Of Obsessive Collecting

I'm an obsessive collector.  I'll readily admit this, and anyone who's known me for any period of time probably has noticed this.  ( will probably kill me if anymore boxes arrive in the mail for the next, say, three years at the least — which is probably why it's a good thing I'm off to Newfoundland for a week come Sunday.  There's just a few more stuck in transit, honey!  I promise!)

However, for all my collecting, there's at least one thing I can say: at least the stuff I'm buying doesn't run the risk of slowly killing me.  (Unless, of course, all the books tip over and bury me.)  But not everyone cares about that, and apparently there's a rather active market in radioactive collecting.  There's your standard stuff: uranium/vaseline-glass and uranium-glazed glassware, old kid's atomic-energy science kits, and so on, but then there's the stranger stuff.  Radium toothpaste, anyone?  Or how about a face powder that contains both radium and thorium?

There's a link in there to an article about the health problems of women who used to paint the old radium-coated watches that includes this quote:

"Those days, most people thought radium was some kind of miracle elixir that could cure cancer and many other medical problems."

It immediately reminded of some ancient science fiction story I read as a kid, in which a secret underground civilization was discovered where everyone was immortal, all thanks to the secret of radium!