Friday March 30

Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

    It's the birthday of Robert Bunsen in 1811 in Gottigen Germany. Bunsen designed the famous burner, which his assistant, Peter Desaga actually built.  Bunsen gave Desaga credit and never patented his design, saying the intellectual rewards were more than enough.
   The Bunsen burner burns with a clean flame which Bunsen needed to analyze substances. Now, the burners are used for heating and sterilizing in labs all over the world.
  Bunsen was especially interested in studying arsenic, which led to huge improvements in iron production. He came up with an antidote to are arsenic poisoning which came in handy the day he poisoned himself during an explosion in his lab.
   His true love was geology. He traveled to Iceland and figured out how geysers worked by lowering scienctific equipment down the blowhole as he stood by. He also loved mountain climbing, but in his later years, he would walk to the base of a mountain and send his friends on ahead. Meanwhile, he would lie down under a tree and light a cigar, then burn a hole through a handkerchief. He placed the handkerchief over his face to keep off the bugs, and smoked through the hole till his friends returned. He never married.

     It's also the birthday in 1853 of Vincent Van Gogh, in Zundert, Netherlands.
he worked as an art dealer, but living in London depressed him so he worked for awhile as a missionary in Belgium before moving in with his well-to-do parents at age 28. He took up painting and in the last ten years of his life, produced hundreds of paintings. The most famous were done in his last two years, as his mental health worsened.
   He shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890, and died two days later. He supposedly only sold one painting during his lifetime. Today, his works sell for many millions at auction. He's remembered "as a tragic artist, whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist."

  


And here are some science jokes in honor of Bunsen Day, which is celebrated on the 31st, the day Bunsen celebrated his birthday, though all the records show he was born on the 30th.

A chemist walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist, "Do you have any acetylsalicylic acid?"
"You mean aspirin?" asked the pharmacist.
"That's it, I can never remember that word." 

A frog telephones the Psychic Hotline. His Personal Psychic Advisor tells him, "You are going to meet a beautiful young girl who will want to know everything about you." The frog is thrilled, "This is great! Will I meet her at a party?" "No," says his advisor, "in her biology class."

Three statisticians go hunting for deer. They spot one off in the distance. The first one shoots about a meter too high, the second one, about a meter too low, the third one yells, “We got it!"

Come back Sunday for the squibs of @jmcdonell123