When I heard the sound that I've heard before during many festive occasions, the shattering of a crystal wineglass, from where I was working, I could see the remnants spill across the hallway floor.So I rose to sweep up the shards of a newly bought redwine glass that since I had washed the dishes a short time before, I believed must have slipped off a rack for some inexplicable reason. A hungry ghost seemed a plausible agent at that moment. But the wineracks remained full.
I picked up what was underfoot and after reassembling the fragments, saw that they resembled a band. I then looked back up at inverted wineglasses and noticed that one was oddly shorter than the rest. So at that point I had solved one mystery. The wineglass had simply exploded spontaneously, rather about 1 cm of the rim had done so.
I have known punch bowls to develop stress fractures. Usually this would happen when they were brought out of a dishwasher hot and set out in a cool room. But in those instances the glass body was much thicker than what is found in stemware.
I am posting this as an example for the world to behold. Does this happen very often? Does anybody wrongly accused of carelessness need my photographic evidence to settle a domestic dispute as to how when nobody was around, it just broke? (I can hear my mother's raging timbre as I type this.) Because sometimes things do just break on their own and it's nobody's fault. But since this is China, it was probably a ghost.
