More than enough crazy to go around...

Why do we put pepper on the kitchen table along with the salt? The only time anyone in our house has ever used it was when I grabbed it by mistake. I suppose it's just one of those things that's done because it seems right.


The advantage of being friends with a crazy person is that you get emails like this every so often:



And you get to send replies like this:



After a short bout of Gmailing, I ascertained that Sam had been fiddling with Shrinkwrap, an old computer of his, named for the fact that it looks like it's been shrinkwrapped. It hasn't. It's partially melted. That's not hugely important but it does foreshadow events to come.

Sam had discovered that Shrinkwrap wasn't starting up and decided to investigate. By plugging it in and poking stuff with his screwdriver. A similar strategy led to the destruction of his old VCR. Fiddling with the variable input (the difference between this and variable output is a very important one, as Sam has now learned) produced the above result.

In his own words:

yeah, i switched it to like 60V, because that was the most anything actually needed... plugged in 240V... and.....
KRAKKASLAM-BLAMMA-BOOM!

It's now a couple of hours after the event and he tells me that his room (henceforth known as "Ground Zero") still smells of smoke and that there is a grey patch on the ceiling directly above the epicentre.

The weirdest part? He's now thinking of starting a small custom PC building business.


I got the woodle up, though it's not quite the one I had planned. Eh. Now, if you'll excuse me, my brother just tossed me series 2 of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. It's a sad thing when I turn to absurdist comedy for a bit of sanity.


Epilogue: at my request, Sam has kindly provided us with an artist's rendition of the whole episode: