I'm pretty sure I stand totally unique in
human history as the only person who has ever had the inclination to put together a
collection of all the chemical elements... you know, that periodic chart they made you
memorize in school? Anyway, perhaps it's the challenge of tracking down materials few
people other than a handful of scientists have ever seen or touched. By now I've
acquired and put into neat little labeled bottles samples of all pure elements other
than gases and most radioactives (which, naturally, I wouldn't want anyway!!)Here to the left, for example, is my sample Calcium metal. This stuff needs to stay in a vacuum bottle or it'll crumble into dust. It's so light that when you jiggle it around it feels like popcorn in there.
And just on the wild chance that this is even mildly interesting to you, I have a picture of Dysprosium and another of Hafnium; two metals that serve little more than space-filler on a periodic chart but mean something to me. And each one of these chunks of metal costs a good deal when you can finally locate some obscure company that deals in scientific supplies and such. One of these days I half expect the FBI to come a-knockin' because I was interested in getting a bit of Plutonium from a Russian supplier. "But officers, really, I just wanna put together a collection of all the elements" as they take me kicking and screaming down the hallway...
Just what the hell am I rambling about??
If I ever get a shrink I wonder what could be said about this?
