DS Ronnie Brooks and Haya Ngama in “Unfinished Business”

How hard is it to fulminate mercury?

It's not. You just need to mix mercury with concentrated nitic acid and add the resulting aqueous mercury nitrate to ethanol. Yeah?

[befuddled] Yeah.

Except it's violently exothermic and gives off clouds of white smoke.

I used to be like that on Saturday night.