June 28, 2011

Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer: SFW, but NSF... Hands?

I only know how to read Internet acronyms and pictures, so that's what the label on the Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer tells me: 

NSFH

To be fair, these things may be totally safe for work and hands, but are they really hygenic and effective? I use them at work occasionally, when I'm feeling guilty about using paper towels, but I'm not completely sold on the machine.

It sort of feels like you're playing Operation, lowering your hands down but being careful not to touch the sides or you'll get electro shocks. Ok, there's no shocks, but what does lurk on the surface? What if the person before you just decided to dry the piss off of their hands instead of washing, and they thought you had to touch the yellow things to turn the machine on? I don't know--I'm a blogger, not a doctor.

Usually, I think automatic sensors are a great feature, but making it a top load for hands seems like it would be a challenge for children, short folks, and people in wheelchairs. Because you can't trigger the blowers to start by putting your hands in the side holes, the only way around this oversight is to mount it very low on the wall. I think it would become awkward for everyone else at that point though. Having the blowers on the bottom seem to make these types of machines a bit more universal, but again, what do I know? I'm a blogger, not an engineer.

All right, so let's say you are able to get your hands in the damn thing. Because the blower doesn't immediately engage, you have to taunt it a bit. And for those few split seconds, you wonder if it is instead going to clamp down on your wrists and bite your hands completely off. The design certainly gives me flashbacks of the castration machine from The Ice Pirates, but what do I know? I'm a blogger, not a terrible movie from 1984.

If it didn't eat you by now, you probably feel the air blowing fairly intensely against your hands and fingers, knocking them into the sides a little bit, which I would think you'd want to avoid. If your hands aren't too wet, they are allegedly dry in about 12 seconds. That's pretty accurate even if they are really wet, but the extra water tends to drip down into the valley of the machine. There doesn't seem to be any type of drain or anything, so it either sits there, or continues its journey down the side of the machine to the floor. I don't know what normally happens to the water dispersed from a typical hand dryer. I guess it goes directly to the floor, or on your clothes. I think I prefer the ignorant bliss of seeing it magically disappear into thin air as opposed to seeing it sit there pooled up on the plastic. But what do I know? I'm a blogger, not a person who wants to continue blogging today.

June 24, 2011

Solved Mysteries: Twin Peaks

Bayonne-born actor Walter Olkewicz has a habit of strange encounters in bars. Most people probably remember him from Twin Peaks as Jacques Renault. Here he is trysting with Laura Palmer and shooting off a famous drunken non-sequitor at the seedy Canadian club One Eyed Jacks:


Little did we know, One Eyed Jacks was not the first watering hole where Olkewicz stirred up trouble. It turns out that he made a trip to bar in Boston nearly a decade earlier and shook up the status quo. There, he encountered Cheers regular Norm Peterson (George Wendt), an old buddy from the high school wrestling team.


In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer was the "Muffin," and in this second season Cheers episode, Olkewicz (as Wally Bodell) revealed Norm's infamous "M-"nickname: "Moonglow." He then made unwanted advances on Norm's wife Vera, and ultimately, in one of the silliest fight scenes ever filmed filmed, succumbed to the real Great Wendt on the floor of Cheers.

One has to wonder, was this the point where Olkewicz lost his mind? After being rebuffed by Vera and defeated by Norm, did he assume Wendt's identity and then throw himself into a world of drinking, drugs, and dangerous women? I really don't know--I haven't seen his Mr. Belvedere episode yet.