Science Lesson

Those lightning lamps that they sell at Target? They send an electrical current bouncing around a cone-shaped lantern that comprises the top half of the lamp.

If you touch the lamp, the current will converge at your fingertips. You can move the "lightning" all around the lamp in this way.

If you take some metal - say, a couple of dimes - and position the lamp on its side, and place the dimes in the area where the cone meets the base, and then touch the dimes gently with your finger, you will see an electrical spark.

The more dimes you add, the bigger the spark.

If you touch the dimes and hold a wad of twisted toilet tissue up to the spark, the tissue will ignite.

If you drop the tissue in a panic, it will land on the carpet of your bedroom.

The carpet in your bedroom is flammable. It does not burst into satisfying flame, as the tissue did. It sort of... melts. And leaves a big brown spot.

These spots are not like dirt. They cannot be scrubbed out with carpet cleaner.

And your parents DO NOT LIKE big brown spots in the carpet, the carpet that is only a year old. When you go to them and confess what you have done, there is a price to be paid. Namely, the cost of replacing a whole section of carpet. Which is going to set you back significantly, believe me, and which your parents don't mind asking of you, since you have a small but steady source of income with your very part-time job and you really, really showed a huge lack of judgment that requires stiff consequences to help you learn your lesson.

But the financial cost is still better than that sick feeling in your stomach that you had before you 'fessed up.

(And what you don't know, and won't until you too are a parent, is that after the stern lectures and warnings and exhortations about the dangers of electricity and playing with fire, is that your parents retired to their room and laughed out loud with each other, rejoicing in your natural curiosity, even if it did lead you and the whole family into danger. You don't know that your parents are secretly proud of you for figuring all this out on your own and have high hopes for your future, if you can just learn a little common sense.)