My Son, the Jedi

Not a lot of things make me feel especially studly. Sure, bedding my buxom, redheaded wife is one of them, but one of the few others is either doing something that improves the house or fixing an appliance/machine that needs it. And, for the latter, get it to run as good as new.


That was just the scenario I was faced with this weekend. Last week, the drive belt that links the axle on which the lawnmower blade turns to the self-propulsion mechanism of the front wheels got chewed up by the blade. Fortunately, I had a spare lawnmower that I stupidly forgot to change the oil in last summer and thus pretty much seized everything up within. Nicely done. A very unstudly moment, to be sure. However, I was able to pull parts off of this old mower and figure out how the belt mechanism worked. I couldn't get the belt off, but I figured Lowes would have the correct replacement. After a 30 minute wait to talk to the guy to make sure the belt I picked up was the right one (and then 30 seconds to confirm...if that), I hustled home and began to fix the mower.


I was cleverly able to loop the belt around the blade so that I didn't have to take the blade off. After this, it was just another quick stretch and pull to get the belt through the opening in the housing for the blade to the pulley for the self-propulsion mechanism. A few twists and a flick to make sure it was tight, and I was back in business. I felt like many a bekilted Scotsman taunting the English after the battle of Stirling Bridge. As an end note, the mower runs as good as new. This was studly moment number one.


Sudly moment number two came on Saturday, when I decided I had had enough of watching Brady Quinn getting screwed and his falling stock, so instead I took my anger out on a light fixture above our kitchen sink that has largely been useless since we bought the house. It was an old (and I do mean old) fluorescent light that had no earthly use. Plus, the bulb was burnt out, and I just plain didn't like it. So, it had to come down. I bought some track lighting to replace it. However, I quickly discovered that the people who owned the house before us, or their contractors, or someone, are complete dolts. Instead of installing a box for the line to come through above the sink, they just had the electrical wires (and the insulation) sticking through a hole drilled in the ceiling. Class act, these folk. So, I wrestled and swore and swore some more and then finally got everything to fit the way I wanted it (if my son hadn't been asleep, I would have gone to get the box to fix it properly, which might be this weekend's project). I got the lights hung just in time before my wife came home, so it was a nice surprise. She, in fact, really liked it. Now, I can leave a light on for her at night when she is working that isn't the one over the stove, which burns out about every ten days. No lie.


So, because I was lazy, I took the old light fixture and laid it on the table in the dining room. I didn't think anything of it, but I did, later, take out the light fixture and such, but I left the bulb there. We'll fast-forward back to Sunday now. As I was preparing the kids' lunches, I was standing at the fridge getting some water from the filter so that I could microwave some macaroni and cheese (modern conveniences are even more wonderful when you've got kids to feed) when here comes my little boy (who is two and a half) into the kitchen, wielding the fluorescent bulb. He came in holding it in front of him and then, when he made sure that I could see him, he stopped, spread his feet shoulder-width apart and then held the bulb up over his head. At the same time, he made this face where he was gritting his teeth and scowling, as if he was trying to frighten off his enemies. In all, he looked quite the young Jedi standing there, ready to face off against Darth Vader.


The funny thing is, this must be a genetic thing because he's never seen a Star Wars-related thing before. My daughter has watched the Clone Wars cartoons with me, but other than that, there's not been too much Star Wars watching with my kids around. Clearly this is a case of genetic nerdiness fandom. As amused as I was, fluorescent bulbs are notoriously fragile and, with the glass being so thin, they tend to form razor-sharp shards when they shatter. Neither of these scenarios is exactly copacetic when it comes to two year olds. I was able to get him to hand me the bulb and I quickly disposed of it properly.


Oh, by the way, if you've had a really bad day working at the book store or something, the sound of long fluorescent bulbs shattering against the back of a steel dumpster is very, very rejuvenating. Or so I've heard.

Leonard Cohen Afterworld

I think from the last two titles of my update threads, you can guess what I listen to while typing. Actually, it's random, but these two songs have popped up right when I went to put the finishing touches on my blog updates.

I felt this one was appropriate, given that I just pounded out the last lines to the final chapter in my book. This is not to say that I'm finished, merely that I finally finished chapter 31, which is the final chapter in the book (not counting the epilogue). It was a long, strange ride getting there, too. I actually had to delete about three pages of my first attempt, repaste them, and then go back and edit and re-edit the parts between where I hadn't cut and where I repasted. Eventually, I got that part right (or right enough for now) and the remainder of the chapter just flowed. It flowed so well that the chapter I was intended to be between 12-14 pages ended up being 22 pages.

There was some extra, tricky stuff involved in this chapter. I knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, but I didn't know how to pull a couple of things off. I'll have to have my wife read through the passages, to make sure they aren't TOO awful. If anything, I really, REALLY strive to avoid camp, cliche stuff in my writing. For these particular scenes, I tried laying the foundation throughout the other chapters concerning these characters. We'll see if it worked.

So, that does it. That wraps up the story arc for one set of my characters. I still have the penultimate chapter, in which all the main characters are brought together in battle form (with kung fu grip), but that's a battle scene and critical to the entire story; it's not critical to the development of these two characters so much as it is for the entire story overall.

I'm rambling because I'm so effing tired.

So, to recap, it's easier to tell you what I DON'T have done at this point (and where I am on those chapters): 10 (3 pages finished), 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29 (nothing done), 30 (five pages done). Sadly, it's not looking like the end of the month to finish this is doable. I have made some big strides with chapter 10 and look to finish that and possibly one other by the end of the month.

The numbers:

Page Count: 437
Word Count: 133,821

More later in the week. My brain's about to melt.

Welcome to the Fold, Antimony

Now, I'm not the kind of guy who goes out of my way to try some fancy, exotic transition-metal catalyst. However, there are some I will trumpet from the tops of the mountains (such as ytterbium (III) triflate, which I used at my old job to do just about everything). When I come across a method for making something that I can't get done under some other, simpler way, I will use the new and exotic method. Plus, it's cool when you can use something new. In the back of my mind, I've kept a running tab of all the spots on the periodic table where I've used an element. It's sadly nerdy, but I am a chemist, after all.

In light of my inability to do certain types of palladium-based coupling reactions, I've had to find a new route to developing the SAR around our superduperriffic compound that we've been making and testing. One way, instead of coupling the free amine sticking off a heterocycle with an aryl bromide, is to try displacing a chloride off the heterocycle SNAr-style with an aniline or an aliphatic amine. The problem is, how does one go from an amino group to a displacable aryl halide?

Simple: you diazotize the amine in an aqueous acid and then convert the hydroxy group to a chloride using the appropriate reagent. I was doing this in two steps using NaNO2 in HOAc followed by stirring in warm POCl3 for a couple of hours. This was working great...until someone else in my company decided to paint the inside of their hood bright-ass yellow by means of an angry flask of POCl3 (hence known as "Pockle-3"). My safety-conscious company has decided to start making sure such volatile reagents, such as Pockle-3, are in the hands of people who know how to handle them. This is not a bad thing; at my old company, the procedure was to cool the Pockle-3 in an ice bath and then chuck in whole chunks of ice while stirring to induce things to crash out and then pour off the Pockle-3/ice/water solution from HELL. Usually into a mixture of halogenated and non-halogenated solvents. My old company wasn't big on safety. Or chemistry.

I digress. Now, enter me, who is staring at the dubious task of trying to make multiple grams of material with the chloride in place (a fluoride would probably work better, but I REALLY don't want to work with DAST). This would mean several multi-milliliter reactions featuring Pockle-3. Not wanting to have to do a safety review on each of the reactions, I decided to find a way around this mess. As it turns out, you can treat the amine in question with t-butyl nitrite in DCM with a little bit of dichloroacetic acid around to diazotize the amine and then addition of antimony(III)chloride will substitute the diazocompound with a chlorine (this can also be done with bromines, as well, using the appropriate brominated compounds). Boom. There it is. One step. Sure, the process takes two days, but between diazotizing, purifying and then hitting the hydroxy with Pockle-3 also takes about two days. Unfortunately, my compound, as unyielding as the relentless pounding of the surf against the shore, only formed the chloride in ~20%. ~70% was the hydroxy with ~10% left over as unreacted starting material. So much for great strokes of genius.

So now I've decided to just put up with the safety committee and go before them, goggles in hand, to be educated as to the ways of dealing with Pockle-3. In the meantime, this was the first time I had ever used an antimony compound. I know that salts of antimony can be used to kill the worms that cause leishmaniasis (I actually asked a girl out in high school whose name was Laurie Leish); unfortunately, the antimony salts also kill the people infected with the disease.

However, this allowed me to fill in one more spot on my "I've used that!" periodic table. Behold:


Sure, some of them are cop-outs, such as I use carbon everyday and most of the time nitrogen is in a ring, or some such. I've never actually taken nitrogen and tried to get it to bond with a transition metal or something. However, I have used the nitrate to do the diazotization reaction. Likewise, I've only ever used cesium in cesium carbonate form (damned fine base, by the way), but it's still cesium. You'll note I highlighted technecium; I'm not sure what technecium can be used for, since it's radioactive and (mostly) man-made. However, I had it shot into me, as outline in the first part of The Ordeal that I wrote about months ago.

So, there you have it. One more box colored in. I'm half tempted to color in thorium, since I've nicknamed my rotovap "The Mighty Thor". I feel that rotovaps work better if you stroke their egos before using them.

Another Sad Remembrance

I promise, I'll pick up some more lighthearted posts, but while we were all in shock and dismay over the happenings at Va. Tech (I saw today that People and such rags are ca$hing in on the tragedy...well done) and my quick memorials over Johnny Hart and Kurt Vonnegut, I completely missed that Brant Parker also died, eight days after friend and partner Johnny Hart. Mr. Parker was 86. He died of complications due to Alzheimer's disease.

This would complete the old adage of "they die in threes" as these three men (Hart, Vonnegut and Parker) were all peripheral heroes of mine. I did not necessarily idolize their work, but I certainly did appreciate it, or them, as is the case with Vonnegut.

Much like B.C., a large amount of Wizard of Id's humor was based on puns. A lot of time there would be glib political humor worked in, as well. One thing that always amused me about the strip was the Wizard himself; as a chemist, you can probably imagine why I enjoy him most of all.

For the past ten years, Brant Parker's son, Jeff, has been drawing the strip (and doing an admirable job, I must add) and will continue to do so. This is good news as I can continue to enjoy this sort of old-school humor that these two strips embrace every morning when I should be doing something...like updating my notebook or some such.

Careful readers might be able to spot a tribute I had 'created' to both Hart and Parker, when and if King of Shadows is every published.

While We're All Somber...

...I thought I'd write a little bit about a couple of legends and personal heroes that we've lost over the past few weeks: Kurt Vonnegut and Johnny Hart.

Vonnegut died April 11th at the age of 84. I've never taken the time to sit down and read an entire Vonnegut novel, but I'm familiar enough with his work that I've always admired it. One of the themes that constantly appeared in his works was what we now would call 'science fiction', but was largely looked at as being just a bit 'out there' at the time of publishing. In this way, I feel he was one of the pioneers of the genre; perhaps not a founding father like H.G. Wells or Jules Verne (and definitely not THE father, like Tolkien is considered for modern fantasy literature), but he was unquestionably before his time. Perhaps one of the most interesting concepts for a book that I've ever heard of was the plotline for Timequake, which was recommended to me many years ago and I still haven't picked up. However, once I'm finished with Tad Williams' newest offering (and writing my own...), I'm planning on finally following through on the recommendation.

Vonnegut was born and raised in Indianapolis, which is one of the reasons that I admire him. Despite the city and the state's clear difference with his political and religious beliefs, he always loved Indianapolis and Indiana. When asked, after living in New York for over 30 years, if he was a New Yorker or a Hoosier, he quickly responded "Hoosier" before the rest of the question was finished. I feel much the same way. I may have left the state, but the state has never left me. His pithy social commentary as well as his well-planned stories has made him an icon. But, my favorite memory of Vonnegut will always be his ability to make fun of himself in the movie "Back to School." I'm not a big Rodney Dangerfield fan (of course, no one was...zing!), but when Vonnegut showed up in the movie and then wrote a paper about himself (which subsequently got a failing grade), it showed that here was a man considered by many to be a social and cultural icon who could still come down out of the tower for a while and take a jab at himself, which I think is an applaudable, terribly human quality.

Johnny Hart died the night before Easter. Fittingly, he was sitting at his drawing board, working on another comic. He was 76. Hart was creator of two of my all time favorite daily comics: B.C. and Wizard of Id, the latter being a co-creation with friend Brant Parker. I've appreciated both of them over the years for their sociopolitical commentary as well as their bad puns. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a sucker for a truly offal pun. The stinkier, the better. Ahem.

Hart might best be remembered for his strongly Christian cartoons that would run around the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, especially in the Sunday papers. Often, it was amazing to see how well a story could be put together in a few colored frames. B.C. was often more overtly Christianed in theme. I'm not sure if he meant it to be that way, since the cast of B.C. should have been alive over a million years before Christ showed up, making it all the more ironically amusing. However, even now, I can't make it through the day properly without first checking out the latest installment of both B.C. and Wizard of Id. Fortunately, Hart had several strips already drawn and saved and his family has promised to help keep the strip going strong, even in the wake of his death, so I can go on for several more years drinking my morning coffee and smiling over today's punny comic.

Here's to Vonnegut and Hart: two men who will definitely be missed around here. *pours out a little beer for both*