I have one of those small goose-neck halogen lamps on my desk.  It's been here since we moved the office into the spare room a few months ago, and the lamp is actually quite older than that.  I was sitting at my desk just now (2:15am) working away when I noticed the light starting to flicker.  I wasn't really surprised as the power grid in Santa Cruz sucks, so I just figured we were having some sort of power fluctuation.  My first instinct was to look closer at the lamp, but now I'm glad I did not: a few seconds after is started flickering, it exploded violently, sending shards of hot glass down onto my desk and sadly my 27" monitor, which now has a few shards of glass permanently implanted in the lower left corner of the display.  Luckily it is in the very bottom left of the screen so I don't see it much but what a bummer.  The noise scared the hell out of me and made the dogs bark - it sounded like a handgun.  What a way to get your heart racing!

Oh, and Happy New Year!  :)