The Babes and the Wolf

"I have seen my death" and Desperate Sarcasm

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30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS  (13+) WDC's Longest Running Blog Competition - Hiatus #1786069 by Fivesixer

Prompt: Fun Fact Friday! So, I can't choose which "fun fact" to use today...but here's where I usually get them from: Pick one and tell us how it relates to you, how it makes you feel, how it punches you in the gut, or just stirs up whatever it is inside you that makes you wanna write something.

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At first I was really unenthusiastic about today's blog prompt. That was before this unassuming tidbit caught my eye:

1896 - It was reported by The Austrian newspaper that Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered the type of radiation that became known as X-rays.



"I have seen my death."

These were the words reportedly spoken by Wilhelm Roentgen's wife Ana Bertha Ludwig upon having an iconic x-ray image rendered of her hand.

Thus were uttered perhaps the most ironic words in nuclear-medical history.

Why?

Both Ana and - four years after - Wilhelm died of intestinal carcinomas possibly caused by their exposure to x-ray radiation.

As ironic as this is, they still come in a distant second to the death of Marie Curie who, after propounding the harmlessness and widespread medical applications of radium and polonium, died from aplastic anemia caused by radiation exposure - leaving behind a real estate property (where she did much of her research) and a trove of personal effects so contaminated they have to be stored in lead boxes (e.g. her famous notebook - but not the house obviously). They are projected to remain dangerously contaminated for the next 1,500 years!

Thanks for taking one for the team Marie. May you rest in peace... In your inch thick lead lined coffin.

http://www.robinsonlibrary.com/science/physics/biography/rontgen.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen#Personal_life
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html
http://www.sciencealert.com/these-personal-effects-of-marie-curie-will-be-radioa...

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Here are a couple of songs I've loved for... basically my whole life. (Again, very socially conscious upbringing by a science teacher and a misanthropic realist poet trapped in a dead end job).

Though my mind has been on the bigger button all week, I'd be lying if I said I haven't been jamming to these songs all year, as they've picked up such extra significance and urgency. By jamming, I mean clinging in sarcastic desperation to anything that at least pretends to offer the restoration of some... any... sense of sanity in this world. If only in jest.

The second isn't included in Soundtrack because I'd hate to cheat (on my first day participating no less) and the song was released a number of years before I was born. Honestly, it was a toss up and I was going to post both anyway but then I realized this one wasn't eligible.

Soundtrack of Our Lives

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Soundtracks of Our Lives  (E) Sharing the music that makes us original... #2144947 by Lyn's a Witchy Woman

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Not Soundtrack of our Lives:

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