The coolest thing I’ve seen on the internet in the past week is a web page at the site for SSI Shredding Systems, a company in Wilsonville, Oregon, that manufactures custom-built shredding machines. Do you have a shredder? One of those plug-in units that grinds all your personal paperwork to little bits? (If not, you should, partly to protect your personal information but mostly because they’re so friggin much fun!) That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, except that SSI builds shredders that stand fifteen feet tall, weigh thirty tons, and have teeth as big as truck tires and sharper and more vicious than a Tyrannosaur’s.

The biggest shredder they make, christened “The Monster”, can eat a refrigerator in seconds. Literally. A fridge forklifted into The Monster’s extra-wide mouth is gone nine seconds after its rotating teeth catch hold and inexorably pull the fridge to its doom. I have never wanted a new toy so badly in all my life.

Not that I necessarily need to own one of SSI’s monster shredders to enjoy the fun of seeing one munch on a Volkswagen Beetle. SSI, which incidentally looks like a great place to work, has built a web page called WatchItShred.com where you can attend a Twinkie-eating contest pitting ten of the company’s employees against one of their shredders (I hope I’m not giving away too much if I reveal the shredder wins). In another video, employees enjoy bowling a few frames on an improvised lane before the balls and pins are rather spectacularly ground to pulp.

I’ve spent way too much time watching too many of these videos. Why? I suppose I could patch together a bullshit excuse that might sound somewhat plausible, but that would be an even bigger waste of my time. I watched them because they were awesome! These guys build shredding machines as big as locomotives that can eat cars! Who wouldn’t want to watch that? Well, okay, My Darling B just rolls her eyes, but Tim and Sean crowd around the screen, point and laugh! They know awesome when they see it.

<img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_s34S78Pjikk/TEWtXc9pV5I/AAAAAAAAExY/AS29lmmks2U/s800/paulsbookstore.jpg" align="left" width="300" alt="image of Paul’s Bookstore in Madison, WI" title="Paul’s Bookstore on State Street, the best used book store in Madison, WI"

I had a hard time deciding which was the most awesome internet find of the week, shredder porn or bookshelf porn. The shredder porn won, but only just. I went surfing from one web site after another looking at photographs of bookshelves for almost an hour. Is this normal? Some might doubt it, but it would be a pleasant dream to live in a house where every wall was a bookshelf from floor to ceiling, filled with every book I could afford to bring home and squirrel away for the day when I can retire and spend my evenings in a rocking chair beside a reading lamp, picking off each of my prizes one by one. If only, if only.