Rapid Combination of Oxygen and Carbon (Pesah Sameah, Everyone)

It's erev Pesah, when Jews increase their carbon footprint by symbolically burning their leavened products (aka hametz), which they're neither allowed to own nor possess (let alone benefit from) during the 7-day Passover holiday (8 days and loss of down if they're also penalized for living outside land of Israel).  Here's a photo of my entry from a few hours ago.

In point of fact, most Jews I know who care about this stuff, while attempting to deplete their hametz stocks as much as they can, sell off what remains to a non-Jew for the holiday, and buy it back afterward.  (I discussed that particular sale in a blog post a few years ago.)  Which is why there are only a few slices of bread in the photo.

Every time I do this I am reminded of the following quote from Kurt Vonnegut's "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater":

Eliot lurched away from Milford, hitchhiked to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He went into a small bar there, announced that anyone who could produce a volunteer fireman's badge could drink with him free. He built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen.

 

"When you think about it, boys," he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen. I tell you, boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City."

I do some patent prosecution work in the US for a company that makes firefighting formulations.  Which is really the only connection this whole thread has to patents.  So sue me.

FWIW, when I took organic chemistry in college, our professor, Maitland Jones, would put some sort of a quote on the front of each test, perhaps as a means of calming down jittery pre-meds (of which yours truly was not one).  On one exam I stapled that quote to the front of my exam booklet.  Like myself, Mait liked that quote, enough that he used it himself on an exam given later that year.

חג כשר ושמח וכולם