Richard the Dreaded Libertarian said:
Methanol was sold as Moonshine during the prohibition and
folks drank it by the quart, daily, without getting anything but
gassed and terribly hung over. Agreed, 50% got side effects,
like going blind, after prolonged guzzling and pigging out on it...
[Hansen]
Moonshine was made from grains, just like commercial boozes
are, but with poorer quality control.
[hanson]
Sure moonshine was MADE from grains, but some shiners SOLD
moonshine spiked with Methanol, if not outright pure MeOH after they
discovered (as I stated earlier) that it is cheaper to dry-distill wood chips
(wood- pyrolysis) to get MeOH and sell it as EtOH... or to retain, collect
and sell the first 5-10% of the fermented grain distillate that is rich in
MeOH. -- To boot, not only back then did this unsavory practice go on
but it happens even today, every day, as was reported in
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2005/04/24/stories/2005042400390400.htm
which states: " Methanol, a toxic solvent, has the same properties as
ethyl alcohol and is much cheaper. In 2004, the police also registered
34,014 cases of illegal sale and manufacture of hooch all over the State
of Maharashtra complaining that 'These illicit dens add methanol to the
hooch which claimed 91 lives and seriously affected over 200 people in
Vikhroli' ".... So, what's ~300 victims out of 35'000 MeOH-boozers...
that's far below the 50% I earlier mentioned... ahahaha...In Pharmacol Toxicol 1987 Mar;60(3):217-20, Jones AW.... it says:
"... the elimination half-life of methanol in *human volunteers*... during the
morning after the subjects had consumed wine with 100 mg/l methanol
the previous evening. The washout of methanol from the body coincided
with the onset of hangover."..... AHAHAHA... volunteers!... ahahaha....There is entire hour TV program devoted to this, on one of the Learning
Channels. Cute side details about MeOH are also in the CACHED text of
http://homedistiller.org/methanol.htm.... and then of course there is the
grand history for all forms and stages of green/enviro-paranoia about
MeOH in
http://www.gasdetection.com/TECH/meoh.htmlMeOH use for/in Fuel cells is not new neither. Germany's weeklong
Hannover Fair in April 2002, reported in
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020907/bob10.asp that
"Dozens of companies are developing direct-methanol and other
types of fuel cells for handheld devices, such as Polyfuel, Smart Fuel
Cells, Samsung, Toshiba and Casio"....
[Hansen]
When I was at NIST, during lunch one day a fellow student from Ukraine
told us a news story from home. Burglar had been breaking into people's
homes. One homeowner filled an empty vodka bottle with methanol and
left it in the kitchen, easily available. The burglars broke into his
house and drank the methanol, and one or both of them died. The
homeowner was charged with premeditated murder.
[ Rich]
So, the moral to this story would be, if you're going to booby-trap your
home, you should use some kind of live-trap? ;-)
Thanks Rich
[hanson]
No, no! Don't do that these days. There are many cases where the
homeowner got into deep legal shit because his dog had mauled the
burglar(s). Even obvious deterrents like barbed wire are problematic.
After our Precious Metal Div. got burglarized, (which was surrounded
by barbed wire) we intended to install razor wire. The City's safety folks
objected because elsewhere in town a burglar who got cut by the razors
while "on the job" did cost them $500'000 in legal fees & compensation
to the burglar turned victim... The city denied our permit application...
The goon got more money from/via his lawyer then he could have
from stealing and fencing... ahahaha... Hey, crime pays! ... AHHAHA...
ahahaha.. ahahanson
