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Insulin and Cancer

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ChrisSmolinski:
There have been schools evacuated / decontaminated due to small amounts of mercury being found. I don't recall ever playing with it in school, but I remember in middle school the science room had a large beaker of mercury sitting in the back of the room.

MDK2:
Can you even get a mercury thermometer anymore? (Not that they were any better than alcohol thermometers, not to my knowledge at least.)

We had one for taking our temperature which my mom accidentally broke. You had to shake the mercury back down after you got your reading, or else it would always just sit at the temp of the last person who had it in their mouth, but her hands were either greasy or soapy and in flew right out of her hand when she was doing that, where it shattered on our little hearth before the fireplace. It was rock with mortar (or at least a facsimile thereof) and the mercury ran in rivulet where the mortar was. I thought it was neat, but she was a nurse and knew that was probably dangerous. I don't think they did anything other than wipe it up and wash well afterward.

Pigmeat:
I don't know how many kids I knew that chomped down on the thermometer too hard and got a mouthful of glass and mercury? MD's were much more worried about the glass than mercury. I had a sister who was a notorious thermometer chomper.

Yup, second grade, third nine weeks and out came the mercury for science class. The kid at the front of each row got a pea sized glob to look over, roll around the desk, and pass back. It would always get dropped and fly into dozens of tiny globules rolling across those tile floors. We were always swiping it to play with.

When we got to 8th grade we had a science teacher who was first class nut, which was good, as the class was filled with troublemakers and geeks, girls would transfer out before the first week was over, sometimes after just looking in the door and seeing our drooling faces. "It'z uh gurl!"

He knew how to handle us. He'd let us dissolve pennies and other metals in sulfuric acid, play with electricity, bring in tanks of helium supposedly to fill balloons to study wind currents, but just as much to talk like Donald Duck, ferment and distill alcohol, "You might need to know this when you get to college." and build all sorts of semi-safe loud noise makers. He'd show us the safe way to do things and turn us loose. The other teachers on that end of the building hated him and loathed us, but he was loved by every boy in that school. There was such a demand to get in that class he had to either like you, or see something in you worth saving. (I had a bad temper. He taught me to resist the temptation to kill people who looked at me sideways that year.) If the school had tried to fire him, there would have been a riot.

Those air current studies and blinky circuits we were taught cranked out a number of classes of fine UFO hoaxers, many who I'm sure still practice the craft in these days of dirt cheap drones. Stan, wherever you are, I hope you're happy and healthy, you were and are the King.

Anyone remember the glory days of chasing the county fogging trucks spraying clouds of good ol' DDT on your bike in the summer. To steal part of a line from Robert Duvall, "God, I love the smell of DDT in the morning!"

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