“
I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit.
”
”
Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective)
“
Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don't smell it, you don't taste it, it's formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating.
”
”
Bella Pollen (Midnight Cactus)
“
See, this is why I hate Google. You come across one site, match one symptom, and all of a sudden you’re dying of carbon monoxide poisoning or cancer of the big toe.
”
”
K.J. McPike (Xodus (Astralis #1))
“
While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.
”
”
Newton Lee (Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness)
“
Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” My best answer is, “How do you know it fell?” But that just gets people angry. So I offer a senseless analogy, “Q: If you can’t smell the carbon monoxide, then how do you know it’s there? A: You drop dead.” In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Death by Black Hole)
“
No Surprises
A heart that’s full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won’t heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don’t, they don’t speak for us.
I’ll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,
with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
Silent silence.
This is my final fit,
my final bellyache,
with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.
Such a pretty house
and such a pretty garden.
No alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.
”
”
Radiohead
“
A cat named Grace helped save her owners from carbon monoxide poisoning by repeatedly banging on their old 120-year-old home's bedroom door to wake them.
”
”
Charles Klotz (1,077 Fun Facts: To Leave You In Disbelief)
“
Things like nuclear holocaust. Or carbon monoxide poisoning. Or having to leave the house and interact with people who weren’t my mother.
”
”
Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir)
“
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
”
”
Sylvia Plath
“
The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural ways—I heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending in carbon monoxide poisoning, a dead quarterback. I didn’t know if this was a problem born of country living, the excess of time and boredom and recreational vehicles, or whether it was a California thing, a grain in the light urging risk and stupid cinematic stunts
”
”
Emma Cline (The Girls)
“
With the front casing removed, he fired up the boiler and showed him the colour of the gas flame. ‘It should normally burn blue, but due to corrosion, the flame is blue to orange, which is a tell-tale sign of leaking carbon monoxide.
”
”
B.P. Smythe (From a Poison Pen)
“
The girl he had dragged along to the pub with him had grown to loathe him dearly over the last hour, and it would probably have been a great satisfaction to her to know that in a minute and a half or so he would suddenly evaporate into a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide. However, when the moment came she would be too busy evaporating herself to notice it.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
“
The Environmental Protection Agency now warns us that indoor air pollution is the nation's number one environmental threat to health- and it's from two to ten times worse than outdoor air pollution. A child indoors is more susceptible to spore of toxic molds growing under that plush carpet; or bacteria or allergens carried by household vermin; or carbon monoxide, radon and lead dust. The allergen level of newer, sealed buildings can be as much as two hundred times greater than that of older structures.
”
”
Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder)
“
Guilt: it comes in so many subtle forms. It's carbon monoxide for the soul.
”
”
Sandra Vischer (Unliving the Dream)
“
It occurred to me that I was on a run of suicides. Akutagawa. Dazai. Plath. Death by water, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide poisoning; three fingers of oblivion, outplaying everything.
”
”
Patti Smith (M Train)
“
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
”
”
Barbara Demick (Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)
“
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
Oh my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (Ariel)
“
NASA, fortunately, has already tackled the oxygen problem. When it launches the successor to the Curiosity rover in 2020, it will carry a type of fuel cell that will turn Mars’s atmospheric CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.
”
”
Stephen L. Petranek (How We'll Live on Mars)
“
Pleasure died forty years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief in everything and everybody, tolerance for the intolerable, the hatred of being alone in silence for more than twenty seconds, the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks, with speeded-up peristalsis while talking to a crowd of fifteen trillion other same-bodies eating sandwiches, gassing cokes, peristalsing, and talking, while baseball-sound-movie-TV tomorrow's trots off track betting howled roared farted choked gagged exploded reentered atmo honked bawled deafened pawed puked croaked shouted repeated repeated REPEATED, especially SAY IT AGAIN LOUDER SAY IT AGAIN, stick that product in every God-damned American's mouth and make him say I BOUGHT IT, GOD I BOUGHT IT AND IT'S GREAT IT's HOLLYWOOD IT'S MY ARSE GOING UP AND DOWN AGAIN, IT'S USA, GOD, and if you can't get it in his mouth and make him SWEAR IT SWEAR IT USA, stick it in his anal sphincter (look it up in the dictionary, college graduates, on account of you didn't have time to learn it in the College of Your Choice).
”
”
James Purdy
“
Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That’s why it kills people.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Carbon monoxide and other pollutants from Asia have been documented on the West Coast since the late 1990s and are actually affecting weather patterns there as well. Global climate change as a result of global industrialization is now a reality, no matter where we live. I
”
”
Elizabeth L. Cline (Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion)
“
When I had been really little and the wind blew like mad at night, I had trouble sleeping. My father would come in and tell me that the house wasn't made of straw or sticks, that it was brick, and like the little pigs knew, nothing could tear it down. Here's what the little pigs didn't realize: the big bad wolf was only the start of their problems. The biggest threat was already inside the house with them, and couldn't be seen. Not radon gas or carbon monoxide, but just the way three very different personalities fit inside one small space. Tell me that the slacker pig - the one who only mustered up straw - really could get along with the high-maintenance bricklayer pig. I think not. I'll bet you if that fairy tale went on another ten pages, all three of those pigs would have been at each other's throats, and that brick house would have exploded after all.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Handle with Care)
“
The Truth the Dead Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide.
”
”
Anne Sexton
“
Alain Fontanel had admitted: Geneviève Magnan going off to hug their sick son, then returning to the château and panicking at finding the four bodies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, the idea of starting the fire to make it look like a domestic accident, Fontanel kicking Letellier’s door to wake him up, wake all the staff up.
”
”
Valérie Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers)
“
My anger is carbon monoxide, binding to pain, humiliation, and hurt, rendering them powerless. You would never know when you met me how angry I am. Like Ani, I sometimes feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I will tell you what you want to hear. I will smile on cue. My anger is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It’s completely toxic.
”
”
Jessica Knoll (Luckiest Girl Alive)
“
My first instinct was to just delete the bug. Remove my terrible code from the system entirely. Briefly, ancient plans resurfaced: carbon monoxide and sleeping pills. But that would have its ramifications, too. My previous efforts to heal might not have fixed me, but they had woven me into this world, sewing me emotionally and professionally into a network of lives. I had friends who cared dearly about me, mentees who looked up to me. And Joey, of course. If I cut myself out of the web, I would leave a gaping hole that would hurt all those around me. And the whole point of this endeavor was to stop hurting people. I guess I had to embrace the impossible. Goddamn it, what a task: I had to fight against fate itself.
”
”
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.
Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
”
”
Sylvia Plath
“
I could take one wrong step off a curb and be crushed by a bus. I could choke on a piece of bread. The arteries around my heart might be clogging right now. I probably already have cancer. Someone in my apartment building might burn a frozen pizza tonight and fry me to death in my sleep. A mosquito could give me malaria. I don’t know how to tell if I’m inhaling carbon monoxide. I could be struck by lightning. I could have an aneurysm. I could starve to death. A tornado could tear me from my seat and pitch me into the sky. I could have a stroke. I could be crushed in a tsunami or an earthquake. I could get rabies. I could drown in an undertow. I could catch the plague. The earth could open up a sinkhole and swallow me. I could get typhoid… and a psychopath could kill me? The fact that a person could deliberately end another person’s life is hard for me to wrap my mind around. Given all the ways to die that are already looming over me, I have to worry about psychopaths, too?
”
”
Emily R. Austin (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead)
“
If we burn the carbon with very little oxygen in a very rapid reaction (for example,
in an automobile engine, where the explosion is so fast that there is not time for
it to make carbon dioxide) a considerable amount of carbon monoxide is formed.
In many such rearrangements, a very large amount of energy is released, forming
explosions, flames, etc., depending on the reactions. Chemists have studied these
arrangements of the atoms, and found that every substance is some type of arrange-
ment of atoms.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics)
“
I do consider suicide. In the later hours of the night, when the ongoing press of time feels like too much, I find myself researching carbon monoxide and razor blades. In theory, it seems like an easy way to escape this suffocating dark. At least it would make my haters feel terrible. Look at what you did. Look what you drove her to. Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you wish you could take it all back? But it all seems like so much trouble, and despair as I might, I can’t make peace with the idea that I will depart from the world without so much as a final word.
”
”
R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
“
Well,I appreciate the offer, Senator, but I'll drive myself.See you over the canapes."
"Then, I'll ride with you," he said amiably. "We don't want to put any more carbon monoxide in the air than necessary. Shall I put that in the car for you?"
Shelby took a firmer grip on the box as her hold in other areas started to slip. It was the damn serious smile and those thoughtful eyes,she decided. They made a woman feel as though she were the only one he'd ever looked at in quite that way.
"Alan," she began,a bit amused by his persistance. "What is this?"
"This..." He leaned over and captured her mouth with his, lingering until her fingers threatened to dig holes in the stif cardboard she held. "Is what our ancestors would have called a siege," he finished softly. "And MacGregors are notoriously successful at laying siege."
Her breath shuddered out to merge with his. "You don't do badly at hand-to-hand combat either." He chuckled and would have kissed her again if she hadn't managed to step back. "All right." Shelby thrust the box into his arms, considering it a strategic move. "We'll carpool.I don't want to be condemned as an air-polluter.
”
”
Nora Roberts (The MacGregors: Alan & Grant (The MacGregors, #3-4))
“
The first gas chambers were constructed in 1939, to implement a Hitler decree dated September 1 of that year, which said that “incurably sick persons should be granted a mercy death.” (It was probably this “medical” origin of gassing that inspired Dr. Servatius’s amazing conviction that killing by gas must be regarded as “a medical matter.” ) The idea itself was considerably older. As early as 1935, Hitler had told his Reich Medical Leader Gerhard Wagner that “if war came, he would take up and carry out this question of euthanasia, because it was easier to do so in wartime.” The decree was immediately carried out in respect to the mentally sick, and between December, 1939, and August, 1941, about fifty thousand Germans were killed with carbon-monoxide gas in institutions where the death rooms were disguised exactly as they later were in Auschwitz—as shower rooms and bathrooms.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
“
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for
cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
”
”
Sylvia Plath
“
Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes. While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
Somebody had been doing some major league tampering to my car. The brake lines were cut. The tires were on fire. There was carbon monoxide coming out of everything. And the radio was tuned to a station I didn’t like. I had to tip my booby-trapped hat to whoever tampered with this car. I was late with my payments on the car anyway, and it looked like a lot of repair work was going to have to be done no matter how this came out, so I figured let the finance company worry about it. I called them up on my cell phone, told them where the car was, and jumped out. I was going over sixty at the time, but luckily I didn't hit the ground. There was a cliff there and I just went harmlessly over that. But just when you’re sailing along, thinking everything is going to be okay, something unexpected comes along to jar you out of your complacency. For me, in this case, it was the bottom of the cliff. I got bruised up pretty bad – they say I bounced for an hour - but luckily no bones were broken. That's where that protective layer of fat I was telling you about comes in.
”
”
John Swartzwelder (The Time Machine Did It)
“
All matter is made of atoms. There are more than 100 types of atoms, corresponding to the same number of elements. Examples of elements are iron, oxygen, calcium, chlorine, carbon, sodium and hydrogen. Most matter consists not of pure elements but of compounds: two or more atoms of various elements bonded together, as in calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, carbon monoxide. The binding of atoms into compounds is mediated by electrons, which are tiny particles orbiting (a metaphor to help us understand their real behaviour, which is much stranger) the central nucleus of each atom. A nucleus is huge compared to an electron but tiny compared to an electron’s orbit. Your hand, consisting mostly of empty space, meets hard resistance when it strikes a block of iron, also consisting mostly of empty space, because forces associated with the atoms in the two solids interact in such a way as to prevent them passing through each other. Consequently iron and stone seem solid to us because our brains most usefully serve us by constructing an illusion of solidity. It has long been understood that a compound can be separated into its component parts, and recombined to make the same or a different compound with the emission or consumption of energy. Such easy-come easy-go interactions between atoms constitute chemistry. But, until the
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
“
Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
”
”
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
“
While iron oxide makes up over 6% of the Earth’s crust, it took a long time for mankind to figure out how to convert dirt into something as useful as steel. The first smelting of iron from ore was probably accidental when some iron-bearing ore was mixed in with the copper ore during the smelting of copper. Iron ore is composed mostly of various iron oxides which need to be reduced – have oxygen removed – to form metallic iron. The iron ore was mixed with charcoal, which is mostly carbon, and fired. The carbon dioxide produced by burning charcoal combines with the hot carbon in the charcoal, forming carbon monoxide. The hot carbon monoxide turns again to carbon dioxide by stealing oxygen from – reducing – the iron oxides, leaving metallic iron behind. But the heat needed for melting copper isn’t nearly sufficient to melt the iron that may be present in the copper ore. The reaction from ore to iron occurs while in a solid state when the iron forms into a solid, ugly mass of spongy metal called a bloom. The bloom’s cavities were full of slag (molten impurities from the smelting) that needed to be removed. Someone must have recognized the spongy mass as a metallic substance, probably by using appropriate scientific methodology such as hitting it with a rock. Eventually, the bloom was processed by heating it to the slag’s melting point and hammering on it until all of the slag had squirted out. This would be hard, dangerous and resource-intensive work as the iron was reheated and beaten over and over to produce wrought iron. This process was the way iron was made from late B.C. to early A.D.
”
”
Anonymous
“
In reference to four of the most notorious death camps, Snyder notes, “The 1.6 million or so Jews killed at Treblinka, Chelmni, Belzec and Sobibor were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.” At Auschwitz, the Nazis used Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas to kill an additional one million Jews.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
“
The Vice President’s Residence is at the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. Technicians at the Control Center of the Technical Service were surprised to see alarms going off at the house. First carbon monoxide, then heat alarms, then other alarms. Even the radiation alarm! Something was seriously amiss. SAs and UD officers immediately responded, letting themselves in. They found Vice President Al Gore standing on a chair, pulling an alarm out of the ceiling, looking for hidden cameras and listening devices.
”
”
Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
“
We move on to the site of the gas chambers. Even the ‘bath house’ has a Star of David, a Hebrew inscription that reads, ‘This is the gate through which the righteous pass.’ Once inside, the doors are sealed, and a captured Soviet T-34 tank engine is started, pumping choking carbon monoxide into the chamber. After a quarter-hour, the people would be dead.
”
”
Matthew A. Rozell (A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them)
“
My mother took her own life the day after my eighteenth birthday—sleeping pills and a steady stream of carbon monoxide courtesy of her champagne-gold Aston Martin. I realized then that it didn’t matter how strong a person was, how resistant they were to criticism and judgment—life could still wear a person down if they weren’t in their own driver’s seat.
”
”
Minka Kent (Unmissing)
“
Abstinence, then, makes way for engagement. If the places in our blood cells designed to carry oxygen are occupied by carbon monoxide, we die for lack of oxygen. If the places in our souls that are to be indwelt by God and his service are occupied by food, sex, and society, we die or languish for lack of God and right relation to his creatures. A proper abstinence actually breaks the hold of improper engagements so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.
”
”
Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives)
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Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis, as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences. In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome.38 We are rewarded best by bracketing the various interpretations, the Exegesis per se, and looking at Dick’s project as a making of something, a creation of meaningful narratives to be read by other people, a reaching out. The term “cry for help” may sound a bit extreme, but it is not. It was during this black period of his life, most specifically in February 1976, when Tessa left him and took their son, that he attempted suicide via drug overdose, slitting his wrists, and carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage, all at the same time. Fortunately, all three plans failed. Setting aside the metaphysics and cosmology, what was Dick trying to say in his writing during this period—to Claudia, to Tessa, to his readers, and to posterity? And what whispered message was he straining to hear from his own precognitive unconscious? Arguably, he wanted to hear the same thing Morgan Robertson managed to hear, loud and clear, when news of the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg splashed across the front page of The New York Times on April 15, 1912. Both in his Exegesis and in his private correspondence with friends like Claudia, Dick flickered between two basic stances on his experience: the secret persistence of the ancient world underneath the veneer of mid-1970s Orange County, and the idea that he was haunting himself from his own future. These are not incompatible ideas in the sense that they both point to our old friend Mister Block Universe, where the past still exists and the future already exists—and by implication, nothing is subject to alteration.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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the Towers of the Tallmen thrust their nine mysterious, phallus like towers upwards into the carbon monoxide smog which mantled them.
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David Denny (Jonathon Postlethwaite and the Seed of Corruption)
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SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent. Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death. He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers. As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.) It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.” THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was nicotine.
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Deborah Blum (The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York)
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I purchased one of those electronic things that plugs into the wall that is meant to scare cockroaches by sending a pulse through the apartment wiring, but while it has reduced the numbers, it seems some have evolved to feed off the electrical signal, increasing their size. I am using one as a coffee table in the lounge and two smaller ones as side tables in the bedroom. They would probably be susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning, though, so I will try running a hose pipe from my car exhaust to the apartment, closing the windows and leaving the vehicle running overnight. It is apparently an odorless gas so should not prove an issue for my son’s Cub group sleepover.
Also, I read somewhere once that cockroaches can survive a nuclear attack, so I have been collecting the dead ones and intend to glue several thousand to the walls thereby ensuring my survival should Cyberdyne Systems become self-aware between now and when the lease runs out.
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David Thorne (The Internet is a Playground)
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Suicide by Jason. I'd have to file that one away with the rest of them. The ways and means. Razors, pills, hanging, guns, jumping in the river, rigging up a car to feed me carbon monoxide. I'd been through the pros and cons. I wasn't sure how or when it would happen. Really hoped I'd be dead before people started finding out about all this weird sex stuff. Because if they knew this about me, I was sure they were going to assume that it was the reason. Everybody milling around my mother's house in black, eating little triangle sandwiches with the crusts cut off. 'Oh, of course. That's why. Well, how unfortunate.'
I didn't want to be dismissed so easily. There were a hundred different reasons. Or there was no reason at all. There was just big, fat, fucking fate sitting on my head.
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Janet E. Cameron (Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World)
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Each year, about 500 people die in the United States as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.
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Anonymous
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Operation Reinhard, whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Polish Jews living in the “General Government”, an area of occupied Poland under Nazi rule that was designated as a separate administrative region. To implement Operation Reinhard, three killing centers were started at the Lublin District (Sobibor and Belzec) and the Warsaw District (Treblinka II). Prisoners at these killing centers were murdered by being herded into gas chambers where carbon monoxide was pumped in. Some 1.5 million Jews were murdered in these killing centers between March 1942 and November 1943, when Sobibor and Treblinka ceased operations following prisoner uprisings. Only 300 prisoners were known to have survived these killing centers, mainly escapees who managed to get away from the camps during the uprisings.
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Larry Berg (Auschwitz: The Shocking Story & Secrets of the Holocaust Death Camp (Auschwitz, Holocaust, Jewish, History, Eyewitness Account, World War 2 Book 1))
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One path to this view begins with an accident, a case of carbon monoxide poisoning from a shower’s bad water heater in 1988, which led to a case of brain damage in a woman known only as “DF.” As a result of the accident, DF felt almost blind. She lost all experience of the shapes and layout of objects in her visual field. Only vague patches of color remained. Despite this, it turned out that she could still act quite effectively toward the objects in space around her. For example, she could post letters through a slot that was placed at various different angles. But she could not describe the angle of the slot, or indicate it by pointing. As far as subjective experience goes, she couldn’t see the slot at all, but the letter reliably went in.
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Peter Godfrey-Smith (Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life)
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Oh, you have no idea how many scenarios I’ve dreamed up for potential catastrophe. Toxic chemicals destroying the population. The whole palace getting carbon monoxide poisoning. An airborne virus that spontaneously removes hands.” I dig my bread through the sauce. “Because they can’t unlock the door without hands.” “Fucking exactly.” I shiver when Pace’s knuckles graze the back of my neck. “Lex thought I was crazy.” “That’s obviously a very reasonable worry.
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Angel Lawson (Princes of Ash (Royals of Forsyth University, #8))
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or he may have felt too guilty to speak to Aurelia. Dot was left to shatter Aurelia’s world. Warren and Maggie flew over while Aurelia, lost in grief, remained in Wellesley. She assumed that Sylvia had died of pneumonia until Warren told her, in his February 17th letter from Halifax, the “hard news” that she had died from “carbon monoxide poisoning from the gas stove.
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Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath)
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Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.
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Michael Shellenberger (Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All)
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Radon may be one danger you haven’t heard of. Like carbon monoxide, it’s undetectable without a sensor. It is a slower-acting gas that forms naturally in soil, rocks, and groundwater but is the second leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke.
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Jamie Gold (Wellness by Design: A Room-by-Room Guide to Optimizing Your Home for Health, Fitness, and Happiness)
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When doing the property inspection, take note of the following things: • Mold and mildew • Undocumented pets • Broken window blinds • Holes in doors or in walls • Evidence of extra people living in the unit • Smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors (if required)—make sure they exist, are up to code, and work • Leaks under the kitchen and bathroom sinks • Dripping water from the bathroom or kitchen sink • Dripping water from the bathtub • Whether the toilet is continuously running • General cleanliness of the property • Items piled against heaters or other fire dangers
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Brandon Turner (The Book on Managing Rental Properties: Find, Screen, and Manage Tenants With Fewer Headaches and Maximum Profits)
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it explains how they were brilliant at home, the Jackson 5, the Temptations, and “Tizita” on their lips, a perfect Afro on their heads, bell-bottoms swishing above Double-O-Seven boots, and then the first foothold in America—behind the counter of a 7-Eleven, or breathing carbon monoxide fumes in a Kinney underground parking lot, or behind the counter of an airport newsstand or Marriott gift shop—has turned out to be a cement foot plant, a haven that they are fearful of leaving lest they suffer a fate worse than invisibility, namely extinction.
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Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
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When Martin analyzed the data—every transaction using a Canadian Tire credit card from the prior year—he discovered that what customers purchased was a remarkably precise predictor of their subsequent payment behavior when used in conjunction with traditional tools like income and credit history. A New York Times Magazine article entitled “What Does Your Credit Card Company Know about You?” described some of Martin’s most intriguing findings: “People who bought cheap, generic automotive oil were much more likely to miss a credit-card payment than someone who got the expensive, name-brand stuff. People who bought carbon-monoxide monitors for their homes or those little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor almost never missed payments. Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a ‘Mega Thruster Exhaust System’ was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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A technical fix for photochemical smog became possible in 1962 when Eugène Jules Houdry patented a way to remove the pollutants from vehicle exhaust just before their emission into the atmosphere by deploying catalytic converters. Platinum was used as the rare metal catalyst; it would be poisoned by lead’s presence in exhaust gases, and this made the introduction of effective catalytic converters (mandatory in all cars starting with the 1975 model year) dependent on the availability of unleaded gas. Eventually these devices made a decisive difference as the precontrol emissions of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide were cut by 96 percent and those of nitrogen oxides by 90 percent.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
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First, Mr. Treadwell and his wife died in a carbon monoxide accident. Then Dr. Miles Prestone dies of a heart attack. I almost get killed in an accident where the other driver mysteriously disappears, and then I almost get killed again by a real-life hit man during a staged robbery. And now Keith Evans, another of Treadwell’s investors, commits suicide?
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Mitty Walters (Breaking Gravity)
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She knew it didn’t really relax her. She knew that she was inhaling carbon monoxide which decreased the amount of blood being delivered to her muscles. But for a brief time it felt like relaxation. She drew heavily on the cigarette allowing the smoke to fill her thirteen-year-old lungs, remembering her first attempt and the coughing fit that had followed. She pictured it swirling around like fog in a clean jar. She didn’t want to smoke. She didn’t want to be dependent on cigarettes or anything, but the tablets were no longer having any effect.
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Angela Marsons (Dying Truth (D.I. Kim Stone, #8))
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Strong cultures are to organizations what breathing life-giving oxygen is to the body, while weak ones are like poisonous carbon monoxide. Don’t ignore the cultural health of the business.
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Jim Knight (Leadership That Rocks)
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In houses and in villages throughout the country, the smoke from indoor cooking contains carbon monoxide, black carbon, and other pollutants, creating pervasive and severe health problems. In response, the government launched a “blue flame revolution” to deliver cylinders of propane—derived from oil or natural gas—to eighty million rural households for cooking.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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They walk down Westheimer, a long, long street that always smells of burnt rubber and carbon monoxide, occasionally interrupted by the aromas of foods from all over the world: Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Guatemalan, etc.
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Gwendolyn Zepeda (Houston Noir (Akashic Noir))
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We can consider the water cycle to start as a gas or vapor in clouds. It starts the cycle as pure H2O (a.k.a. dihydrogen monoxide, or oxidane), but not for long. As it condenses to form water droplets, it absorbs carbon dioxide and other gases from the air. The atmosphere is also full of dust particles and tiny mineral crystals, such as sand and sodium chloride. All of these substances help water droplets to condense, but they also contaminate the water during formation. The droplets agglomerate and fall to the earth as precipitation (rain or snow).
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John Palmer (Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Brewing Elements))
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Carbon monoxide from diesel engines at the concentration camps could not have actually killed prisoners in the way that historians said. And Hitler himself, for all his faults, was “an individual of great courage,” Buchanan wrote. To
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Eric Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men)
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It’s now six a.m. and I’m smoking. Oh yeah, Tracey: it’s all going so fucking well. The lonely princess. Carbon monoxide is feeding my soul.
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Tracey Emin (Strangeland)
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Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” My best answer is, “How do you know it fell?” But that just gets people angry. So I offer a senseless analogy, “Q: If you can’t smell the carbon monoxide, then how do you know it’s there? A: You drop dead.” In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.
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Anonymous
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They gobble thousands of dollars’ worth of natural gas a month, spewing carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, and highly toxic mercury (from dental fillings) into the atmosphere.
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Caitlin Doughty (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death)