I bypassed the Dole salad bag as it was down in the double digits (way down) in popularity. A curious sort, I clicked the link at Amazon to get a look at the top 100 gourmet items being ordered this Christmas.
Lo and behold the 99 spot is occupied by…
a $7.45 box of cinnamon toohpicks!
The first reviewer notes:
I’m old-school in the toothpick department. We’d fill old Rx bottles with cinnamon oil that we bought at the drugstore and eat them on the bus. The hotter the better. Personally, I think these babies are great for everything from weight-control to quitting smoking. Sugar free too. Packs pop in your purse. Yes, I’m a lady but I still love me some cinnamon-picks!
You eat them??? I was under the impression one didn’t eat wood, but I was clearly wrong. And apparently wood has no calories or a nominal few. But what kind of wood are the toothpicks made out of? Doesn’t say. “Wood” doesn’t do it for me. Since learning about the squid in the gumbo I think it’s a good idea to ask a few questions about your food.
Then I saw over on the Amazon sidebar a Back to Basics Egg and Muffin 2 slice toaster and egg poacher! Would members of my family prefer this? The reviewers all love the device and it’s said by one of them to be the hottest holiday gift around! I’d no idea, just like I didn’t know about hot toothpicks. I don’t know about lots of hot things. I am not up on the hottest of the hots.
I was about to post on all this, was pressing the publish key when the power went off again. H.o.p. didn’t mind as we were working on math on his computer and had been for a while. Now that the power is back on he has not mentioned cutting back on the computer. He’s assuming I will forget about the math. I haven’t.
Yeah, yeah, I know, one can do math without a computer. Go away.
(Later.) Well, he remembered and wanted the computer on. I spent a good 40 minutes working on it and finally got it to cut back on, whereupon I discovered that while wrestling with it I had unplugged the mouse accidentally. And the keyboard wasn’t working so I couldn’t do a control-alt-delete restart. So had to shut off the machine and then damn wrestle with it again for another 20 or so minutes before I got it to start again. In the meanwhile I was wiping down dust behind. And then I felt the machine not only hum but really crank and I remembered that the reason this desktop hard drive was on a drawer on the floor under his desk was because this was the machine in which the CD rom exploded. And I moved away from it.
Here’s my blog entry for the day the CD Rom exploded.
2004 September 10 –
Friday – The computer explodesWell, not exactly the computer. But H.o.p.’s CD Rom (Mitsumi 48x) exploded. I was at my computer, H.o.p. was at his. He had been playing his educational CDs for a while and having fun with that. Marty came up and was standing between. Suddenly there was this bang, I felt something sharp slap me in the face. What was that?! I looked down and saw a jagged piece of H.o.p.’s dinosaur CD sitting in my lap. The piece that had hit me just below my eye (another piece hit my glasses that I had sitting on my head). We looked at H.o.p.’s CD Rom. It had blown completely apart. The front of it had blown off. Pieces of CD were everywhere. The bad thing about this is that his hard drive casing sits beneath his monitor,is one of those horizontal ones. So when the CD Rom exploded it went ballistic and got me. Fortunately, H.o.p. wasn’t hit, neither was Marty.
We had another CD Rom we had been planning to put in it anyway and Marty, trying to get over his jitters over the whole business, installed it.
He turned on the machine. It screams now with this high siren whine and that’s it. It no longer works. H.o.p.’s computer is dead for now. Marty is going to take it to a friend tomorrow and see if he knows what is wrong with it, if it can be fixed. I hope it can be fixed as we use it for H.o.p.’s schooling and he has all his educational CDs he plays on it. Spanish, math, language skills etc.
No more refurbished computers. I’m scared of this one now. I looked up online and though it is unusual, CD Rom’s have been known to explode. The reason is given as generally a cracked CD. But that CD was not cracked. (Poor H.o.p. No more dinosaur CD!) I remembered that a month or so ago H.o.p. opened up the CD Rom when a game stopped working and pulled out the CD and it was split in two. I had completely forgotten about it after that night.
I find this on the web about exploding CDs. Seems however they need to be moving really fast. And that an exploding CD player is extremely dangerous.
Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel recently tackled the legend of exploding CDs. The legend goes that flawed CDs that are spun to 30,000+ r.p.m. in 50+X CD-ROM drives have a tendency to explode.
Well, turns out that the legend is somewhat true. The guys from Mythbusters were able to get some CDs to explode by spinning them really, really fast on a fake CD-ROM drive powered by a router (the wood-working kind).
(Why a router? Turns out that they couldn’t get a commercial CD-ROM drive to spin as fast as it was supposed to. A 52X drive is supposed to spin at 30K r.p.m., but they couldn’t get one to spin past 20K.)
They spun these CDs (and exploded many of them) in front of an unprotected gelatin mold of a human. The damage was exceptional. The exploding CDs spun outward like ninja stars, doing considerable damage to the dummy. The best results were from CDs that they “pre-damaged” to simulate wear-and-tear, including one they microwaved.
(Remember, however, that in real-life the CD is inside the CD-ROM drive, giving you more protection than Jello-man. Although, in one expirement, the exploding CD dented and deformed the metal case, leaving creases in it.)
I find elsewhere that it is rare to happen and when it does it usually destroys the hard drive.
For posterity, here are the pieces that hit me. I think the one with the dinosaur face is the one that hit me below the eye, as it was in my lap. And the piece that says “finder” I think is the one that hit my head as it was at my feet.
Anyway. After we got the computer fixed (new CD Rom), we put the casing on the floor. Just in case. I will never have a CD rom sitting on a desk again.
Seems like a very very long time ago when that happened. Was lucky no one’s eye was put out.
Now this is what blogs are for. Wasting time in a dim-witted kind of way.
Never did finish thinking about picking out Christmas gifts. Back to Amazon now.
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