If it's anything like John Carpenter's The Thing, I'd keep it frozen!

Thank you again for this GA +1!!

I'm happy to see the winners, hummer and chadjenofsky! Congratulations to you both! Makes me happy that I didn't enter ^__^

I DID want to participate in the thread, at least, but you know I never could remember any of those MacGyver moments! >_< lol~

Thanks for the fun giveaway~!

I know I'm too late for the giveaway, but I wouldn't be in for it anyway - I just want to tell my MacGyver story.

I was driving my young family a couple hundred miles on the Interstate for a weekend at Grandma's and found that my trusty '85 Honda Civic Station Wagon was overheating in the hot day sun when we got caught in a rather large, slow traffic jam. So I pulled over and took a look at what was going on and found that the radiator fan didn't run. The fan on those cars isn't hooked to a belt that gets driven by the engine - it's just an electric fan that gets cycled on and off by a thermostat. Apparently the thermostat was defective so the fan never turned on to pull air through the radiator.

So I found another electricity source for the fan. The cables that energized the horn used the same connector as the fan, so I unplugged them from the horn and plugged them into the fan. Now when I pressed on the steering wheel pad as if honking the horn the fan would run. This worked well enough to keep the engine temperature in range.

I never fixed that thermostat - the engine would run cool enough most of the time (as long as the car was moving, air would flow through the radiator), and for the times when it seemed that the engine would get hot, I'd just press on the middle of the steering wheel. It stayed that way until some jerk hit me and totaled the car (it wasn't a serious accident - the car was so old that a fender bender would total it).

It probably would have been nice to be able to honk at that guy.

You're welcome! You know I've been trying to remember a MacGyver story of my own but I still can't think of anything noteworthy, at least not in the chemistry/physics department. I had good grades in chemistry back in school but that's just theory, I never used any of it to fix stuff or make stuff go boom in creative ways. I know how to cook which is chemistry as well but I don't think that's MacGyver enough.
Maybe I'm such a big MacGyver fan because he has all these skills that I don't have. But let's not forget MacGyver's non technical side. I think his biggest strength is his character and positive attitude. The TV show imho does a better job at teaching morals than listening to a Sunday sermon. While I marvel at MacGyver's ingenious mind and technical abilities, I'm even more impressed by his character. Of course, it's a fantasy world where people usually get saved in time and the bad guys only get knocked unconscious instead of getting killed so it's a lighthearted sanitized version of the world far from reality. I see it as sort of an abstract parable like Aesop's Fables, tales we can enjoy and learn from.

When I watch MacGyver, I don't primarily try to remember which chemicals he uses to make what, I primarily take note of what it means to be a good person. You don't need any tools for that at all and yet it's the biggest challenge.

Wow, this is a perfect example of the kind of stories I was hoping to see, thanks so much for sharing! It's got everything, drama, tragedy and comedy. The ending made me laugh and I imagined what it would be like if you had rigged the horn to be triggered from another manipulation, e.g. if you try to lower the windows the horn will sound and if you try to turn on the radio the windows will lower and so on, until all the functions of the car are in some way misappropriated and reconfigured and everything comes to full circle in its wackiness, kind of like in old Disney cartoons where this sort of thing is often used as a comedy element.