Stove-top Popcorn

Back when I was a kid, we heated our leftovers in the oven or in a skillet on the stove. We bought popcorn kernels (unseasoned) in bags like the ones rice comes in. To pop the corn, you had to put some cooking oil in a pot and heat it up, add the popcorn kernels, and pop on the lid. Once the corn started popping, there was an art to getting every kernel popped without burning it. You had to hold the lid down with one hand and shake, shake, shake the pot with the other, manually tossing the kernels around inside to get them all heated. Once the popping stopped, you dumped the popcorn out into a bowl. In my case, you then had to pick out all the burnt pieces and salt and butter the daylights out of what little was left. The day they came out with microwaves, I thought I had died and gone to heaven! No more messing up a bunch of dishes to heat leftovers, and glory to God! - they came out with microwave popcorn. No more burnt popcorn! (Yeah, right.)
Yes, the microwave oven rocked my world, but somewhere in the back of my mind, microwaving just seems unnatural - There has to be something deadly about cooking food with waves of some unknown power...Whatever imagined health hazard there is to microwave cooking, I'll take it and never look back.