Toaster Project

As you may know, there have been many GOP debates recently, and there will probably be more to come yet. After the recent one at CBS, Michele Bachmann was outraged because she did not get to be in the limelight. As is her custom, she sent out another one of her urgent, "this is an outrage" emails to supporters telling them to send her more money. By the way, you can read about limelights here at Wikipedia.

Sometimes, Stephen highlights what other news anchors have talked about and tonight he featured a lot of news from FOX. There's talk about the Keystone Pipeline Project. According to FOX, it would create at least 20,000 jobs; it would create at least 50,000 jobs; a total of about 118,000 indirect jobs; it would create 120,000 jobs, it could provide up to a million new high paying jobs. Stay tuned. I'm sure Stephen will let us know when FOX has it up to a billion new jobs.

Congratulations to Jay the Intern as he welcomed his cute new baby boy into the world.

Stephen's guest tonight was Thomas Thwaites, author of The Toaster Project. At first I thought it would be boring, but it was quite interesting. Thwaites built a toaster from scratch. By that I mean he even tried smelting iron in his mom's microwave. To help him know what to do, he bought a cheap toaster and took that apart. Take a guess. How many parts in the toaster? Would you believe 400 parts?!? That website is interesting because it is one of the few that you need to scroll across from left to right, rather than scrolling from top to bottom.

So, while a toaster might not seem very interesting, if you think about what you would have to do to build it totally from scratch, it would keep a person busy for quite a while.

Imagine if he had tried to build a car, a computer or a television!