spreading on its own, so I put the lighter back where I found it and ran upstairs to make sure that nobody had seen what I was doing. After 2 or 3 minutes I walk back downstairs and without even entering the laundry room where I had started the fire I see a ton of smoke in the kitchen. After that I ran back upstairs and told my mother that there was a fire (only after asking her several times if she would get mad at me). The main entrance and the laundry room's back door were blocked by the fire, and the kitchen exit was already being engulfed in smoke, so instead she opened one of the windows in the 1st floor and put me and my younger brother outside through the window.

I don't know what exactly happened after that since I was just scared and running around the house confused, but from what my mother told me my uncle ran out of the shower in a towel and the neighbor noticed that something was wrong as well, so with the help of my mom and aunt they were able to put out the fire with the water hose we had in the backyard. Most houses in Brazil are made with bricks and concrete, but our house had some parts that were still made of wood since they were part of an older house that my parents bought and reformed, but thankfully the fire was mostly contained to the concrete side of the house, with only the laundry room, as well as some of the wooden parts in the kitchen and some wooden doors catching fire.