What's on your mind today?

[Icarus]

^ sentinels on watch, in case the "revenoors" are coming?

[billy rubin]

bootleg alcohol has a long tradition around here. people still do it recreationall, but the possible issues with distilling out the methanol have always kept me away from the process. the stills used a re pretty rudimentary, and so instead of monitoring boiling point to separate the alcohols, people just throw the first fractions away.

not very exact when youre talking poisonous wood alcohol. when i was kid in s e asia, there would be periodic outbreaks of mass poisonings from drinking badly distilled palm toddy. cant buy alcohol if youre a muslim, so people would distill their own.

when i was making a living with a farmers market booth, the sunflower guy showed up every year with some moonshine a friend of his made. mason jars and all. it was pretty good stuff.

[Asmodean]

Wood alcohol..? Be they fermenting like... Firewood or some such? I think around here, they mostly do grain sugars... I think. I'm not exactly a alcohol consumer and as such, my knowledge is limited to neighbours and acquaintances.

That said, chemically speaking, I can see how fermenting fruit and such-like could produce quite a bit of methanol, but wood..? I don't think it would be that dissimilar from grains, except perhaps needing proportiionally quite a bit more of it... Or would it?

[hermes2015]

Wood alcohol is just an old, inaccurate name for methanol.

[Icarus]

This ain't gonna work for me. My acrophobia as well as a bit of common sense prohibits adventure of this sort.

https://imgur.com/gallery/sky-ladder-dachstein-mountains-austria-aXCssYB

[Asmodean]

Wood alcohol is just an old, inaccurate name for methanol.

Ah! I know little about methanol synthesis back in the good old days (My experience is mostly with small scale lab experiments as I used to love chemistry - both organic and inorganic - in my younger days) but I suspect the name implies the use of wood somewhere in the process? Or was it just something you burned to keep the ole still hot?

[hermes2015]

As far as I know, it was called wood alcohol because an early chemist made it by fermenting wood.

[billy rubin]

i think it was a product of the paper mills, generated while they were producing woid pulp.

the thing about moonshine is that a small amount of methanol is apparently normal product of tbe fermentation. it has a lsignificantly lower boiling point, so it comes out of the still first and can discarded. without a thermometer you just threw away the first pint or two of liquid.

multiple distillations of the same alcohol will generate less and less methanol to be discarded, until only reasonably pure grain alcohol is left.

or so i have read.

[Tank]

"or so i have read."

[billy rubin]

i read it on the internet.

what more do you want?

[Asmodean]

The Internet knows.

Nevermind whether what it knows is true or not - it does know it.

No, it actually does make sense to separate methanol from ethanol by distillation. It does boil at some fifteen-or-so-ish degrees lower heat than ethanol, and that there is a exploitable gap.

[billy rubin]

in the meantime, i am from oklahoma, and this accent takes me right back to the prairies of my youth

may be some useful tips to you pagans in here as well

[billy rubin]

the end of something.

wher i live, the nearest town has about 400 people, old storefronts, all shuttered. the county seat is about 20 miles away, about 5000 people. it has a shopping mall, newer storefronts, about half shuttered.

today we went to the cinema to see the last show. tomorrow it will be shuttered too, closing down. actually we went to the 1430 show, and theres another at 1630. there was a line, about 10 people. never had a line before that i remember. but i am not a motion picture person.

the cinema is a big chain , 10 screens or so, storefronts nationwide, but generally pretty much empty every time ve been there. this time there were no previews. no next week films, nothing coming up. they announced three days ago that they were closing. the workers found out just like we did, three days before they were out of work.

the nearest motion picture theatrer to the west is about 50 miles. to the east about 45. nothing to the north or south within 80 miles or so.

it was never very crowded. just a failing business model these days. big screen stuff had a run of about 100 years, but its time is up.

this will have no effect on my life. i have about zero intrrest in movies, and would go see them only to spend time with the family. if they were violent i would go wait in the car. but its still bemusing to see the book close on something that was once so big.