My wife and I had a fun moment this last week that I felt was worth sharing.
We received a small decorative hot-air popcorn making machine that is essentially a scaled-down version of a movie popcorn maker. Our first trial run of it was this last week, while we prepared to watch some well-deserved "24" man-opera action.
I had set it up to run by itself and found that it made a big mess all over my kitchen counter -- popped kernels of corn were all over the place, presumably because I didn't have a correctly-sized bowl to catch the popcorn. So, for our second run, Kristen had me wait and hold the bowl at an appropriate angle to catch all the kernels on their way out.
And therein lay the fun.
You see, shortly after one minute into the next popping exercise, with me standing at the bowl, I saw that the popping kernels were also causing a sizable fraction of unpopped kernels to be blown out of the popper. "That's strange," I thought, "since my last bowl didn't have lots of kernels all over the place." I kept staring at the bowl with more and more kernels piling up when it hit me.
Literally!
All those unpopped, superheated kernels which I had so efficiently been catching started violently popping all over the place. The entire bowl started erupting popcorn all over the kitchen floor, our countertop, my hair... everything.
As soon as we figured out that what was happening, it was too late to stop, so we just laughed along while the bowl was doing its thing.
We didn't get a big yield of popcorn, since it was all over the floor and ourselves, but it was enough to get us a light snack between commercial breaks. The next time, though, we used a towel too. :)
