The ’70s claim another victim

This actually happened several days ago, but after reading of the man who was killed by an exploding lava lamp, several of my co-workers conspired to place a lava lamp on my desk with a sign that read “Warning: Do Not Place on Stove.” There are several scary things about this. First, by co-workers, I mostly mean subordinates, who certainly could be seen as threatening a superior with a lava lamp. Second, they HAD a lava lamp at the office. Third, it was a nasty one, perhaps an original, and the globules of wax looked like the fat scrapings from inside the band saw at the meat counter (trust me — been there, cleaned that). Fourth, it smelled. Hot, nasty, possibly dangerous. But in the end, the scariest thing about this tragedy was the final line from the police, who said that they had found no evidence of alcohol or drug use. Why on earth would you be trying to heat a lava lamp unless you were high?

That said, I’m currently messing around with various visualizers for iTunes, which are nothing if not devices for turning a very expensive computer into a very expensive lava lamp. And I’m not high, either. But I’m not putting my G4 on the stove to see what happens.