Element of the Month: Nitrogen!

May's Element of the Month:
Nitrogen!
N
7

Atomic Mass: 14.0067 amu
Melting Point: -210 °C
Boiling Point: -196 °C

Nitrogen, like love, is all around. Really! It’s almost 4/5ths of your local atmosphere, although it’s colorless and odorless so it’s easy to miss. Indeed, if it wasn’t colorless or odorless, there wouldn’t be much point to the concepts of “sight” or “odor,” would there? All you’d ever see or smell would be the great swirling masses of Nitrogen. But it is in fact colorless and odorless, which is very conclusive proof – depending on whom you ask – that God is a very clever chap indeed, or that you belong to a species that evolved its sensory organs in a Nitrogen-based atmosphere, or both.

Now you might be tempted, as a creature who relentlessly craves Oxygen above all other things, to disrespect Nitrogen a little for taking up atmospheric space that might otherwise have more of the good stuff. But not so fast! Oxygen is incredibly reactive – hell, that’s why it’s such a big deal in the various chemical reactions that make you tick, pal – and it’s actually a good thing to have it cut with a fairly inert mixer like Nitrogen. It keeps all those things that we like to keep stable, like metal and exposed flesh, from bursting into flame at the drop of a hat.

The Centerfold!

Another reason to tip your hat to Nitrogen is that it’s one of the ingredients in amino acids, and therefore absolutely essential to Terrestrial life. You yourself, Gentle Reader, are 3% Nitrogen. There’s a tricky little business involved in the biology of Nitrogen, though, in that you are surrounded by it but you aren’t able to absorb it from the atmosphere. Don’t feel bad about it; neither can I. No animal can, and plants can’t either. “But wait!” you cry. “What about the ‘nitrogen-fixing plants,’ legumes, clover and the like, that farmers grow to replenish nitrogen in their soil, in the unlikely event that they aren’t just dumping industrially-fixed nitrogen on it?” Excellent question. Turns out, though, that it's not the plants themselves that fix the nitrogen – which is to say, convert it from an atmospheric form to a biologically useful form.  It's bacteria that hang out in those plants’ roots that are doing the heavy lifting. Thanks, root bacteria!

As an incredibly common element, Nitrogen is in a zillion compounds that are of use to the human community, from fertilizers through laughing gas to rocket propellant. Nitrogen qua Nitrogen, though, is mostly just used when something needs to be packaged in an inert gas. Would you want to package your food, or your explosives, in eager-beaver Oxygen? Of course not. You'd want to package it in laid-back Nitrogen, which will keep to its own affairs and not start nosing into other people’s compounds.

Daniel Rutherford, one of those brilliant Scottish polymath dudes, is credited with discovering Nitrogen in 1772.  Except, since what he thought he’d done is removed all of the phlogiston from elemental air, he probably shouldn’t be.

The Straw-Stacker Stamp Album of Grandpa5000

Warning: Essay-Length Post
Twitter-Equivalent Translation: Looking through my grandpa's stamp collection.  OMG it's cool. Ck out pics!

I kept a stamp collection for a while when I was a kid, and since you’re here it’s a safe bet that you might have as well. Back then, when I visited Grandma and Grandpa5000’s house, I would often dig out their own mothballed stamp collections and get lost in an older, stranger world. It was the first contact I ever had with countries that had since disappeared, unheard-of places like “Lithuania” or “Bosnia,” or “Germany” without an “East” or a “West."  Their stamps were by and large older than mine, as were their stamp albums, and they were, well, the second-most interesting thing in the house, after the jam-packed games cabinet.

When Grandpa died in 2001, my parents very sweetly gave me the stamp collection, and in the decade since I have treasured it – but abstractly, without ever really looking at it. Until a rainy day a few weekends back, when I was repotting some house plants and moving things around and one thing led to another and suddenly I had the old albums spread out on a table, enchanted.


From a strictly personal perspective, it is interesting to read the biographical clues left in the collection by my grandparents. They clearly took up the hobby in about 1961. Grandma was interested in U.S. stamps, mostly contemporary, and liked collecting blocks of four and first-day issues. Grandpa liked older international stamps, and if he had any criteria for their selection it is not at all obvious.  He might have just picked ones he thought looked cool, and if so he and I had some tastes in common. They kept up their collections for about five years, and then they petered out. After that, like me, like you maybe, they just had a box into which they tossed interesting stamps that happened to land on their doorstep, against the possibility that the philatelic bug would bite them again in the future. But it never did.

It hasn’t bit me, either, at not in the sense that I intend to seek out new stamps or even organize the three collections – Grandpa’s, Grandma’s, and seventh-grade Michael5000’s – that I now have in my possession. I’m not a stamp collector. But I have some stamp collections, and as you may have noticed I have an enthusiasm for paper ephemera. Which is why, summarily and without even consulting the Dork, Vice-Dork, or Dorks Emeriti, I am adding stamp imagery to the purview of this online variety magazine. Forewarened is forearmed.

The Reeves & Co. Scrapbook.

One of the most singular items in the grandparental collection is a small album in a agricultural brochure that must date, judging from the graphics, from around the turn of the 20th Century. The handwriting might be Grandpa’s and the stamps are very old, but whether this is an artifact from his youth, or something he put together in 1961 before he got organized, or just something he encountered and kept from the margins of life’s random roads, I don’t know.

Here’s the cover:

On the inside, we see that it is both an account book and an advertisement for a piece of agricultural equipment. I suppose that equipment salesmen must have passed out swag to farmers back in the day the same way that pharmaceutical reps do with doctors now. Also, we see the words “United States” scrawled on the top – by my grandfather? – and that things have been pasted in and then removed. I think this page may have held some of the stamps that eventually ended up in Grandma’s U.S. albums.

On the next page, there’s a message from Reeves and Co. and some info on their new hay stacker…

...and a set of stamps from “England”! We also get a look at the improvised hinges that must have held two more stamps in place at some point.

Another page gives us another page of pre-professional marketing bluster, and some stamps from Germany. Old stamps!

These appear to be – although how would I know, really – from a series issued in 1889, and worth as much as five bucks apiece! ...if, you know, they are unused and in mint condition and not essentially taped to an agricultural pamphlet. Frankly, though, this way is much cooler.

The organizational scheme appears to have been U.S., England, Germany, and Other: the next page brings us specimens from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Italy, the South Africa Colony, India, and Hong Kong.

Then we have a page of what I find is the 1893 “Landing of Columbus 2 Cent” issue.

Wow, you can buy those for $45.00 apiece online! ...mint, unused. Or you can buy used ones for 20 cents.And then, on the right hand side, more writing.

Many of the negro tribes cultivate the soil, raise cattle, sheep, and goats, and manufacture various articles. some are harmless and very industrious while others are ignorant and savage. 

The tribes suffer grately from wars among themselfs and from the cruelties of their chiefs and the Arab slave trader. Some of the natives are tall, brave and well formed. The chiefs of some of the tribes are very creul not only their prisoners but their own subjects. The great desert which is about two thirds as large as the United States is almost destitute of rain.  Places in 

The essay jumps up and continues underneath the stamps -- which, for those of us with sophisticated training in interpreting original documents, yields a clue! This pamphlet was used as a school notebook before it was used as a stamp album!

After this, there are several pages that were set up to track a student's progress in various classes. This log was kept faithfully for three days.

The booklet ends with a list of the countries of Africa…

…and lists of major African rivers, mountains, lakes, and islands.

Two hypotheses: This could be a Depression-era relic of my grandpa’s youth, an old pamphlet adapted for schoolboy use. Or, since the stamps come from a decade or so before Grandpa was born, maybe it is something he picked up from someone else, perhaps a great-grandparent who must, logic dictates, have existed before him (Grandpa didn’t like to talk about his childhood). Either way, what we have here is a typical specimen of a common sort of document from the late 19th or early 20th Century. It has no real value.

Bidding starts at $500.

Your Sunday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

De Luxe Cottages

Agate Beach, Oregon


10 units, completely furnished, fully equipped kitchesn, for 2 to 6 people.  T.V. in units.  Ocean view all cottages, steps to sandy beach.  Agate hunting, fishing, golfing nearby.


Provenance: From the Grandma and Grandpa5000 Collection, Gift of Mom5000, April 2011.

The Bear Chronicles

I this painting totally looks like me.
Eating a Pop Tart.

The Reading List: Pnin

Well, it’s no Lolita.

But then, what is?

I know more about the background of this book than I usually do because the edition I read had a foreword by David Lodge. He’s one of my favorite writers-about-literature, so I actually read what he had to say, although not of course until I had finished the book. And I’m glad I did; not only did his thoughts and comments enrich my understanding, but his at-first baffling description of a key scene made me realize that I had accidentally turned over two pages at the end of a chapter, thereby missing one of the best passages in the book.

Anyway.  Pnin is an early entry in the campus comedy genre, a portrait of an eccentric professor of Russian written in seven discrete, episodic chapters. From the foreword, I learned that Nabokov wrote the book in a series of short stories that were first published in the New Yorker before being appearing together as a novel. Yet despite this, and despite that the individual episodes vary widely in tone and theme, this is no collection of short stories. The novel is in fact tightly interwoven, with mysteries from the opening page that aren't cleared up until the final chapter, and a florid abundance of subplots that gently progress over the course of the narrative. Much of the primary plot, the “story,” happened long before the rather quotidian events described in the book, and is only gradually uncovered and discovered through fragmentary references to the past. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to describe Pnin as a kind of Cubist portrait, in which we see a single life from all sorts of angles simultaneously – or at least as "simultaneously" as you can burn through 130 pages (it’s short!).

This being Nabokov, Pnin is chockablock with erudite wordplay that is positively Nabokovian, and I say this in every confidence that two-thirds of it went straight over my head. But it ain’t all highbrow stuff, either. There’s plenty of making fun of how our hero, the eponymous Professor Timofey Pnin, talks funny, and there’s a long scene that relies on the sitcom device of him thinking he’s talking to one guy when he’s actually talking to somebody else. The opening scene, in fact, is a long shaggy dog story about how Pnin has got on the wrong train and hasn’t figured it out yet, ho ho ho! It’s not likely to have you in stitches, but Nabokov has the comic timing to make it all work.

Now if you’re like me, you are fascinated by the way that the nature of the narrator structures a work of literature, amIright? And in this regard, Pnin is positively over the top. From the first sentence, Nabokov introduces an ambiguity as to whether the story is being told by a garden variety omniscient implied narrator or by a specific but unnamed storyteller within the world of the novel. But as we start to get comfortable with the omniscient narrator, who after all constantly remarks on Pnin’s thoughts and feelings, the unnamed storyteller will suddenly pop up and assert himself, remarking offhandedly for instance that someone who Pnin knows is a mutual acquaintance. As the book continues, these intrusions get more and more frequent until, by the last chapter, the narrator is writing in the first person and is the active party, Pnin himself still at the center of attention but as the object of someone else’s observation. (And just to put the cherry on the cake, Lodge tells us that Nabokov drops numerous biographical hints that the narrator is, in essence, real-life Nabokov.) I don’t recall seeing anything quite like it before, and no wonder; this kind of writing requires a technical virtuoso.

But is it any good?

Well, in most of the chapters, Professor Pnin is a fairly pathetic figure. His research is silly, he’s a poor teacher, and he talks funny. He’s not well-integrated into American culture, his personal life is lonely and unhappy, and he is petty, selfish, and vain. If he stayed in this one mode to the end of the book, he would be pretty hard to take.

But, there are surprises waiting that add a great deal of depth to the novel. On a weekend road trip, Pnin gets himself lost on country roads through his foolishness and vanity – but then, suddenly, reaches his destination, a country house where he is staying for the weekend with several of his fellow expatriates, intellectuals who fled the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis before washing up in alien North America. Among his own kind, the ridiculous Dr. Pnin is suddenly revealed as an intelligent, sensitive, even urbane man with more subtleties and sorrows than anything we have seen of him on campus. A few chapters later, he hosts a party for his handful of campus friends, and although he is still a bit of a buffoon in this setting we can also see that he is a humane figure who is playing a tough deal as best he can.

So Pnin is funny, but darkly funny. It’s witty but spare. It’s a lot of fun for readers who like to put some work into their fun.

Here’s the Part I Read Out Loud to Mrs.5000

Remember that this is a campus comedy, and one of the early entries in the now-common genre.  And, although professorial politics is a pretty broad target, it's a target that Nabokov hits repeatedly and with considerable deftness.

The setup for this particular passage is that Dr. Herman Hagen, the head of the German Department, is leaving his post.  Pnin, the college’s only Russian professor, has been housed in German, but Hagen knows that Pnin will be cut from the staff without his protection, and he is trying to convince the chair of the French Department to take him on. We have already learned that:

Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo.

So here goes [oh! and check out how the mostly-invisible narrator subtly surfaces in the first sentence]:

Hagen… suggested Pnin could teach a French Language course: like many Russians, our friend had had a French governess as a child, and after the Revolution he lived in Paris for more than fifteen years.
‘You mean,’ asked Blorenge sternly, ‘he can speak French?’
Hagen, who was well aware of Blorenge’s special requirements, hesistated.
‘Out with it, Herman! Yes or no?’
‘I am sure he could adapt himself.’
‘He does speak it, eh?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘In that case,’ said Blorenge, ‘we can’t use him in First-Year French. It would be unfair to our Mr. Smith, who gives the elementary course this term and, naturally, is required to be only one lesson ahead of his students. Now it so happens that Mr. Hashimoto needs an assistant for his overflowing group in Intermediate French. Does your man read French as well as speak it?’
‘I repeat, he can adapt himself,’ hedged Hagen.
‘I know what adaptation means,’ said Blorenge, frowning. ‘In 1950, when Hash was away, I engaged that Swiss skiing instructor and he smuggled in mimeo copies of some old French anthology. It took us almost a year to bring the class back to its initial level. Now, if what’s-his-name does not read French –‘
‘I’m afraid he does,’ said Hagen with a sigh.
‘Then we can’t use him at all. As you know, we believe only in speech records and other mechanical devices. No books are allowed.’
‘There still remains Advanced French,’ murmured Hagen.
‘Carolina Slavski and I take care of that,’ answered Blorenge.

If you are chuckling at this point, you need to go out and get you some Pnin. If you are profoundly unamused, then this is not the book for you. If you’re somewhere in between, you may proceed on your own judgement.

Your Thursday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

SEA ANEMONES
REPRODUCTIONS IN GLASS
CARNEGIE MUSEUM, PITTSBUGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Provenance: Sent by possible L&TM5K Reader Roxanna, April 2011.

The Wednesday Quiz has unresolved competing claims on its sovereignty

It's:

The weekly game of knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!

Answers come out Fridayish.

1. His Arkansas-based company made him the richest man in the United States from 1982 to 1988.

2. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.  The character is named Clarissa. Who is the author?

3. This is one of the largest areas in the world with unresolved competing claims on its sovereignty. Which is to say, what country does it belong to? Depends on whom you ask! What do we call it, in English?

4. Who composed Götterdämmerung, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, and Parsifal?

5. Who recorded Quadrophenia and Live at Leeds?

6. What city is this?

7. Spanish-language placenames like Guadalajara or Guadalquivir derive from this Arabic word, which means "valley" or "intermittant stream."

8. You're most familiar with his "Arrangement in Grey and Black," but this one, the "Nocturne in Black and Gold," is known in part because he sued John Ruskin for libel after he gave it a nasty review (and won, although it was a pyrrhic victory). Who is this American born artist?

9. He was chair of the convention that drew up the United States Constitution in 1787.

10. It's ranked, depending on how you slice 'em, as between the 4th and 8th biggest city in China. Its metro area has roughly the population of, say, Sweden. A major transportation hub, it is known for six very long bridges over (and one tunnel under) the Yangtze River. What's its name?

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Held over by popular demand! Time yourself for two minutes -- How many creatures can you name that begin with this week's letter?

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What a lark!  What a plunge!  Put your answers in the comments.