Mom, something smells like burning.

Hot metal. Melting plastic. Chemicals. Poisonous fumes. Everything a mother could want for her child. I realize it sounds as if I'm talking about some Chinese sweat factory full of ten-year-olds working 14 hours a day, but I'm not. I'm talking about me, when I was a kid.

Let me give you an example. Say you're living alone in a shitty room at a boarding house, and all you have to cook on is a hot plate. One day, you get a hankering for some squeeze cheese for your crackers, but all you have is a block of american. You figure you can melt some, but you don't have a pan or cups or anything else since you just moved in and mostly use the hot plate to heat a teapot full of water for your ramen noodles.

You rummage through some old crap a previous tenant left in the closet, and since she was a crazy old lady with six cats, you stumble on a couple of cat-shaped candy molds underneath a stack of newspapers from 1975.

"Hmmm," you think to yourself, "I'll just melt up the cheese in these things. You rinse the mouse turds out of the molds, stick a piece of wire hanger through the holes, lay them on the hot plate and drop a few blocks of cheese in. A few minutes later, right before you get to dippin' your Ritz, the phone rings and it's your parole officer wanting to know where you were last Tuesday night. You get all flustered trying to remember, and you don't want your cheese to burn so you pull the candy mold off the plate, burning your fingers in the process because you forgot to use the coat hanger.

"Fucker!" you yell, forgetting who you're talking to. By the time you convince your parole officer that you weren't talking to him, and that last Tuesday you didn't answer the phone because you went down to the adult video store and rented The DaVinci Load and Forrest Hump, the cheese has cooled in your mold and you've just re-invented a best-selling children's toy from the 60's and 70's called Creepy Crawlers:

Granted, you've got congealed cheese cats instead of rubbery bugs, so technically you've invented the toy my brother Snitch had -- Incredible Edibles:

Incredible Edibles was basically the same idea -- heat up goop in molds -- but since The Snitch's life revolved around food, it was only fitting that he wanted toys he could eat. I think if someone told him about edible underwear, he would have gone crazy with excitement for all the wrong reasons.

The main problem with the Incredible Edibles toy was the cost of the consumables. My brother would bake bugs like most people bake brownies. My mother could give him an entire set of new flavor packs and they'd be cooked up and eaten by the end of the day. He's the only kid I knew who could ruin his appetite manufacturing edible bugs. He would have been better off just eating the raw goop right from the foil pack. I don't even know what the ingredients were, but when you're eating something called "goop" that's the color of antifreeze, it's probably not great for you.

Another one of my toys that could give you third degree burns was the Strange Change machine. The basic premise was that you'd take these little colored rectangular-shaped pieces of plastic and heat them in the "Time Chamber," and they would expand into dinosaurs and bugs and all sorts of other things, depending upon the sets you purchased. You never knew what was going to appear since all the cubes looked alike. I can still distinctly remember the thrill of watching the pterodactyl claw pop free of the cube, my face inches from the dome as I inhaled the toxic fumes of melted plastic. To this day when I smell burning wire insulation or overheated electronics, I instantly think, "I wonder who left their Strange Change machine plugged in?"

After the creatures reached their full potential, you could take them out of the oven and let them harden, or you could put them in the integral vise and squash them back down to a cube again. Of course this never really worked well, so instead of a featureless colored cube, you ended up with what looked like a pterodactyl that had pissed off the Russian Mafia and ended up in a car crusher. Eventually the creatures became brittle and burnt and would hardly crush at all. You'd release them from the vise and they'd just sort of expand slowly and then harden into some weird shape. My grandmother would see my pterodactyl and be like, "What do you have there? Is that a bird doing yoga?" and then I'd realize the mystery was gone and I'd throw the burnt ones out.

After a while you couldn't get new refills for it, and since a Strange Change machine without refills is nothing but a space heater, we decided to see what would happen if we tried using other stuff. Most stuff either didn't melt, or melted too much. I think the wax lips finally killed it.

I guess it really was magic.