Shootouts CAN be Dangerous

You know, I was thinking about how dangerous these shootouts are becoming.

We do them in the evening, and sometimes we order out some food [usually Vietnamese] and we draft somebody [Neli. :-)] to go pick up it and bring it back.

We then consume mass quantities and listen to a CD or LP kind of casually and chat about how cool it would be to have X, Y or Z for the next shootout.

Then it is back to the shootout proper: listening, going up to the system and switching cables, powercords, whatever back and forth. More listening.

Ponying up to the system, my tummy being overly full to the point of me whining about it to everybody who will listen [that would be, as it always is, nobody] I then had this terrible waking nightmare:

The button pops off my shorts, goes sailing through the air like a button who really hated being under extreme pressure all these years, and strikes one of the tubes on the most lovely sounding, exquisite, amps we have ever heard.

And the tube *explodes* from the impact. Glass is everywhere. Sparks are flying. The lights in the kitchen are flashing off and on.

I start wondering if Neli is going to kill me with knife or pistol.

Then an extremely unlikely and not very nice event occurs. The exploding tube generates some kind of freak surge and the dying amp takes out not one but both speakers. Drivers are now sailing across the room in cannonball like trajectories.

One lands in the bowl of Red Curry Stew with extra Tofu, and splashes Red Curry Stew with Extra Tofu all over the stack of LPs we had brought upstairs for the demo.

The other hits the floor and starts rolling across the room like the old Bridgestone Tire commercials, continues until it encounters the stairs going down to the other listening room – which it then starts plopping down ‘plop’ ‘plop’.

It then continues to go ‘plop”plop’ down the stairs in the now very, very quiet listening room as I look at everybody else in the room and present them with the stupidest grin I can come up with.

All this to say that I am resolving to be on the safe side and eat less take out at our shootouts from now on.

[Even though that take out *is* really, really yummy… Hmmmm, maybe I’ll just walk up to the system sideways, facing any buttons AWAY from the system.]