Thursday, April 29, 2004

More Pointless Phenomena: My Famous Blender Story This jpeg is a reduced scan of a page torn from an old magazine. I've been dragging it around with me for ten years and keep it taped to the wall wherever I live and work to remind me of caprice and synchrony. Late one evening in 1993 I was sitting alone in my little rented house in Chapmantown, an unkempt unincorporated somewhat slummy village enveloped by the slicker finer Chico urban area. The house was dark except for the space around the living-room reading lamp next to the sofa, where I sat leafing through a magazine that featured an article on the impact on human health of proximity to electromagnetic fields. The subject had fascinated me since I'd read the New Yorker series on the subject ("Annals of Radiation: The Hazards of Electromagnetic Fields," June 12, 19, 26, 1989). In the quiet and semidarkness, I turned the page to reveal this illustration (which I suppose was meant to convey a sense of EMFs surrounding common household appliances). As I glanced at the illustration, at that very moment, popping and buzzing noises suddenly came from the kitchen. I looked up quickly toward the darkened kitchen doorway in time to see flashes of white light strobing the room. I tossed down the magazine and ran to the kitchen. All was dark and quiet again--whatever had happened, it was over --but the smell of ozone was intense. I flipped on the light and began sniffing my way to the source of the "electric" smell. It took me a minute to trace it to a wall outlet above the kitchen counter where my blender--an old chrome-based Waring identical to the one in the illustration, was plugged in. The outlet cover and the wall area around the outlet had been blackened; the outlet was dead. The event--a short? a surge?--had occurred coincidentally at the instant of my first glimpse of the electrical illustration. (Illustration from American Health, May 1993, page 53.) 11:24:42 AM    comment []