Chemical-of-the-Month Club (C)1990 Alan M. Schwartz Computerization of the compilation, sorting, and printing of mailing lists coupled with a little good old capitalist lust for money has filled our mailboxes with all sorts of reprehensible crap. As a scientist I not only enjoy the garbage sent to me courtesy of my owning a car and being in the DMV database, or being a member of various professional societies that sell my name to all comers for $0.03 each, or even having fancy golden credit cards fooling purveyors of real leather gearshift knobs into assuming my acquisitive nature. My honored mailbox is the periodic repository for futuristic pre-sorted postal trash that boggles the mind, and that may require a security clearance to destroy. A typical Tuesday afternoon was the stage for yet another in the escalating attempts by a group of advertising people to shout louder than all the other groups of advertising people, who are also shouting as loudly as they can. It was with outstanding revulsion that I received a very large envelope covered with very large type, to wit: "GIVE US AN HOUR EACH WEEK... WE'LL GIVE YOU 3,500 NEW ORGANIC CHEMICALS." Gee, that is only 182,000 new chemicals a year. Perhaps I would do well to build an extension onto the garage, or inquire about renting space in a hazardous waste dump. I held the envelope before me and wondered just what the deal was. Would they send all 3500 mystery substances each week, and I would only have to pay for the ones I kept, sending the rest back at my own expense? Would the oxidizers be separated from the combustibles be separated from the toxics be separated from the air and water sensitives be separated from the carcinogens and mutagens? Might I get 3500 OSHA, NIOSH, EPA, and DOT approved wooden shipping crates one week? Would each crate be opened to reveal a sealed cardboard box containing a hermetically sealed can? Would the can be opened to reveal a chemical barrier bag which contained another box, filled with vermiculite and containing a heat-sealed plastic bag containing the bottle of stuff, its lid secured with a shrink-wrap band or sticky tape? Perhaps they would just dump all the bottles of chemicals into a single drum and hoping for the best, ship that. Maybe I would get one of those fancy Publisher's Clearinghouse type of brochures each week, listing each new chemical in the most wondrous, sexy terms, the better to seduce me into lusting for its possession. I would tear off and lick the appropriate gummed stamps, apply them to the postcard, and mail it in. Yeah! These teratogens look sooooo good that I can hardly wait to start receiving them. And If I choose a humectant selection and this variety of dipolar aprotic solvents, I can get free at no charge whatsoever this rare collection of sterically hindered nucleophiles for just $99.95 in postage and handling. Oh boy! Maybe it is like the Book-of-the-Month Club with recommended selections and alternates. April is tri-block segmented polymer month, with an extraordinary assemblage of thermoplastic elastomers and impact resistant engineering plastics. If you prefer, we can substitute an assortment of telechelic oligomers and a bonus of not one, not five, but fifteen photochemical initiators! You must hurry, because this offer will not be repeated! Many is the time I have sat at the dining room table, my head in my hands, my fingers running through my hair, "if only I had the chemicals to do a dozen Norrish Type II rearrangements, I would be a man again." Perhaps May would be devoted to the Smiles rearrangement, June to anti-Markovnikov additions, and the fireworks of July heralded by pyrophoric organometallics! 3500 chemicals to choose from each week puts a chemist in the same lamentable yet irresistible situation as a banker would be in the vault at Fort Knox -- shaking and sweating, eyes bulging, palms moist, head buzzing with a nova burst of white hot passion, surrounded by ecstasy, drowning in lust. DO IT TO ME! Do it to somebody else. Were I a weaker fellow, had I not met with enticement in my youth and found the strength to move on, if I had yielded to the temptation to open that envelope and be engulfed with that which I did not have the strength to resist, I would have been doomed. I stood tall, proud and invulnerable! Years and years of undergraduate and graduate research, hoarding THF from the benzophenone ketyl still when there was always fresh solvent on tap and always worrying about peroxide contamination, have hardened me against the siren song of chemical yearning. I reached down and grabbed the Aldrich catalog, more than 40,000 fine chemicals described with loving detail so stimulating that only the most explicit pictures, hundreds of them, are included within that text. I hugged it to my bosom, and sighed. I took that junk mailed envelope with its Bulk Rate stamp and marched with back straight and eyes bright to the garage, there to place the overpowering solicitation in the special yellow garbage can, followed by the weeks' output of used kitty litter, just in case.