Someone recently stole samples of fourteen distinct rare earth metals from a Stanford lab. Elements with wild names like ytterbium, praesodymium, and holmium.

Right away I think there’s an SF/Ufological angle to this theft. I think it’s obvious to any reasonable person that a saucer alien, time traveler, or cross-brane hopper needed this stuff to build a device to get back home.

Or maybe the aliens don’t need the rare earth metals to build a device, per se, but rather they plan to use them as a tonic so as to enter a certain quantum computational state of consicousness which permits a teleportation hop.

I recall that my my moldie character Andrea was getting high off rare earths in my novel Freeware. Quoting from the Freeware notes:

Andrea gets high on chelated rare-earth polymers. The rare-earth elements, also called lanthanides, are Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium. Ytterbium was first found in a mineral called yttria in the 1890s near Ytterby, Sweden. “Ytterbium” was first applied to a substance found in yttria that was in fact a compound of the elements lutetium and ytterbium. Yttrium, though not a rare earth, resembles the rare-earth elements and is often associated with them.

And here’s a relevant quote from Freeware itself:

On the sidewalk outside the Boardwalk was Monique’s mother Andrea, spread softly out on the pavement like a Colorado River toad, but a toad in the shape of a giant book lying open on the ground. The Good Book. Big gothic letters scrolled across the two exposed pages. Just now the letters read, Thou Shalt Not Hate Moldies.

“Moldies are sentient beings with genuine religious impulses,” intoned Andrea. “I’m interested in pursuing a dialogue on this issue. Especially with single men!”

“Mom,” said Monique in an encrypted chirp. “One of these days a Heritagist tourist is going to pour alcohol on you and light you. A lot of Heritagists are Christians. Do you really think they dig seeing you, like, imitate their sacred book?”

“Greetings, Monique,” squawked Andrea cheerfully. “I am in an ecstatic state of consciousness today. A potent yttrium-ytterbium-twist compound was provided to me this morning by cousin Emuline. It’s made right here in California, they call it betty, I don’t know why, maybe because ‘betty’ is almost ‘ytterbium’ spelled backwards, well that would be ‘muibretty’. Monique, your mother is lifted on fine, fine, muibretty betty. But what is your request, my dear daughter?”

That’s all….for now. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for those rare earth element thieves!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.