Hmmm, now this is a slightly sticky situation. See, this here is a family show, and as such, there are certain subjects that we generally don't allow on the air during our time slot. Unfortunately, we've gotten so many requests to work this one particular angle into our plotline, we're compelled by state law to comply-- and this story has certain elements that are, shall we say, "unsuitable" for our younger and more sensitive viewers. What to do, what to do...

Oh, what the heck. Some guy in Europe burned his penis on his laptop.

No, really, you guys, shut up-- this is serious. (You can tell because it's on CNN.) As faithful viewer nateman soberly informed us, some poor scientist fellow in London had his notebook running on his lap for an hour, and the next day his doctor found that-- and this is the bit where our younger and more sensitive viewers might want to look at something else for a moment-- "the ventral part of his scrotal skin had turned red, and there was a blister with a diameter of about two centimeters." And before you ask, yes, the guy was wearing pants-- although it sounds as if he may as well have been computing buck nekkid, for all the good it did him.

Now, let's ignore for a moment the fact that this guy apparently managed to inflict second-degree burns on his genitals over the course of an hour and he didn't notice until after the damage had been done.

No, seriously, ignore it. Try real hard, we know you can do it.

Any luck?

No?

Okay, forget it-- us neither. C'mon, the guy fried his genitals, fer cryin' out Pete's sake! How does one not notice something like that until the day after? Yeesh.

Anyway, most of our faithful viewers were pretty eager to hear what brand of laptop managed to wreak such havoc on one man's nether regions; the Reuters article at CNN doesn't say, nor, apparently, does the letter in The Lancet that sparked all this raging interest in the blisters on one man's tackle in the first place. But faithful viewer Alan Benson noted that a reader over at The Register did a little digging, and seems to have discovered the maker of the gonad-broiling computing device. Ready for this? It's Dell.

Yeah, try to contain your shock.

Note to Apple: clearly this guy is an exceptional candidate to star in a future Switch ad. We're not saying that Apple's notebooks don't throw out some serious BTUs; heck, even our trusty G3-based Pismo gets toasty enough to make our laps a tad uncomfortable. Still, we're not aware of any medical journals describing heat-related genital damage (in stunning detail, we might add) inflicted by an Apple laptop, even back when the PowerBook 5300 was amusing children of all ages by bursting into flames in Apple's labs. So seriously, Apple, toss this guy a TiBook and stick him in front of a camera. Why, we can hear the tag line now: "I'm an unidentified scientist-- and Dell blistered my privates." Move over, Ellen Feiss: Unidentified Scientist is comin' to town!