CFL bulbs are a pain in the butt—literally

Some months back, I decided that I ought to give compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) a try here in the Jowers house. It's not that I was trying to save the baby seals or the endangered Nashville Crayfish. Heck, I wasn't even trying to save the planet, which has gotten along fine for 4 billion years without any meddling from me. I was just trying to save a few bucks, and maybe save myself a few trips up and down a ladder.

So I went to a big-box store, bought $150 worth of the bulbs that look like Shirley Temple's hair, and set out to deploy them in my ceiling fixtures. Believe me when I tell you, putting newfangled light bulbs to work in the Jowers house is not an easy job, because the house is 96 years old. We've got no fixtures from a modern lighting store, no reproductions and nothing Brentwoodian. As far as our lighting is concerned, we Jowerses have no faux. What we've got are genuine brass ceiling fixtures from 1914, the very lights that came with the house.

You old-house dwellers who've experimented with the curly bulbs already know: Those things don't fit so well in century-old lampholders. The bulbs are too fat at the bottom, because unlike regular incandescent bulbs, they've got gizmos embedded in the tail end of the bulb.

I know, some of you are thinking, "Gizmos in the CFL bulbs? What kind of gizmos?"

Well, gizmos that are, uh, foreign to me. Gadgets, thingamajigs, brightly colored things that look like Chiclets with wires wrapped around them and have Chinese writing on them. The stuff in the butt of the bulb is from China, the country that sold us the lead-laced children's toys and the drywall that corrodes wires, pipes, air conditioners and refrigerators and stinks up a whole house besides. I discovered the gizmos when I dropped—and broke—the first curly bulb I touched.

I called my buddy Bird, who is in the gizmo business. "What's all this stuff in the butt of the curly bulb," I asked Bird. "It looks like the guts of an old ham radio."

"Those are transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes," Bird said. "You can use 'em to make an overdrive pedal for a guitar, or a noisemaker that coughs up beepy Atari sounds from the '70s."

I asked Bird if he could come over to my house and explain the alien light bulb to me. And he did.

"So," I said as Bird walked in the door, "I've got a broken 15-dollar light bulb that never glowed and never will, but if I wanted to, I could turn it into a wah-wah pedal, or maybe a Donkey Kong machine?"

"That's right," Bird confirmed. "But more importantly, keep in mind that your busted bulb has been leaking mercury into your house ever since you dropped it."

"I know," I said. "As a semi-retired home inspector, I know that I'm supposed to evacuate all the living things in my house, including the bugs. I'm supposed to shut down my air conditioner—which I won't do—then dab up the mercury that I can't see or smell, and finally package up the debris and take the busted bulb back to the store where I bought it. Or something like that. Right now, my house is a hazardous waste site. But what really pisses me off is that I'm obliged to be the designated driver for a got-dang Chinese light bulb that's full of neurotoxin and wouldn't even screw into the light fixture in the first place."

"It's a hard, hard road that you travel," Bird said.

"China sent this bulb over here," I said as I pulled on a pair rubber gloves and stuffed the remains of the CFL into another rubber glove, which I put into a garbage bag. "And now I'm stuck with it. It's like a hitchhiker blowing second-hand smoke in my face, or a parasitic twin that dug into me while I was minding my own business in my mother's womb. If a cop pulls me over while I'm driving it back to the big box that spawned it, he'll see the thing and think I'm transporting a hellish foreign-made time bomb—which I will be.

"Do you remember Midnight Express?" I asked Bird. "I'll end up in a hillbilly prison waiting for Irene Miracle to stop by and flash me before I open an artery. And Irene Miracle is 55 now..."

The link below takes you to a website that has a slide show of the electronic parts that reside in the butt of a CFL.

www.aronnelson.com

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