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Dr. James Wightman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994 Virginia Scientist of the Year, presented an 04 November 1997 lecture Oil Film on Water Surfaces - A Study of Science and Technology, History, Ethics, and Feminism. He mixed diethyl ether with water to form a saturated solution of the former in the latter at room temperature, and introduced a source of ignition... flames! He closed by securing a sample of cerumen (ear wax) from his auditory labyrinth and touching it to one corner of the fluid surface of the flaming pan. In the finest tradition of insoluble Langmuir-Blodgett films spreading across a hydraulic trough (Blodgett was Langmuir's lab bitch; she had the idea while doing dishes, he got the credit), the flames extinguished. What a difference a single molecule-thick layer makes!
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was onto Dr. Wightman like affective trauma counselors at an Oklahoma City bombing. Was he authorized to monger biology in chemistry lectures? Were there Material Safety Data Sheets for and warning stickers on his ears? Is ear wax on the FDA Generally Recognized as Safe list? Haz-Mat paid a $100K visit for safe disposal of the remains. Their plastic buckets all carried International Warning Orange stickers in Spanish to forbid children from drowning in them.
"¡Aviso! Niños pueden caer adentro de el balde y ahogarse. Retire los niños de los baldes aunque solamente tengan un poco de agua."
Federal revenue agents imposted the Carbon Tax on Everything, threatening to confiscate Dr. Wightman's earlobes if it was not money up front. A jolly time was had by all, and who cares about Dr. Wightman?
Enviro-whiners otherwise preoccupied with condemning progress in its every form espied an end to water, CO2, dry chemical, and other bastard technological spawn fire extinguishers threatening fragile and endangered environments. Demonstrations were held! Petitions were circulated! Legislation was drafted! Babies in their cribs would be saved (and the Giant Flying Vampire Toad, too, despite being threatened with extinction - which is forever!) by the National Cerumen Crisis. All it required was Federal subsidy and jackbooted State compassion. Hillary Ramrod Clinton (Little Clitler) was very loud about it, Emergency Federal Day Care having gone the way of the National Health Care Crisis.
Every home, apartment, hotel, and Bowery alley in America received recycling bins for Q-Tips and paper clips. Highest quality Mil-Spec aluminum-scandium alloy USSR ICBM missile skins were salvaged and reworked at horrendous US taxpayer cost. Tens of thousands of hours of NASA engineering CAD/CAM were devoted to making the lid seal just so, just so NASA zero-g toilet engineers could justify their annual productivity bonuses. Digging your pinky into an ear and flipping the adherent result was a mandatory $10,000 fine/10 years in prison sentence, no possibility of parole.
While a few billion dollars pursued a worthy cause, that no dollop of ear wax not be collected, processed, packaged, and warehoused, private industry did not stand idly by. Oh no! Recombinant DNA technology quickly fostered access to purely giant synthetic ears transplanted onto cattle, and loaded with ear wax. How the Animal Rights whiners did gnash their teeth! No ears for steers! (A certain nuance about the fine points of breeding steers rather diffused their indignation, the way a rhinoceros urinates backwards in a broad horizontal fan.)
The BATF enjoyed an expanded mission statement. Rumors of Appalachian juvenile ears brimming with ear wax destined for the cerumen black market in Algiers lent urgency to a full scale assault. Save the children! Injured and killed Federal agent statistics mounted as they donned their SWAT gear and loaded their guns. Armed cotton swab patrols marched through city streets and battered down suspicious suburban doors. Combat otolaryngologists were drafted, trained, equipped, and deployed. No tympanum was safe from Washington's trespass.
In the meanwhile Dr. Wightman was caught short for a boffo ending to his lecture. He reviewed his options for Langmuir-Blodgett deposition: A set of low-melting, elongated, thin, hydrophobic molecules with polar functionality at one end. The grease waves in the air as the polar head digs into the water, yin and yang, and an ordered bipolar film marches across surface tension atop the water. His audience was typically teenagers and, though the aesthetics were nothing to shout about, expressed sebum with its oxidized cork was as good as cerumen, and even allowed audience participation. Why, he'd call it the Comedo of Errors!
OSHA was on him like hebephiles attending the evidence phase at a McMartin Pre-School trial.
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