they’ll get you every time.
David Linden used to regale us in the 1980s with stories about how tetrodotoxin was packaged for lab use: I’ll spare you the details, but the boxing arrangement was the cardboard-and-polystyrene equivalent of Russian dolls, with a huge appliance-size crate arriving in the lab that brought boxes within boxes—all bearing sternly worded labels—until the toxin itself emerged from a tiny jewelry-size case in a teensy vial. Sternly worded.
Presumably in the Age of Homeland Security any scientists who want to work with this very-potent substance have to have their genitals scanned before they can take delivery.
David: “But when I talk to the Homeland Security agents they want to see how anything toxic is stored; and yet they can barely pronounce the names.”
Joy: “So much of what DHS does is cosmetic, anyway. But they will learn what these poisons look like, and how to pronounce them. Anyway, it’s your fault: all you scientists use words with entirely too many syllables in them. No word should have more than three or four.”
Other than supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and antidisestablishmentarianism.
My cousin Kevin Smith and I (no, not that Kevin Smith) once made up a word that used all of the vowels other than that wimpy part-timer, y: “quaoiiean.” It means unique, or “for once in her life, Joy gets to set the terms of play, because Kevin is tired, or perhaps because he cannot find his brother and Joy’s brother today for another round of ‘let’s pick on the girl.'”
As far a the poisoning cases go, however: I blame Bush.
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