Re: Warnings concerning products {:-)

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

Paul Johnson wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Craigen" <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>
>
> >  There is a bit of physics in all this.  As much as people *think* they
> >  love their coffee as hot as they can get it, the fact is that boiling
> >  water scalds.
>
> But nobody drinks boiling coffee, Doug. For those of us who like our coffee
> HOT, McDonalds is the place to go.
>
> I drink my coffee straight --- no milk or sugar. Our Mr. Coffee at home
> keeps it fairly hot after it's brewed, but pouring it into a
> room-temperature mug cools it too much. So I routinely zap it in the
> microwave oven at high power for 20 seconds. That essentially warms the mug
> up to the original coffee temperature. Its average temp while I'm sipping it
> remains pleasantly hot.
>
> In the roughly 45 years I've been drinking hot coffee, I've never spilled it
> on me. Those who do spill it on them should bear the consequences of their
> own carelessness.
>
> Paul O. Johnson

My goodness, then you have a wonderful experience to look forward to.
I have been drinking coffee for 50 years and have spilled it on
myself two or three times--once when sitting in a car where I
couldn't jump out of the way. I'll bet I'm a lot closer to the
average than you are, so your turn is coming, Paul. (Just
kidding--let's not start the statistics lessons.)

But WRT the McDonald's incident, as it has been pointed out here, the
coffee temperature was considerably higher than the McD. standard,
and that particular restaurant had been told to turn the temp down,
but they didn't. Spilling coffee (I dunno, maybe someone bumped her
just as she was taking a sip, so it wasn't even due to her
ineptitude) in your groin that is hot enough to produce third degree
burns is not a pleasant experience, for a man or a woman. And the
coffee doesn't have to be that hot to meet anyone's requirements. It
seems to me that 140-150 degrees should be plenty hot (maybe even
less). I understand that this coffee was on the order of 180 degrees.
That's the temperature your dishwasher uses to sterilize the dishes
before it shuts off (if you open the dishwasher just as it turns off,
you should find the dishes way too hot to touch), and it's why on
occasion some piece of plastic that you thought you were going to
wash, comes out looking like a woebegone pretzel.

Hugh

--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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