[jrockway]

My thought while reading this was "this must be an article from the Daily Mail". Then I looked at the link's URL more carefully.

FWIW, we were discussing incandescent bulbs, not CFLs, as referred to in your excerpt.

[cgio]

That was the first link I found btw. There are other links like the following from the Environmental Protection Agency http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl if you think there is something with the validity of the article linked previously. It raises the same issues.

Furthermore, the discussion was not specifying incandescent, but I specified energy saving just in case.

[makomk]

Those are just precautionary measures for people who are really worried about minimizing their mercury exposure. It's not a big deal unless you're breaking CFLs on a regular basis or dealing with some of the older fluorescent tubes; the amount of mercury they contain is tiny.

[cgio]

This is also explained in the last section of the EPA link. Nevertheless, it remains relevant in a discussion about putting bulbs in microwaves to have some fun. I would stick with incandescent, which apparently are also more fun.