Periodic Table of the Nerds

Did you know there are people who collect the elements? There are others, but this guy is the main one. I'm not sure what the attraction is. Mostly, it involves buying lumps of transition metals, which you put on your shelf, and they sit there, heavy and gray. Some of them rust, and some of them do not. Typical description: "It's a nice enough metal, but not distinguished in any particular way from others around it that are cheaper, stronger, and more stable in air."

Then you have the elements like beryllium and fluorine and rubidium, which have to be kept in sealed glass ampoules, which can never ever be handled, because if you break them we'll all die.

Finally, you have the elements that are really hard to get, which you can't get, which you can only get in tiny amounts, and which are probably monitored by the FBI. If you want a sample of technetium, fine, but you're just going to keep it in a lead box, while it tries as hard as it can to give you cancer. Is that a rewarding hobby? It is to some people.

If I were an element collector, I would collect only the elements that didn't fall into these categories. Those are the fun elements. You can cast sulfur on your kitchen stove. If you explode sodium, the residue will attract butterflies. And apparently he hates white phosphorous and refuses to keep it around (possibly to protest US imperialism?)

Finally, we receive this dispatch from the front. A friend of his tasted all the salts of chlorine. Conclusion? Table salt is the only one that tastes good. It is bold men like these who push the boundaries of our knowledge outward.