Ooh, Neat! There's a Little Tiny Man Arc-Welding in our Oven!

Yesterday evening, Lindz and I were in the kitchen. I had just handed her a beer, and she was telling me about her day at work. While she was recounting tales of her boss's amazing foolishness, I was baking pita chips for us to snack on. The conversation abruptly stopped when we heard a noise. It was something that resembled buzzing, humming and sputtering. Smoke and bright, white light was visible though the oven vent beneath one of the burners. I furrowed my brow and looked in the oven. Sparks and orange magma greeted my pessimistic expectations. "How about we turn that off, babe?" my wife suggested.
"Yes, I believe that's a wise notion, my cherry-cheeked goddess." I turned off the bake element, and we finished the last sentence of the interrupted conversation. I finished the pita chips with the broiler element, narrowly avoiding burning them.
"We're going to need something by Thanksgiving," Lindz said, wearing a hard-to-describe combination of smirk and grimace. It's the facial expression used by homeowners when confronted by something expensive that was working fine moments earlier.
"Yep," I replied, adopting the smirk-grimace.




Anyway, The biscuit-colored Magic Chef owes us little or nothing. I think it's 25 years old. It probably would have failed sooner, but the previous owner of the house seems to have been as afraid of cooking as he was of attaching anything with more than 1/2 the requisite number of screws. The new Kenmore range (model 94002, a nice, bottom-of-the-line coil top) arrives on Saturday. I didn't even look at radiant glass tops. I don't trust that there new-fangled stuff. Cheap ranges do everything I need. I'm not sure how much it would be to replace this bake element, but I'm not putting money into this old thing.