I went on a camping trip this weekend and made one of those “how am I just learning about this now” discoveries:
It’s a “fire tube”: basically just a collapsible straw that you can safely stick deep in the coals of a campfire and blow a lot of oxygen into it.
It’s weirdly addictive. Unlike fanning a campfire with newspaper or whatever, where the effect lasts less than a second, blowing with the tube a couple times make the fire significantly brighter and hotter, with a powerful sense of accomplishment. Also the visual effect when you blow on the coals is hypnotic: it dims overall but the “edges” of coals get brighter, like you just ran it through an edge-sharpening algo.
I may have done it so many times last night that I gave myself mild ear pain from all the backpressure.
Brinens and Things 