3.8.11

Da-da's Darwin Award #1: The ULTIMATE in Grueling Blender Horror

This is how you'll look after reading this.

What would summer be without a story full of grueling horror, blender idiocy, and nut-driver terror that freezes and frappes your blood into a chunky smoothie to drink while re-reading Encyclopaedia Britannica? NOTHING, that's what. So, having successfully made it through the first six-plus years of his children's lives, Da-da can now safely say WHY he occasionally scores so high on the Parental Anxiety and HORROR Meter. The answer is simple and, well... obvious to anyone within a few Astronomical Units (AUs) of Da-da's event horizon. Jeez, would you please stop hyperlinking and get on with it?

It's because Da-da himself has done so many stupid things that he's stuck in a kind of third-person auto-comment parent-blogging horror matrix and is convinced that his own kids are skipping down the same claymore-d path to State College Mediocrity. Da-da's lying, of course. He's actually quite fabulous (no, seriously) and has only done really one incredibly stupid thing -- except for his first marriage at 21 to that pineapple, that ugly pineapple). Yes, Da-da did a stupid thing. One that outranks all stupid things he's ever done... venturing perhaps into DARWIN AWARD territory, if not for the fact that Da-da survived. Strapped in? Here we go.

Picture Da-da at 30: OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER. He's alone in his apartment (so alone). A clock ticks loudly in the background, because his days are numbered. A nearby female mannikin with glowing red pressure-sensor LED eyes wears a polynesian grass skirt, football shoulder pads, and a marching band helmet. Da-da's vintage lime-green stretch-couch has salsa stains. His fridge contains only beer and mustard... yes, you see it, now... HE'S SINGLE. He also doesn't have a single gray hair. He's still thin and HOT, and has most of his gray matter and memory intact (um, no kids, hello?). And as usual, he's stubbornly trying to fix something that wasn't really broken. But not just any something, an important something: SOMETHING THAT MAKES MARGARITAS. Something like this:

Blenders can kill the cranially challenged.

An old Waring blender, though Da-da's was from the '60s, with thicker glass, top to bottom, sitting atop a one-horsepower chrome steel base, similar to the one above. Now, Da-da noticed that the blender's blades seemed kinda loose after too many margarita grinds. This is the blade:

Looks innocent, right? That's what it wants you to think.

See that hex nut? Looks simple, right? And this is the bottom:



See how thick the glass is?

Da-da got out a screwdriver-handled nut driver with a red handle -- the kind that looks like a screwdriver, but with a box wrench hex end -- and tried to tighten the blade while holding that spinning part at the base... RRRRGG... couldn't do it. Since he was in an apartment and didn't have a proper vise (or vise grips), Genius Da-da then got an idea... a terrible, awful idea. Can you see where this train will be wrecking?

Genius Da-da then placed the blender on its base, reached in with the aptly named nut driver, holds on tight and turns the blender ON, though only to LOW. The blender base hummed like angry bees and gave some resistance... but not enough. So, Genius Da-da turned the blender to HIGH.

Everything went into super slo-mo.

The nut driver immediately spun out of Da-da's hand and proceeded to spin 'round and 'round very fast, its rotational angle getting more and more horizontal as it spun, shearing off inch-thick glass all the way down to the base in the process, glass flying everywhere. But the real fun came when the nut driver zoomed off the blender... a flash of red past Da-da's temple, grazing cropped hair... and sticking into the wall behind him HANDLE FIRST.

So. That happened.

A little shakey, Da-da cleaned up the mess, gave thanks for the fact that no one had seen what he'd done... and gave birth to all future fears regarding children's safety, not to mention a lifelong respect for the power of one horsepower and a general fear of nut drivers. Waiter, Da-da will have that thorazine now... in a Chambord sidecar.

Oh. A thigh-handle. Yay.

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