Microwave those junk CDs

All those AOL disks they send everyone make great lightshows when you microwave them for a few seconds. They make a very bright flash, as well as a nice purple ball of plasma several inches in diameter, use a paper cup to get them up off the bottom of the oven (see video for more info), and test to find out how long to nuke them. I nuked on high for 1second, then 2seconds, then 3seconds, at 3 seconds, there was the flash. You want the shortest time that will produce a flash, any longer and the plastic will burn, and that may ruin your microwave, which I am not responsible under any circumstances, that said it did not harm my oven to do this several times, YMMV.

I have a video here (requires quicktime), that shows the CD in the oven, you can not see the plasma ball, but that is becouse the camera was overloaded by the flash. In the pictures below, you can see what happens to the CDs, two of them are old CDR media, one is a DVD. Any disk will work. The marks that look like scratches are where the metal foil was burned away by the huge electrical currents induced in the disk.