My Mom still won’t certify me to use one of these. I don’t blame her.
I am however, self-certified to deep fry in an iron skillet while wandering throughout the house.
Tell me about it. Braze the valves shut and check to see what happens to diesel in a pressure cooker and no one will allow you near one again.
I do that. Now if only I could get the pan to follow me around; I might not burn stuff as much.
Then your certification process is flawed. I never burn things when I’m deep frying. This scares company to no end. I do not do this with small children in the house. They’re loose cannons.
Certification, shmertification. I’m a renegade.
And I like scaring the guests. Makes 'em think twice about importuning on me ever again. And I’ve made sure that my reputation assures that kids aren’t a problem: they cry when mommy and daddy say they should all go to my place. That, in my estimation, is a resounding success.
Had a couple of new neighbor kids who didn’t know the drill yet knock at my door which, let me tell you, was a huge surprise after all the work I’ve gone to against just that sort of thing. While the cigarette in the corner of my mouth ashed itself on the floor, I scratched under my bathrobe and squinted at them. “We don’t want any,” I rasped. “We want to meet your cat,” they said. The frickin’ cat. Sheesh. So I grudgingly let them in, told them to stop bouncing, sit down, keep their hands off my beer and stay the hell put while I went and got the cat. Who, by the way, hates kids too and already knew what was up and had wisely hid herself away in the closet. I went back to the living room with the cat struggling under my arm, hoping that the sooner we got this over with the sooner they’d be out the door. “Ohhhhhhhh, cuuuuuuuuuuute!”, the little kids cooed and chirped. “Kill, Mubu. Kill,” I said. No dice. She just ran back to the closet.
I thought that was why ours came over…
Might be a West Coast thing. Here, going to a different church is livin’ large.
ah, we have churches…some of 'em send out recruiters!
I’m such a disappointment 
To think of the years I wasted learning to tie a knot.
Now how do you tie your shoes with it?
Maybe they simply haven’t gotten it yet and still think of you as a challenge. You just have to keep at it for a while, is all. Apparently just like with the kids word must have finally got around to not even bother because I haven’t seen hide nor pamphlet of a proselytiser in years. In one way it’s a bit of a disappointment, because I used to so enjoy inviting them in so I could watch how long it took for them to hit their limit, contrive their escape, and then totter gingerly away with their eyes spinning as I hospitably saw them off. It was always well worth the expense of the coffee. 
I do remember the giving of the cup of something from me youth.
Makes 'em a bit captive for a while
I gave up torture back in the mid 70s though
True, I did eventually have to come to terms with that and the question of compassion. I don’t know what I’d do now…if I was starved for entertainment I’d probably just fake a foreign language, something like that.
vel if ya gotta
I really like these. Is anyone still making them? Very Hasbro Steampunk.
BTW, Denny, the coffee was never, ever laced. That would be rather ill-mannered and, I think, beneath even me. No, we would all just sit down, chat, and I’d drive them crazy on my own good steam.
That’s not a gadget. It’s a kid with cheap sunglasses who ran onto a badminton court with a championship game in progress, with very, very unfortunate results. The snapshot captures his blood-curdling scream on sensing the two gaping black holes where his eyes used to be.
Y’know, it did occur to me that I could cobble together much the same thing with a little adept dumpster diving, a glue gun, and going all Martha Stewart on it. I’ve actually got a Steampunk-themed wedding gig coming up (this will be a first for me) and the band is encouraged to fit in costumarially, so I need togs. I’m thinking more Altair IV futuristic than slavishly Edwardian, though. With the badminton goggles, somehow the idea of a Tyvek lab coat - left rakishly open, of course, for that orchestratedly careless Rive Gauche look against the industrial fans - is working my fashion nerve. Naturally I’ll want to wear something underneath, too…
If only the Victorians had Ax Man surplus.
Our haz mat group has some wonderful full suit Tyvek, including the booties, in really bright yellow.
Could you really pull these off? How little is your nose? Do you have terry cloth and velour shirts and enough hair gel to maintain the image?