God is on our side (3)

Pope Benedict XVI has, apparently, said, during a visit to John Paul II's home town of Wadowice, Poland, that he hopes the ex-pope will shortly be elevated to sainthood.
What the f##k did JPII do to deserve sainthood? Presumably it was not his refusal to modify doctrine which encourages unsustainable overpopulation of the planet and the spread of AIDS? Gosh, the chap who organizes the Cambridge Beer Festival has done more good for mankind than all the sodding popes put together.
I know it's only a remote possibility, but if anyone reading this rubbish is a catholic with both a conscience and a direct line to PBVXI perhaps you could mention his name - it's Sean Marsh. His helpers also deserve a mention.

Fun with chemistry (5)

Explosions in the back garden has reminded me of experiments with sodium chlorate and sugar. In the nineteen-sixties sodium chlorate weedkiller was easy to obtain over the counter in Woolies - even ten-year-olds could buy it. After some experimentation I managed to prepare a small amount of an explosive mixture and constructed a small cannon from a glass vial (capacity a couple of tablespoons) with a push-on plastic lid. I put a small amount of the mixture in the tube and fashioned a fuse by packing a small piece of glass tubing (from my chemistry set) with the same mixture. I then made a hole in the plastic lid to accommodate the fuse and buried the whole lot in the garden so only the plastic cap and fuse were visible. I lit the fuse and retired a short distance. In due course there was a small explosion and the cap was blown off the vial and landed a couple of yards away. The vial was, amazingly, undamaged. Encouraged by this minor success I refilled the fuse and put somewhat more mixture in the vial. This time the effect was spectacular. The explosion blew quite a large amount of earth a couple of feet into the air, as if a small shell had landed, the glass vial was reduced to powder, and the plastic lid was nowhere to be seen. I was hunting around for materials to make a bigger and better bomb when there was a call from the house. Inside were mum, and dad, and the chap who lived in the house at the bottom of the garden - a couple of hundred yards away. He was spitting rivets. He had been asleep in a deckchair and my explosion had woken him. To add insult to injury my plastic lid had then landed on the lawn a couple of feet from him. After he left my parents wet themselves laughing (they were not very fond of this neighbour). Similar experiments were, however, forbidden.

Fun with chemistry (4)

This one happened to a friend of a friend, but should still be recorded for posterity. It might not be 100% accurate, but the gist is true. Maybe, some time, I'll check the facts.
The friend of a friend, a well known chemist in the drug industry, had a concrete air-raid shelter in his back garden which he wanted rid of. He tried chiselling away at it, but to little effect. Because someone had told him concrete becomes brittle and more easy to break up when it has been heated, he filled the shelter with wood with a view to starting a bonfire. It didn't catch fire easily, so he searched for an accelerant and found a can of petrol in his garden shed. He poured this on the wood in the shelter and threw in a match. It was a very hot day, however, so much of the petrol had evaporated and the vapour had formed an explosive mixture with the air in the confined space of the shelter. The match caused the whole caboodle to explode with devastating force. He blew off most of the back wall of his house. Several lumps of concrete were blown right over the roof of his house and one quite large piece of bomb shelter went through the front window of a house on the other side of the road and landed on a sofa very recently vacated by an old chap and his missus. They would have been killed outright had they still been sitting there. Amazingly, no one was killed. The chap responsible was thrown against his house but ended up with minor injuries only. He could just as easily have been blown to pieces so small no one could have found him. Apparently no one pressed charges and all the damage was covered by insurance.

Fun with chemistry (3)

After leaving school I worked for a short while as a technician in the Chemistry Department of Birmingham University. One of the chaps in the laboratory had been awarded a first class honours degree but was a hopeless practical chemist and had been striving for seven years to accumulate enough results for a Ph.D. One day he was performing a reaction with lithium aluminium hydride, quite a reactive compound, in ether. Trouble is, he turned on the isomantle to heat his flask but forgot to pass water through his condenser, so all the ether boiled away. The reaction temperature was not, therefore, limited by the boiling point of ether (thirty-five degrees Celsius) but by the maximum temperature reached by the heater - maybe a couple of hundred degrees or so. Eventually this high temperature led to runaway reaction and then an explosion. Several small pieces of red-hot reaction mixture shot across the laboratory, missing everyone. We were lucky - because of the hemispherical shape of the heating mantle most of the explosion went upwards. He was, however, conducting his experiment directly beneath one end of a fluorescent tube suspended by two chains from a high ceiling. The explosion cut, with pin-point accuracy, through one end of the tube and the free end swung down, scything its way through a large experiment set up on the bench adjacent to danger man's patch. Although several hundred quid's worth of glass was lost that day, amazingly, although the laboratory was fully occupied, no one was even slightly hurt. Danger man was booted out of the university shortly after this incident. He didn't get his Ph.D.

God is on our side (2)

According to Radio 4's loony religious program yesterday morning the Jews have a problem. Are water buffalo (which some Jews wish to eat) kosher or not? To be kosher, apparently, animals must be mammals with cloven feet which chew the cud. The head rabbi was unable to decide on the last of these when presented with a water buffalo skull - he had to see a freshly severed head. "Bring me the head of a water buffalo" - eat your heart out, Peckinpah. Amazing, is it not, that educated, intelligent people in the twenty-first century can still believe god created some animals as 'clean' and others as 'unclean'? Why the f##k should he bother? Yet this ridiculous idea is central to several religions. Although Christianity does not have this problem, it is not without ridiculous ideas of its own. Think of god as a 'loving father' christians are told. I am a father. If I were omniscient and omnipotent I would not allow millions of my kids to be overwhelmed by tsunamis or die of starvation. The theory does not hold water.