OK, so it's not that great of a story, so you'll all be dissapointed that nothing blew up. Wife's car wouldn't start two weeks ago so we drove and got another battery (her other one was super old). I put in the new battery connecting the right cable to the correct connection (I'm not that dumb) and her car started right up. Figured that was the problem.
Two weeks later once again her car wouldn't start. She had to carpool to work two days and we had to jump her car to take it to the mechanic as I figured at this point the alternator wasn't working properly and wasn't charging the battery. Turns out I didn't connect the battery tightly enough, even though I cranked down on the nutz pretty damn hard. So anyways, two days without a car, a jump and a $70 mechanic bill later I still don't know what I didn't do correctly when hooking up the battery.