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June 16, 2006
Vote Early Vote Often
Via Politburo Diktat, a chance to vote or your favourite element at Innocent Bystander.
Clearly this is fixed, an abuse of due process as there is no way to vote for scandium, everybody’s favourite element.
Vote, therefore, for gallium.
Why gallium? We used to buy that when in Moscow. Bloke would come round to the office every few weeks with a few kilos in a 2 litre plastic Pepsi bottle or several. Good metal, nothing wrong with it at all, we’d pay cash for it.
It was only some years later that we found he’d been siphoning it off from an experiment looking for solar neutrinos. This involved two huge (30 tonnes each) tanks of gallium, one in the US, one in Russia. In order for the experiment to work, there had to be equal volumes of gallium in each tank....which, of course, after a year or so of us (and a number of other scrap metal dealers) buying those Pepsi bottles full, there wasn’t.
X decades of science thus down the drain.
Oops, sorry folks!
June 16, 2006 in The Low Hanging Fruit Company (BVI) Limited | Permalink
Comments
Fine metal, shocking paint job!
Posted by: Mark Holland | Jun 16, 2006 1:15:22 PM
I refuse to take part until platinum is included in the list of candidates.
IB is obviously running a gerrymandered campaign in a rotten borough. I demand an investigation by UN observers.
RM
Posted by: The Remittance Man | Jun 16, 2006 2:03:50 PM
Sorry, you saw nothing potentially worrying about paying cash for a valuable metal to a bloke who basically came round and said "have some of this, it fell off the back of a lorry"?
Nice moral compass you've got there. Try that in front of a British court and you'd be put inside for "receiving goods knowing them to be stolen" so fast your head would spin.
Posted by: ajay | Jun 16, 2006 4:32:11 PM
Why do you think he was working in the SU?
Posted by: Agammamon | Jun 17, 2006 1:21:05 AM
Nice moral compass you've got there. Try that in front of a British court and you'd be put inside for "receiving goods knowing them to be stolen" so fast your head would spin.
It was in Russia in the early 90s. People bought milk in this fashion back then. Tim probably had to bribe a policemen or three hundred too. Again, not something you'd want to do in London. But the chap who arrives in Russia with a moral compass is going to be in an awful lot of trouble very quickly.
Posted by: Tim Newman | Jun 17, 2006 11:55:56 AM
