Althouse: Arsenic and old wallpaper.

December 25, 2021

Arsenic and old wallpaper.

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A post shared by Roz Chast (@rozchast)

23 comments:

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...: Hmm. Is that the same Scheele who developed Scheele's Acid? (A mixture of a couple familiar acids, though I forget which.) Probably.; 12/25/21, 11:29 AM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Led paint, toxic wallpaper and listening to everything. They was worse than commie Russia.; 12/25/21, 11:41 AM
Josephbleau said...: I bet it was great for mice and roaches though.; 12/25/21, 12:20 PM
wild chicken said...: I hate wallpaper the way other people hate wall to wall carpet.

The carpet is easier to get rid of.; 12/25/21, 12:29 PM
Bill Peschel said...: I was looking up poisons doctors used in the Victorian age yesterday, and arsenic came up. It was a byproduct of many industries and used in so many products (including wallpaper, as Chaz notes) that one writer considered it the first example of widespread pollution infecting a mass population.

Now we're dealing with plastics, prescription drugs in the water, and hormones in our meat, only we're not quite sure what it's doing to us.; 12/25/21, 12:56 PM
Heartless Aztec said...: Bonaparte's slayer...; 12/25/21, 1:17 PM
RBE said...: Arsenic was in fancy clothing items as well.; 12/25/21, 1:57 PM
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...: RBE, never mind clothing; women used arsenical face washes. Made the skin whiter, apparently. (Cue the CRT folks, but in fact we've been trying to tan our faces for more than a century now.); 12/25/21, 3:10 PM
Christy said...: Arsenic is a micronutrient, don't you know?

"[H]humans might need between 12.5 μg and 25 μg of arsenic...."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246629/

I see arsenic as a metaphor for much of what is wrong in our pathologicaly risk-averse society.; 12/25/21, 3:44 PM
JMW Turner said...: Poisonous but attractive, like so many things in our lives. The lower right panel reminds me of late Victorian, Pre Raphaelite William Morris wall paper.; 12/25/21, 4:33 PM
tim in vermont said...: I gave my daughter a piece of uranium glass from a trip to Arizona her grandpa once made, it glows under UV light a similar green.; 12/25/21, 4:46 PM
Lurker21 said...: That could be why Oscar Wilde was reputed to have said on his deathbed, "This wallpaper is killing me. One of us will have to go."

I always thought it would have been more appropriate if it had killed William Morris instead.; 12/25/21, 5:17 PM
JMR said...: The best this cuck can do to describe arsenic is "problematic"? Yeesh.; 12/25/21, 6:44 PM
gadfly said...: Lem: "Lead" is element number 82 that has the symbol of Pb derived from the Latin word for waterpipe plumbum.

"Led" in this instance, cannot be the past-tense of the noun "lead" and is not an acronym meaning "light-emitting-diode" so it obviously comes from plum dumb meaning dumb as a plum.; 12/25/21, 7:36 PM
ken in tx said...: The gowns dyed with that were worn only by the very wealthy. The wearer, also wearing numerous undergarments and long gloves rarely suffered poisoning. However, lady's maids and seamstresses were not so protected. It became know as Poison Green. It was not just a shade of green. It had a shimmer and a sheen like a bird or insect's wings.; 12/25/21, 8:11 PM
effinayright said...: tim in vermont said...
I gave my daughter a piece of uranium glass from a trip to Arizona her grandpa once made, it glows under UV light a similar green.
**************
I have hanging in my dining room an early 20th century lamp with four original uranium glass "shades".

Very cool under UV.; 12/25/21, 8:51 PM
JPS said...: tim in vermont,

"I gave my daughter a piece of uranium glass from a trip to Arizona her grandpa once made, it glows under UV light a similar green."

Cool. I wonder what the fluorescent compound is.; 12/25/21, 9:29 PM
Howard said...: True story. The average natural background soil concentration of arsenic is ~10-times higher than what toxicology says is safe. Natural background lead is often way higher than soil action levels.

Both are only a problem if you eat it or inhale it as a dust. Lead paint is only a problem when you sand it or if a poor kid suffering from pica eats the flakes. That's not why the artists lead based paint is called flake white. Black oil is a great old school artist painting medium made by boiling litharge in linseed oil. Along with mastic, it's the basis of the famous Maroger's medium thought to be used by the old Masters.; 12/25/21, 10:02 PM
Rt41Rebel said...: I'm guessing that the use of the word 'problematic' was the reason Ann posted this piece.; 12/26/21, 12:28 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "The best this cuck can do to describe arsenic is "problematic"? Yeesh."

Um. Roz Chast is the brilliant cartoonist. You instinct to insult is incredibly stupid.; 12/26/21, 5:54 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "I'm guessing that the use of the word 'problematic' was the reason Ann posted this piece."

My reason for posting is that the wallpaper really is beautiful.; 12/26/21, 5:55 AM
tim in vermont said...: "I wonder what the fluorescent compound is."

Yeah, I wondered about that myself, but per the internet, it's the unuranium oxide.; 12/26/21, 8:50 AM
JPS said...: tim in vermont,

Yes - and I'm a chemist, with palm slapped to forehead. The uranium's not fully oxidized, so it has electrons left in its f-orbitals. The UV excites them, they don't fall directly back to lower levels, and when they do by an indirect pathway, they emit visible light.; 12/26/21, 3:28 PM