Buzz earlier this week about the fact that stinky kitchen sponges can be made fresh again by microwaving them for two minutes. What the widely distributed article didn’t say (originally) was that you need to make sure the sponge is wet before firing the bacterial death ray. Microwave experiments cause sponge disasters:
“Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off,” one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.
Mark Morford, amazing/insane as always, riffs on the debacle, and on our national obsession with germs.
Wait, there’s more. What’s the most germ-clogged, festering item on your body right now (besides, of course, your body itself)? That would be your cell phone, silly. After all, it just sits there all day, simmering in the happy juices of your toasty pants pocket, churning out microbes of horror like Paris Hilton churns out intimations of death. And you put that thing up to your face without first disinfecting it with some ethyl alcohol and a flamethrower? What are you, high?
For our part, we’re just amazed that it takes so much longer for kitchen sponges to get stinky now that we’ve got that little humidity problem under control. Amazed.
It puts my knickers in a twist to hear about kitchen sponges… they’re just plain disgusting. What’s wrong with dish rags? They readily come clean in the dishwater or the clothes washer. All they need is a hook to dry. MICROWAVE? That’s just throwing one inappropriate technology at another. Like using a Segway to drive to work instead of a bicycle.
I liked hearing about Nothingland, though.