Whipped Cream Difficulties

Obit watch: John Reed, of the D’Oly Carte Opera Company.

…for a generation of fans, Mr. Reed was the memorable embodiment of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “little man” roles, among them John Wellington Wells, the title character of “The Sorcerer”; Major-General Stanley, the very model of et cetera from “The Pirates of Penzance”; Ko-Ko, the nebbish turned lord high executioner in “The Mikado,” a part he also played in the 1967 film version.

The LAT magazine profiles the man who brought Tiki to America: Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. Mr. Gantt is perhaps better known by the name he acquired later in life: Donn E.R. Beachcomber.

Edited to add: I intended to blog this on Friday, but didn’t have anything to put with it, and it slipped my mind when I was preparing these notes: David Parker’s eulogy for his father, Robert B. Parker.

My father, at that moment in a cut-off sweatshirt covered with muffin crumbs, bacon grease, Flintstones Jelly and beer stains replied without dropping a beat–“Yeah, I’d like to see something by Twyla Tharp, I understand she’s quite innovative”.

(Hattip: Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

ETA2: Also forgot to blog the most recent entry in Derek Lowe’s “Things I Won’t Work With” series: dioxygen diflouride (also known as FOOF).

The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.

Also recommended: the “How Not To Do It” archives. Especially the story of the liquid nitrogen tank at Texas A&M.

Both the pressure relief and rupture disks had failed for some reason in the past, so they’d been removed and sealed off with metal plugs. You may commence shivering now.