 mark michaels' featured household item of the day
This is my microwave. It seems like I've had it about a year and a half now. I didn't buy it, but rather it was given to me as a gift by one of my ex-Christian Scientist girlfriends.*
I don't think she bought it either. I think it might have belonged to her mother when she died. My girlfriend already had a microvwave at the time, so she gave this one to me.
I don't really cook at all, so I don't use it very much. Once in a while I'll heat up a bowl of progresso soup with it. For some reason I haven't been able to figure out how to use the timer. I'll press "2" then "0" then "0" then "start", but nothing happens.
But I have figured out that if I hit a button that says "popcorn" or "rice" then "start", then the microwave starts microwaving. I've learned by this method that the "popcorn" setting isn't quite enough to heat a bowl of soup, while the "rice" setting is a little too much. After a while of microwaving on the "rice" setting, it sounds like the bowl is kind of banging around on the glass tray in the oven. When I open the door, it seems like the soup is overly sizzled on top.
If I think the soup is being overly cooked and is getting banged around too much I will open the microwave in a hurry. There's this big button you press to open the microwave.
My mom used to be very worried that if you opened a microwave while it was still going, its microwave radiation would poison you, and give you chest cancer or something. I think I used to be worried about this for some time too, but then I kinda got over it.
But I think one of the best scenes of radiationing poisoning in a movie was the Star Trek where Spock goes into the radiation chamber on the Enterprise and picks up nuclear material and stuff with his bare hands to save everyone else on the ship. You can see super-bright white light streaming all over him and these little particles. Then you can see his flesh start to deteriorate on his face, and he gets weaker and slower.
When he's about to die he speaks to Captain Kirk through the plexi-glass, and they put their nanu-nanu hands up to each other in a final gesture of friendship. (It worked out luckily for the movie that the entire radiation chamber was clear plexi-glass which made it totally possible to see everything that was happening to Spock as he was dying).
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," Spock says.
(I also remember being amazed when I was a kid that an old man like Ricardo Monteban(?) had such big muscles (in Star Trek II). Were those muscles real or were they just a rubber suit? Its hard to know because Hollywood actors have a real knack for keeping themselves in shape. But at the same time, its not hard to know at all because with a quick google search you could find a web site dedicated to that very Star Trek movie which would probably have a guest column by a kid who speaks Klingon in San Diego about how Ricardo Monteban(?) kept himself in such good shape (unless, of course, it was just a rubber muscle suit).
Anyway, that's my microwave.
*I've had two Christian Scientist girlfriends. One was a hair dresser, while another one was a quality control lady at a Verizon call center. The microwave was from the Verizon call center girlfriend. (My last girlfriend Whitney dater a Verizon employee after me. I remember her telling me he was really hardworking and responsible and was about to buy his own house, even though he was in his mid-twenties. I kind of took this as a dig towards me since I'm thirty-four years old and I still rent.
7:37:01 PM 
|
