rlfj: Blog

I had to give this chapter a lot of thought, for several reasons. First, lots of people start getting sick and dying. I'm not a particularly bloodthirsty individual, but a background in chemistry gives a person a lot of information on making people dead. A second reason was my own history as a chemist.

DMSO is an excellent solvent, with all the issues mentioned. I personally encountered it when, back in the late 1970s, my father asked me to get him some. DMSO was being investigated as a treatment for gout, which he suffered from. I got him a bottle, but I am not sure whether he used it or what he did with it.

In college I was given an assignment to develop a procedure using phase transfer catalysis as a future lab experiment. The technique used sodium cyanide as one of the reagents and was successful. My grad adviser took my process and wrote a paper, with my name on it as well, and submitted it to the Journal of Chemical Education. A few months later we learned it was rejected on the basis that cyanide was much too dangerous for undergrads to use. We really scratched our heads at that. In most chemistry labs cyanide was so common we almost stored it in barrels! It was one of the basic chemicals we used routinely. There are many chemicals much more dangerous than cyanide. Many of those chemicals can be obtained legally or procured without too much difficulty in nature. Snake venom and aconite are two such substances.

Anyway, enjoy!

Things are about to get very nasty at the Balustre Group. It's not full-blown war yet, but it's getting close. Enjoy!

It's time for Travis and Janice to disappear. Or is it Sean and Janice? Jake and Janice? Well, somebody is disappearing! Enjoy!

I had some fun with Chapter 13 describing the problems with elk in Everest. The fictional city and county of Everest, Montana, are southeast of the very real city of Banff, Alberta. My wife and I had the chance to vacation there about 15 years ago. Beautiful place, lots of history. Banff has the interesting distinction of being in the middle of a national park in the Canadian Rockies. As such, it is surrounded by a wide variety of wild critters and no hunting is allowed. The municipal garbage cans are made from armor plating so the bears can't get into them, every few years a jogger or camper becomes lunch for a cougar or a wolf, and most mornings the elk graze the local golf course. If you are playing golf, they're just one more hazard to avoid, and you have to play through when your ball lands in some elk poop. Anyway, we were talking to one of the locals and he told us about the idiot who walked up to an elk and plopped his kid on the elk's back. No, they're not tame. The idiot will probably get the elk horn out of his ass any year now!

I was surprised that only one reader had experience in a military field hospital. The assistance is appreciated, and if anybody else has experience, let me know. Thanks.

Enjoy!

The weapons issue generated a lot of emails. For those wondering about the last blog post, I am perfectly aware that the Ruger Mini 14 fires NATO 5.56. The Mini Thirty is the version that is chambered for Russian 7.62. My ignorance was that when I read 7.62, I didn't realize it was also a Russian round different from NATO 7.62. Personally, the last firearm I used involved a rubber band and a paperclip. Anyway, this discussion is finished.

Assistance is needed. If you are or were a surgical doctor or nurse, I need some help writing an operating room scene for a future story. Even better would be knowledge of surgery in a field hospital setting. Further, while I dearly love the assistance I get from all my readers, please don't respond if you simply watched something on a TV show or dropped out of podiatry school sixty years ago. Many thanks!