I liked the name so much I changed my blog description to 'mechanical derangement'. In my previous entry on the subject I was referring to a great sci-fi short story I had once read about a future where "millions of common, everyday objects—your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your shoes, the box of cereal on your shelf—began to exhibit massive processing power and interobject communication" which can sometimes lead to the creation of a "spontaneous assemblage—or 'bleb,' as most people called such random accretions of intelligent appliances and artifacts, after the biological term for an extrusion of anomalous cells."

It won a Nebula (I think) and is available on-line:

And the Dish ran away with the Spoon
by Paul Di Filippo

Cody sat back and began to laugh. "Is that all? My god, what a trivial thing to worry about. Blebs just happen, Kaz, anytime, anywhere. You can't prevent them. And they're mostly harmless, as you well know. You just knock them apart and separate the components." Cody snorted in what I thought was a rather rude and unsympathetic fashion. "Blebs! It's like worrying about—about robber squirrels or vampire pigeons or running out of SuperMilk."

Blebs were a fact of life. Cody was right about that. But they weren't always trivial or innocent.

One had killed my parents.