Unsolicited Advice

I had been wondering for a while when exactly we stopped calling chemicals things like "oil of vitriol" and started calling them things like "sulfuric acid". It's very romantic, but less than useful for, say, figuring out what the hell you're working with. The question was answered incidentally, as so many of my questions are, by Oliver Sacks, in his memoir   Uncle Tungsten , which is a charmingly off-kilter remembrance of his childhood in England and the many, many hazardous things he did with chemicals back then, because apparently the concept of safety hadn't been invented yet. The answer is that we changed over in the late 1700s, due in large part to the efforts of a French chemist, one Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier . He knocked it down to Antoine Lavoisier, the name by which he is best known, after the Revolution. It didn't last long, unfortunately; he was unlucky enough to be born into the nobility, so as soon as the proletariat got around t...

Minor life mysteries: Solved! I've never been especially fond of grapes. I'll eat them, but I'll pick just about any other fruit (or artificial froot-flavor) first. It turns out that this is because I've been eating supermarket seedless grapes all my life. Those are flavored mostly fructose, with a touch of tannin. Someone brought several pounds of Concord grapes to the PMRP green room during the show run this time, and now a lot of things make a lot more sense. Firstly, I am still flummoxed by the idea that food plants grow randomly in suburban yards here. I grew up in Arizona, a place where nature tries so hard to kill you the Australians would feel right at home. Food comes from stores, and yards are covered in Bermuda grass, which looks kind of lawn-y from a distance, but is in reality made up of tiny unripe punji stakes, and not to be walked on barefoot. All the plants look like they come from Mars and eating them is a bad idea 99% of the time. Prickly pear f...

I was at CVS the other day, and a lady near the front door handed me a sample of some sort of fancy "age-defying" cream. I'm not especially interested in it, as it's expensive by CVS standards and contains a lot of unnecessary glop in the base that my face won't appreciate, but I found the ingredients list rather interesting. It's essentially using sunscreen compounds for what Mog and I refer to as "the other use". [Mog also speaks Japanese, at least to the extent that she didn't die while in Tokyo for a semester. The phrase on English-language instructions that's customarily rendered as "only to be used as directed" has a Japanese-language equivalent that literally translates to "not to be used for the other use". Moggie has taken this as a guiding principle of life, and uses things for the other use whenever possible.] There are two kinds of sunscreens in the world: physical and chemical. Physical sunscreens work by ...

Rather than buy bags of designated rat food, I feed my critters a mix of basic human foodstuffs, supplemented by my own leftovers. Their diet should be mostly carbs (i.e., grains), and one of the cheapest ways to do this is to feed the little boogers a lot of oatmeal. I can't stand the stuff, so normally I just buy big canisters of whatever brand of rolled oats is on sale and feed them cold porridge for breakfast, but this week the supermarket happened to have packets of "fruit-and-cream flavored" oatmeal on sale. They like fruit, they like cream, and they like oatmeal, so I figured I'd pick it up and give them sweetened cardboard-sludge every once in a while as a treat. They got "bananas and cream" today . They are adamant that this is not  their beloved cold porridge. Don't get me wrong, they demolished it -- they just had to sniff it a lot first. They have a point. Given the smell of it, I'd say it's not "bananas and cream" so much...