This is just to inform you...

[rachelmanija]

...that my brand new laptop charger and my toaster oven burst into flames in the same day.

The charger was especially aggravating as it kept getting not delivered as the delivery people kept trying to deliver to Washington Boulevard rather than Washington Place, even after phone calls explaining the difference.

What do you think will burst into flames next?

ETA: See last comment. Salmon it is!

Poll #22009

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 96

View Respondents

What do you think will be next to burst into flames?

View Answers

My car, which is sitting in the garage as I can't drive with a broken right foot
7 (7.3%)

The salmon I intend to have for dinner
12 (12.5%)

My Pyrex bread-baking bowl, and by "burst into flames" I actually mean "explode"
29 (30.2%)

My bread, the next time I bake it
8 (8.3%)

My snack seaweed of dubious provenance
18 (18.8%)

My very expensive prescription medication
5 (5.2%)

Someone else's car, after crashing outside my apartment
27 (28.1%)

My dumpster
20 (20.8%)

Game of Thrones fandom
43 (44.8%)

Homestuck fandom
10 (10.4%)

Hamilton fandom, after Lin-Manuel Miranda appears as Lee Scoresby
12 (12.5%)

My smoke detector
15 (15.6%)

The state of California
33 (34.4%)

Something else which I will explain in a comment
5 (5.2%)

Comments

[sartorias]

I *wish* it would be Trump spontaneously combusting. After all, he's a gasbag.

[rachelmanija]

Me too!

[batwrangler]

All of the above!

[rachelmanija]

Oh I should have included that as an option.

[hannah]

As per The Simpsons: a bowl of cereal, after first pouring in the cereal and then the milk.

[magistrate]

You're missing a tag. This could only happen to you.

[rachelmanija]

Added!

[rosefox]

I too specifically looked for this tag.

[ironed_orchid]

I looked for this tag, but it had been added by the time I saw the post :-D

[sholio]

This is making me think of animated gifs directed by Michael Bay.

[rachelmanija]

I hadn't seen that before and it was hilarious. 6 is my favorite.

[mme_hardy]

The Game of Thrones and Homestuck fandoms are waaaay, way ahead of you.

I really wish we (and you!) could get a break from "it could only happen to rachel".

[rachelmanija]

Honestly stuff bursting into literal flames makes a pleasant break from metaphorical flames.

[davidgillon]

I was tempted to put the state of California, but haven't you already done that one?

[rachelmanija]

We can always do it again!

[ironed_orchid]

It's almost an annual event.

[mrissa]

Yeah, my thought there was that you never bet against California burning, but it might not be the thing that burns next.

this icon seems mordantly appropriate somehow

[yhlee]

i voted pyrex bowl. i have literally had a pyrex baking thing explode. ara and i were a few yards away from it when this happened and we were very, very lucky no one was in the blast radius when it happened. and yet, because i am too lazy to replace my baking pan, i still bake with pyrex. if you hear i have died of pyrex explosion, you'll know why.l

ara's vote was "the state of california."

Re: this icon seems mordantly appropriate somehow

[rachelmanija]

I still bake with pyrex because it's perfect for round bread loaves.

Re: this icon seems mordantly appropriate somehow

[yhlee]

i must try that sometime!

i still bake with pyrex because it's a damn sight easier to wash clean after.

Re: this icon seems mordantly appropriate somehow

[havocthecat]

Seconding that with the pyrex. I have recently acquired some vintage pyrex on Ebay and I love them SO MUCH for round bread loves and they're ten times easier to clean up than my bread pans. I just pop them in my dishwasher.

Today in "the more you know" tl;dr

[cadenzamuse]

I actually have a hypothesis about your pyrex explosion, courtesy of Things I Learned From My Partner The Thermal Engineer. Pyrex, which used to be a division of Owens Corning, used to make all its glassware for all applications from borosilicate glass, which has high thermal shock resistance, hence its ability to be taken quickly from hot to cold or vice versa without shattering. Pyrex got the reputation for heat safety over the 80+ years it was made this way. In the 1980s, Owens Corning (and later Corelle, which it spun off) started shifting to tempered soda-lime glass for baking (lab glass is still borosilicate, yay!), which has higher mechanical strength (less breakage when dropped) and is cheaper, but is much, much less resistant to thermal shock for bakeware--so does indeed explode often.

Two three solutions to this: the European company that the Pyrex name is licensed to still uses borosilicate, so you could buy European Pyrex and it would be better. Or you could just search for non-name brand borosilicate glass cookware. Or buy some Pyrex lab glassware and cook in that.

[lilacsigil]

I'm sure your car will wait until you're driving it again!

[st_aurafina]

Was... was there a power surge or something? Or is it something dire and astrological?

[rachelmanija]

They didn't happen simultaneously or plugged into the same outlet, just in the same day. So I'm going with "dire and astrological," or just the tendency of things to burst into flames in my vicinity.

[sara]

Having seen some recent technical documents on the subject in my professional capacity, the answer is 100% the state of California.

[tibicina]

The state of California has been getting a lot of rain, this week. (which we need, but it means the being on fire should be in a couple of months.)

(also, I really need to buy icon space here because I no longer have my 'L.A. is on fire' icon available.

[rachelmanija]

Oh! If you have it, can I share it?

Since I posted the poll yesterday, two options have burst into flames: my salmon dinner, and Game of Thrones fandom.

[tibicina]

https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/92641082/326978 I think Sara made it for me, so you'd have to ask her about sharing it, but I suspect she'll be fine with it.

[sara]

Yeah, that's not exactly a good thing, because us up north will not be able to resource you at that point. Right now we can do it, in November we can do it...July, we will not have extra resources, particularly given that we didn't get our budget ask this cycle.

[tibicina]

Oh, yeah, in the END it will be worse. It just wasn't the /next/ thing that was going to be on fire. There was plenty of time for all sorts of other things to go up in flames before then. (Including, apparently, rocks on Game of Thrones. I have no idea other than my entire twitter feed last night was endless despair.)

[naomikritzer]

I voted "someone else's car" and will now tell you a story.

On my 30th birthday, it was a really warm day in Minneapolis (my birthday falls in late April, and have gotten every sort of weather you can imagine, including both 90F and humid, and actual blizzards). Ed made dinner and suggested we eat on the back patio. He took my usual spot, so I had my back to the house, and he was facing the house. We had just started eating when he suddenly craned his neck to look at something. Then his eyes got very big and he bolted into the house.

I stood up to see what he was looking at and saw that there was an ENORMOUS COLUMN OF FLAME shooting up from somewhere across the street from our house. Ed had grabbed the phone and was calling 911. I picked up Molly (who was about 2 1/2 at the time) and went out to my front yard to get a better look.

It turned out that it was the garage of someone on the other side of the street and then the other side of the alley (so, a house on the next block over). Fire trucks came and sprayed it with water until it was out.

It turned out that the fire was caused by a VW Jetta that spontaneously burst into flame. It was a detached garage, so no one was injured and their house was not damaged (the only damage was to their garage, which was destroyed, and then to the garages in the immediate vicinity, which had heat damage.)

Also, after we went back to the table, random friends started showing up in our back yard, but I was too keyed up from the whole "OH LOOK SOMETHING IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IS BURNING DOWN!" experience earlier in the evening to actually put the pieces together until a bunch more friends came out of the house and yelled "SURPRISE!" All around: a very memorable birthday.

[naomikritzer]

There was also a car in the parking lot of my workplace in the late 1990s that just burst into flame and burned up, and last year a friend's teenager had driven a friend somewhere like a coffee shop and they were sitting inside doing homework when someone came in and said "there's a car on fire in the parking lot!" and the teenager said "oh, wow, a car's on fire?" and went out to gawk and it was his car.

I think his was also a VW. You don't own a VW, do you, Rachel?

[rachelmanija]

Amazing.

The car I was in that spontaneously burst into flame was a Mitsubishi.

[sholio]

OMG.

I knew someone who had her car burst into flames in a parking lot across the street from a fire station ... that was having a fire chiefs' convention.

Into which she burst, yelling, "HELP, MY CAR IS ON FIRE!"

Everyone was like, haha, lady, very funny. Until she pointed out the window at her flaming car.

I am now wondering how often cars just burst into flames. It happened to a roommate of mine, too. I guess if you think about it, you're basically driving around on a large tank of extremely flammable liquid in a vehicle that functions by making sparks, and isn't that a fun thought.

[mecurtin]

The US Congress. Duh.

[pameladean]

Wow. RIP your charger and your toaster oven. I think you have a small genius for designing polls and I am always amused by the order in which you list things, but in many cases I have trouble voting because I feel vaguely that I am wishing my choice on you somehow.

I keep wondering if the charger was repeatedly delivered or attempted to be delivered to the wrong place as a deliberate attempt to make the wrong place catch on fire with it.

P.

[rachelmanija]

I just wanted to note that, in fact, my salmon just caught fire.

[sylvaine]

Oh no! You seem to be having the worst of luck!

[viridian5]

I would have answered "California" if your state didn't already catch fire on its own a few times a year. Sorry about your toaster oven and charger.

Cars, maybe. My brother's old Camaro's engine once caught fire as he was driving the car. (The Camaro had a lot of weird ailments over the time he owned it. I have such stories about that car....) With another old car, its engine dropped out the bottom as he was driving it. I don't tend to have particularly weird car events, thankfully.

[rattfan]

I had this happen to me a few times - when switching on a lamp and also an iron - but these are mundane things compared to yours. That's how I found I could drop something fast enough to not get burned. I did vote for your state, thinking of political combustion as well as actual. I live in Western Australia which also goes up in flames frequently and in varied locations.

Now about to bake bread and hoping nothing explodes.

[havocthecat]

Did you run over a busload of nuns petting kittens in a previous life?

Did you back over and do it again? And again? And again?

Your luck, what is with it?

ETA: That was my overly-sarcastic attempt at sympathy. I was gaming all day yesterday and my sarcasm meter got overclocked. So, uh, sorry. I'm super sarcastic and rein it in a lot. But holy fuck, why do these things happen to you! All the sympathy!

[rachelmanija]

I set fire to the busload of kitten-petting nuns. ;)

[stranger]

I voted smoke detector for pure irony. The fandoms, together or various, will burst into flames anyway, ditto state of California.