A few thoughts on your problem:
1. At 8 days your beer was probably done fermenting. I have bottled at day 7 without bottle bombs but I got a lot of sediment in my bottles as not all the trub had settled out yet. 2 to 3 weeks before bottling got me much less sediment. To get a bottle to explode you may have simply added too much priming sugar. The "sugar candy things" may have called for 2 per bottle but one might have been sufficient.
2. Your strong alcohol taste is probably from fusel alcohol that the yeast produced because you didn't control the fermentation temperature and the beer got too warm. Try to keep the temperature of the next batches in the 60 to 68F range for better tasting beer. If you do have fusel alcohol in the beer, limit your drinking as it is reported that getting too much fusel alcohol will lead to some wicked headaches then next day.
3. Refrigerating your beer will lower the pressure but will not stop the yeast from making more CO2. Take the bottles out and carefully lift one side of the cap until you hear the CO2 escaping, then recap. It will take several times to get the pressure down to a safe level. This can be done 3 or 4 times a day. If the beer starts to leak foam recap it immediately and then loosen the cap again in a hour or so.
4. Use a hydrometer to tell what the final gravity of your beer is and take at least 2 samples a day or 2 apart so you can verify that your beer is really done fermenting. You need two matching readings to make sure you don't produce bottle bombs. It is possible to still get bottle bombs if you get wild yeast in your beer because the wild yeast can (slowly) eat sugars that your beer yeast cannot and increase the pressure of CO2 in the bottles over time.
