Happy Thanksgiving! (Don't go up in flames)

Fried turkey can be delicious, but you need to do it right. This video has some excellent safety tips for frying your turkey with relative safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65m8-Em2ziA

At a previous job the CTO came back after Thanksgiving and told us how he’d just burned down his deck and done significant damage to his vinyl siding. He’d been using a Turkey Fryer. He’d plopped the frozen turkey into the fryer. First, the oil overflowed and caught fire. Next, the ice in the turkey did what frozen water does when you drop it in boiling oil. Within seconds his deck and the side of his house were covered in burning oil and flaming chunks of turkey.

He finished the account with saying that next year he would set the fryer up in his garage, which had a cement floor. I left that job before Thanksgiving rolled around again, so I don’t know if he followed through.

Here are a few videos demonstrating what I suspect his back deck looked like thanks to his flagrantly ignoring pretty much all the safety advice around using a turkey fryer.

This video shows what a frozen turkey will do when put in boiling oil. Check out the air time that oil gets when it sprays up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gn895y4wkc

Here’s a short video of what happens when the fryer overflows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxia0Ca9Qwc

Remember, the CTO I mentioned had BOTH happen.

Did you know Underwriter’s Laboratory has never certified a SINGLE turkey fryer? Here’s why:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yObDuYTfudY

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has their say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=HYvMWIvghnQ

Have an happy and enjoyable Thanksgiving! I hope everyone comes back to work Monday uncharred and without any new home repairs suddenly added to their calendar.

Machiavellian dating

On this morning's train ride to work I sat next to two women who were discussing their love lives. One of them had her eye on a specific man in her social circle, but he was married. The woman had decided to befriend the man's wife to, "Find out what's wrong so I can exploit it." After a few months hanging out with the wife and "Getting their kids used to me being around," she had learned, "His wife uses sex to control him. She locks her legs whenever she wants something. Makes fun of his performance, always tearing him down about it. She's proud of yawning during sex just to make him feel bad."

"Is he a bad lay?" her friend on the train asked.

"That's the sick part. She says he's good in bed. She wants to make him feel grateful when they do it and not have to do any of the work. "

"Crap."

"I'm going for it the next time she's holding out. Summer's coming and she says she always keeps him waiting to get the vacation she wants. A woman turns down her man enough he's not going to stop asking, he's just going to stop asking HER. All I have to do is pursue him a little and he's all mine. I think I can get her to cheat on him before I seduce him. That'll take care of any guilt he might have about leaving her and give him an edge in the divorce."

They chatted for a few more minutes about the other woman's prospects, but she clearly preferred going after single men who didn't require a months long plan to figure out how to sabotage a marriage. They had shifted to a discussion of the weather by the time they got off the train.