ChemBark

It’s time for another edition of WWWTP?, which in this case, could just as easily stand for “What’s Wrong with these People?”

This image was kindly forwarded to ChemBark by a concerned reader and patron of Phenomenex. The company ships their products in these sexually suggestive cardboard boxes. The innuendo would make sense and qualify as mildly clever double entendre if the company dealt with genomics, but Phenomenex sells chromatography supplies. I guess someone thought they had a good idea and decided to roll with it:

Inside the box, a colorful brochure contained less disguised innuendo: the words “unzip me” and what appears to be anthropomorphic female genitalia with legs and a cane. Closer inspection of the Phenomenex Web site reveals that these characters are based on an astonishingly yonic logo for Kinetex (R), the company’s core-shell adsorbent materials for chromatography. Hmmm.

I feel it necessary to warn any of you who might be (i) charged with purchasing HPLC supplies and (ii) perverted, that I hear the customer service at Phenomenex is awful.

On a recent cross-country flight, I happened upon this advertisement on page 125 of the Holiday 2011 edition of SkyMall:

As if it wasn’t bad enough that some despicable marketing hacks re-branded the term “organic“, now “Buckyballs” has been pilfered from the world of chemistry. Sadly, a Google search of the term returns the toys before the molecules. I don’t understand what, exactly, is so “bucky” about these balls. I also don’t understand how you could get away with trademarking that name, which has famously referred to C₆₀ and friends since the 1980s.

I hope these toy makers get lumps of coal in their stockings this Christmas.

The History Channel produced a Modern Marvels episode on Christmas technology which included an interesting snippet on bubble lights (history video).

Basically, these tree ornaments consist of a sealed tube of dyed solvent placed over a small, incandescent lamp. The lamp not only illuminates the solvent, but heats it and causes it to boil. A plug of glass wool at the bottom of the tube ensures even boiling. According to the History Channel and the link above, the solvent of choice is methylene chloride (yay!). I guess that for some people, rigging a flammable plant with lights and electrical cords isn’t a hazardous enough way to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

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