Duct Tape

I have heard that duct tape works to get rid of warts. How do you use it, and how long does it take? Research on duct tape was published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in October. Parents were told to cover their children's warts with a piece of duct tape for six days. If it fell off, they were to replace it. At the end of the six days, they removed the tape, soaked the wart in warm water and then filed it down with an emery board. The duct tape was replaced the next day, and the process was repeated for two months or until the wart disappeared.

Duct tape accessories are the new black. Well, maybe that's going too far. But duct tape handbags and wallets are definitely the new silver. In the hands of David Pippenger and friends, the do-it-all tape has crashed the fashion world like LeRoy Neiman at the Louvre museum. The accessories -- two wallets, a purse and a palm-sized cash-and-ID holder called "Barhopper" -- made their debut last August at the Fashion Avenue Merchandise Expo in New York and the MAGIC fashion show in Las Vegas.

The man was clearly out of his element. He wandered the store aisles, unsure where to find what he was looking for, and even more unsure how his wife was going to react when he brought it all home three days before Valentine's Day. Shyly, he asked another customer for advice, made his choices and, after a final check of his handwritten list, brought his items - not a box of chocolates among them - to the Home Depot checkout counter: Duct tape Plastic...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Way up here, while Tom Ridge was sending a ripple of code orange panic through the Lower 48 and urging everyone to stock up on duct tape in case of a terrorist attack, people on the last frontier were having a good chuckle. Anchorage had just held its annual Duct Tape Ball. Performers at the city's Fly By Night Club have been playing rolls of duct tape as musical instruments for 16 years. Pilots use the stuff to repair airplane wings. Dog mushers stick it on their faces to prevent frostbite.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Popular wisdom claims you can use it to patch a canoe, repair a dangling fender or keep an alligator's mouth shut. But according to scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, there's one thing duct tape is no good for: taping ducts.In tests that mimicked conditions in the forlorn and hidden spaces where ducts reside, "what we found was that duct tape almost always failed," said Max Sherman, a physicist who ran the tests. "It failed reliably and often quite catastrophically."

In a disheveled office just north of Baltimore, Chris Harring is aiming lights at a wall and framing a shot in a nearby camera. In less than four hours, this scene - however it turns out - will wind up in front of an audience at the Senator Theatre. Far from big-budget Hollywood - but smack in the middle of the city of John Waters - 20 independent film crews raced through the region yesterday attempting to produce a short movie on deadline for the Creative Alliance's sixth annual CAmm Slamm competition.

Once upon a time, duct tape was used for a practical purpose - fixing ducts - not for making prom dresses or toe rings or sculpture. But that was before duct tape moved out of the toolbox and into pop culture. For reasons that may well be inexplicable, there has been a spontaneous eruption of duct tape expression in North America in the past few months. For example, an American flag the size of an NBA basketball court, made completely of red, white and blue duct tape, was unveiled this month in Manhattan's Union Square to commemorate Flag Day. It was made by full-time duct tape artist Todd Scott.

Now we know why we bought all that duct tape. Not for Code Orange, that's so yesterday. Not for Code Yellow, our current national alert level, either. It's for Code White. The snowstorms of '03 call for heavy-duty arts and crafts projects and home improvements that can only be accomplished with thick rolls of lovely silver duct tape. Here are a few suggestions. * Duct-tape your kids together and see how long it takes them to pull themselves apart. (Could be considered both arts and crafts and home improvement.

Home Tip--Tough Tape--Need something hardier than duct tape? Gorilla Glue's Gorilla Tape is thicker and sticks to most surfaces. $9.99 for 35 yards.

"The Jumbo Duct Tape Book," by Jim Berg, Tim Nyberg and Tony Dierckins (Workman Publishing, 455 pages, $8.95). If you are not devoted to -- dependant upon -- duct tape, there is something worrisomely unAmerican about you. Now comes a substantial, delightful celebration by a pair of men who call thmselves "The Duct Tape Guys." Some of their ideas are madly fanciful -- but many are practical: repairing damaged trees, sealing toothpaste tubes (or just about anything else), unclogging Velcro, emergency repacking of auto wheel bearings, blade guards, anchoring pet dishes - and a thousand or so others.