The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats once wrote “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The legendary lyricist’s words weren’t imagined to be taken literally, but heck, let’s do it anyway. Because we, as Americans, are habitual line-steppers, and that’s not to be an adornment of ridicule, but rather a proud badge to sport. If it weren’t for us — and our ancestors like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison, for example — the technique you’re about to see wouldn’t be an anachronistic lifeskill altogether trivial now in our modern world.

It would be vital.

Eek.

And that would be bad, because while Kap of the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii makes creating the red flower from two tiny pieces of a tree look easy, it’s not. Nope.

Of course, we don’t want to say the knowledge is useless. That would be ignorant. Because you never know when disaster will strike, and you suddenly find yourself on a deserted island (or a desert island — or a deserted desert island) with grubs that need to be flame-roasted to be edible. And that’s when you’ll be glad you watched this YouTube clip of big Kap walking you through the wonder of organic combustion …

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