Also curious… what are you goin go do with any left over merchendise from the Chemblog store anyway?

thank you, sir, and best of luck with your future endeavors…

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1995.....Cadaverine

He hadn’t known quite what to expect, but he had not expected this.
No, that was not right. He had some sense of what might be inside such a box. It had been carefully constructed of hardwood and brass. It was dense, heavy with import. Some kind of analytical instrument – a microscope, maybe. Had he come across it without provenance, he might have thought it a strongbox built to carry one or more bars of gold bullion.
He’d slid it way back under a low table where it was obscured by a case of methanol and some big Dewar flasks. It had taken his group three weeks or so to use up the methanol bottles in the solvent cabinet, and when he picked up the big cardboard cube to slice it open to replenish their supply, he’d again seen the box.
Why do I keep hiding that thing from myself?
He dug around in the top drawer of his desk and found the key Colder had given him. It slid into the lock and turned without effort, like it had not been ignored and neglected for who knows how many years.
The top swung up. Recessed about an inch below was a piece of wood that filled the opening. In the center of this was embedded a simple square gauge, a brass plate, and a tiny toggle switch. On either side of these were two silvery metal knobs. Inside the thin glass covering the gauge was a hair-thin black needle pointing up to an line arc annotated in a spidery hand, left to right: NONSENSE at what looked to be the zero point, where the needle rested; BOMBAST in the middle at the apex of the curve; BUNKUM at full-scale.
On the brass plate above the scale was engraved:

A DEVICE FOR
RHETORICAL CALIBRATION
Presented to “Sparky” Horvath
August 1900

McAllister turned the box over. There was no other lettering to be seen, no indication who had made this present for Horvath, nor where it had been fabricated. There were screws that probably allowed the panel to be removed. It looked like it took batteries. It must take batteries – there was no cord. He tried to remember if there would even have been outlets to plug into in 1900. He clicked the switch up and put a finger on each of the silver knobs and jerked like he had been shot through with a thousand volts when the fragile little needle moved from NONSENSE almost all the way up to BOMBAST.
Holy Crap! Colder must have been keeping the charge up!
He pressed down harder, and the needle climbed higher. He found that by gripping the whole knob and squeezing he could get the indicator to swing all the way over to BUNKUM.
He started to laugh, first at the silly absurdity of the thing, then at the bizarre fucking nature of – well, of everything. It gripped him like a seizure, the convulsions of hilarity making his eyes water and his ribs start to feel sore. And somewhere in the fit he realized that he would never see that ghost again.