A Cat with Eighteen Half-Lives

Speaking of uranium, who wants a can of uranium ore? You can buy a little tin of it on Amazon for about 40 bucks. The product description says it is useful for testing your Geiger counter, and I’ll take the vendor’s word for it. The main reason to bring this up here is not so much the uranium, but the fun the commenters have with the idea:

I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.

Ran out of toothpaste, and remembered how you're supposed to be able to use baking soda to clean your teeth, so of course, I accidentally used this instead, and Wow! all I can say is, my teeth have never been cleaner! They sparkle, they tingle, and for some reason, they STAY clean now, no matter what. Highly recommended!

I put it on my cat's food and now it has 18 half lives.

I originally purchased this for powering the hovercraft on which my house sits, so when I want to move I can take my house with me.

And of course:

I bought this stuff to power my Delorian on a trip back to 1955. All went well until I got there. At first I was shocked it had all been used up on one trip but then I thought, "my bad, it was -50 years I was travelling, I'll just order some more". I was horrified to discover that they would not deliver to 1955.

Because, of course, the most popular use of nuclear energy will be in the flux capacitor.

There’s some non-proliferation and mutation humor, as you’d expect, but in general, the focus is on the surreal nature of owning a little trough of uranium. Comedy gold – or yellow, as the case may be - for the next Nuclear Energy Assembly.

J.R. Bray has a rather dicey, if still key, role in the history of animation. Pretending to be a journalist, he visited pioneering animator Winsor McCay in 1911 and McCay happily shared his techniques – which Bray promptly patented under his own name. (A later court case reestablished McCay’s interest.)

But Bray controlled the patents like a club and you’ll see “Bray-Hurd” (Ed Hurd was Bray’s business partner) on the credits of many early cartoons that licensed the patents. Bray himself lost interest in cartoons after World War I, moving on to live action shorts, but his company continued producing them until the end of the silent era – The Cat’s Nine Lives is from 1926.

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NEI Nuclear Notes

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