David Hahn’s Mugshot
“In 2007, when his mug shot was leaked to the media, David’s cherubic face was pockmarked with red sores, as if he had acute acne and had picked every pimple until it bled. But thirty-one-year-old men usually don’t come down with acne. The inescapable conclusion was that he’d been reliving his adolescence with more nuclear experiments.”
This is literary imagery that fails to stimulate the emotion al response as the actual visual image is describing and potentially is actually an example of how any literary imagery may fail this purpose. Visual imagery does accompany some of the descriptive imagery at various points in this book, but not here - which is too bad, because if one actually sees the mugshot in question, it absolutely has a much more visceral impact.
Periodically Stupid Political Hypocrisy
Why would a country that decries the interference into their government by foreign agents look to the elements on the table to do something really absurd to the leader of a foreign country. Because American foreign policy is, in addition to be elementally hypocritical, periodically stupid.
“Thallium has a gruesome record of killing spies, orphans, and great-aunts with large estates. But rather than relive darker scenes, maybe it’s better to recall element eighty-one’s single foray into (admittedly morbid) comedy. During its Cuba-obsessed years, the Central Intelligence Agency hatched a plan to powder Fidel Castro’s socks with a sort of talcum powder tainted with thallium. The spies were especially tickled that the poison would cause all his hair, including his famous beard, to fall out, which they hoped would emasculate Castro in front of his comrades before killing him.”
Cooks and Killjoys
Bubbles can become lighter than air, floating over heads energized to do so by little more than a plastic wand and an exhalation of breath. When one considers the most fragile things dealt with daily, bubbles should definitely come to mind, but that reputation is not the whole picture. Bubbles have been the centerpiece of some very hardcore, Nobel-winning research in the field of chemistry. But that research got its start in the kitchen:
“The intuitive science that picked up bubbles research was cooking. Bakers and brewers had long used yeasts—primitive bubble-making machines—to leaven bread and carbonate beer. But eighteenth-century haute cuisine chefs in Europe learned to whip egg whites into vast, fluffy foams and began to experiment with the meringues, porous cheeses, whipped creams, and cappuccinos we love today. Still, chefs and chemists tended to distrust one another, chemists seeing cooks as undisciplined and unscientific, cooks seeing chemists as sterile killjoys.”
Where do Elements Come From?
Where do elements come from anyway? This was a question dogging scientists for quite some time with the predominant view arrived at courtesy of the easy answer is the best for things we don’t know about. Perhaps surprisingly, that theory held fast together right up to the era of screwball comedies and Dillinger.
“They’re neither created nor destroyed: elements just are. Later theories, such as the 1930s big bang theory, folded this view into their fabric. Since the pinprick that existed back then, fourteen billion years ago, contained all the matter in the universe, everything around us must have been ejected from that speck. Not shaped like diamond tiaras and tin cans and aluminium foil quite yet, but the same basic stuff. (One scientist...quipped, `The elements were cooked in less time than it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes.’)”
