Got to see if that sodium and calcium metal can be found cheaper before I buy it where I would now buy it. Plus going to look for cheaper pyridine. Although I admit, pyridine is a LAST resort chemical, if I can use an alternative I do, because it STINKS. There are very, very very few, a vanishingly tiny handful of reagents that I LOATHE more than I do pyridine. The stench is something heinously disgustingly repulsive and awful. Like rotting, really badly decayed fishy plus undernotes of general fishy aminey stink. But amines generally aren't SO bad as pyridine. Plus, its toxic, not that I'd be ingesting it, and you only need a mere trace of it in something to make it totally uningestable by accident. Its what they use here in methylated spirits, along with purple dye, to warn that there is toxic methanol to poison wouldbe desperate alcoholic drinkers for tax purposes here. There is a miniscule quantity of pyridine added to it, which gives denatured alcohol as british type methylated spirits its disgusting stink. And I hate even that, using it to clean CDs or pour over salted/CaCl'ed ice cubes in a water or water-antifreeze bath, for use as a cryogenic freezing bath. Pyridine is fucking awful stuff. Useful, very, but awful, fucking jesus H hell on a unicorn, sitting with its horn up his christly anus is Py fucking heinously stinky vile noxious shit on a shitty shit covered frozen dog shit popsicle. I've even once had the displeasure, of the time I had a temporal lobe seizure, which actually was most curious and interesting, not that I want more, but to observe its effects, that was curious indeed. But they can produce, in addition to odd visual and psychological effects, phantom odours. At the time, I experienced an overpowering and truly foulsome reek of phantom pyridine. I HADN'T spilled any anywhere, but out of the blue, this overwhelming, hell-fart of a stinking pyridine stench became apparrent. The only things I know personally that are worse, are some of the nastier stinking arsenic compounds, some of the worst offenders amongst the sulfur compounds and some nasty ass organoselenium stuff. Plus isocyanides. There are just...there really aren't anything similar that isocyanides can be compared to in terms of similarity, like how E.g hydrogen sulfide smells of rotting eggs (and is responsible for them) or mercaptan/thiols, the lower ones are used to stink up natural gas supplies to houses and give gas leaks warning properties rather than be odourless. But in concentration are truly powerfully carrying, long-distance stinkers, and of the lowest liquid ones, one or two drops in the center of a football pitch outside and it would be impossible to approach that football pitch from quite some distance. You just couldn't do it, not without a gas mask that covers both mouth and nose with a filter cartridge that will strip them from the air and bind the nasty ass shit.
Or how ammonium sulfide again smells eggy and nasty like rotten egg. But where isocyanides are concerned...they are in a horrid family of their own, that contains isocyanides and only isocyanides. But they are penetrating, and brutal in the extreme when it comes to the stench they pack. And I have never yet encountered anything fouler. Not even the selenium analogs of mercaptans. Selenols as they are known. Mercaptan (the term comes from the latin 'mercurium captans' meaning 'to capture or hold/bind mercury' as sulfur has a very high tendency to bind with or associate with mercury, the main mercury ore, cinnabar, a red pigment, being mercury (I) sulfide) being where sulfur replaces the oxygen (in the periodic table, in that downward group one has first oxygen, then sulfur, then selenium and lastly in order, tellurium and polonium, the latter being extremely radioactive, the main common isotope, 210Po being a powerful alpha emitting radioisotope, Po has no non-radioactive isotopes and is nasty ass stuff), I've never worked with tellurium compounds, although I really want some native, natural crystalline tellurium (like one of the allotropes of selenium its a semimetal, like metallic arsenic, one of the selenium allotropes, silicon, and germanium, and it has the most brilliantly mirrorlike, bright and absolutely gorgeous looking vitreous-although nontranslucent, metallic look to it, mirrorlike and bright. I want it not for chemistry, but a piece of it growing off sylvanite, an ore which it commonly is attached to in the natural state, the sylvanite being black and in acicular or rodlike pieces. Although absorb even the most tiny tiny quantities of Te and it causes 'tellurium breath' where organic Te derivatives that are volatile and gaseous are slowly excreted from the body, such as dimethyl telluride, dimethyl ditelluride etc. and cause the unfortunate to have their breath and bodily fluids rendered so awfully foul they cannot approach another human, and anything they touch must be retired or preferably burnt away from humanity. So much as touch a book if so afflicted and the book can never, ever be used again. Alexander 'sasha' Shulgin, now sadly deceased, may his soul have reached paradise, the pioneer of self-experimental psychedelic tryptamine, amphetamine and phenethylamine chemistry, who left the rest of us a biography in two parts, one containing at the back all his efforts and recipes and chemistry knowhow on phenethylamines/amphetamine psychedelics and empathogen-entactogens, the inventor of MDMA, and many many others, and the other, part bio and lifestory, and at the back, his compendium of tryptamine inventions and stuff on tryptamine chemistry, even how-tos from start to finish, including synthesizing precursors. The two books, PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved) and TIHKAL (tryptamines '') are the literal Bibles for psychedelic chemists and aspiring developers everywhere. And they are aimed to have gotten, and succeeded in doing so, the cat out of the bag so that this treasure trove, the massive wonderful and truly generous life's work, of his, is, the knowledge-genie is out of the bottle and can never, no matter how hard law enforcement or govts try and ban things, ever ever be put back in:)
Of course, I own both books. Plus a third of his, a catalog more or less, called SPIQ 'the Simple Plant Isoquinolines' not data on bioactivity sadly, but a catalog of what they are, synonyms, formulae and where in nature to find them.
And there is another, that as yet I have not got, The Shulgin Index, containing yet more chemical wonders that he had been working on before his death, as a venerable old man and artiste beyond artistry.
This man, well, he was my inspiration. I always had the seed of this interest within me, but his work, the two books, PIHKAL and TIHKAL were my guiding star, leading the three wise men, or one man in this case, like the allegorical star to the baby jebus. And now, after following some of his recipes at first to the letter of his Lex Legis, have had the Sanctum Sanctorum pregnant with the beginnings of gestating works entirely new, that Sasha himself, had never explored. Something, a phenethylamine and its corresponding amphetamine, that hopefully will be psychedelic, and if not can be converted into one, a fluoromethoxylated brominated mescaline and corresponding TMA (trimethoxyamphetamine) analog that to the best of my knowledge has never, ever ever gone into a man before. I don't think its ever gone into a research animal, and i can't even find reference to the likes of serotonin/dopamine/noradrenaline receptors or/and transporter binding assays and cell culture-level assays. This will be something NEW, so, SO new, that I, shall almost certainly be the very first person to have created it, save maybe if big pharma has created it in the process of multi-compound high-throughput screening as an incidental, synthed it and filed it away untouched. But almost certainly, from my deepest and most thourough searches of the published scientific journal literature, to have produced it and near certain I am that I will be the first to taste the fruits of the work.
This post, made in honour of, and TO honour, the late, and truly great Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin, and pay tribute to him and his still living wife, Anne. I would SO love to have met the great man himself, who from his writing style and things he has told of himself, I am fucking positive the guy was on the spectrum.
My first tasting of this brominated difluoromethyl ether replacing methoxy, leaving one of mescaline's three methoxy groups as it is, an important one in a position intolerant of very much poking around there, as it is, whether active or not so, it will be done with reverence of this great man, and as a toast to his and his wife's time upon this earth. A toast in respect of him, shall it be.
