Once more, we venture into the realm of the professionals

Last night I brought you the only man in the room professional enough to have a gun. Tonight, we do a local blog post bringing you Asheboro, NC’s finest and their discovery of…

a guy collecting the elements in the Periodic Table. I’m not making this up! Judging from descriptions, they must have emptied every closet, the refrigerator, everything that contained anything that looked like a chemical. And I love the line about his personal belongings left in the yard under blue tarps (thieves, please help yourselves). Oh yeah, and he’s being evicted. Plus the bills for legal representation.

Best of all the quotes:

At least one company, the Red Green and Blue Co. Ltd., based in London, sells boxed sets of the elements on its website. One set contains 81 elements – all of the non-radioactive elements; two other sets, one with larger samples than the other, contain all 92 naturally occurring elements, including the radioactive ones. The least expensive set sells for $724.26, the most expensive for $1,689.94.

Dude, it would have cheaper to just buy one.

The original story was a Big Hairy Deal. Every TV station in the area had the story; it was front page in all the papers. “First meth lab in Asheboro discovered!” (Like it’s a triumph of some strange sort?) The local paper doesn’t archive online items, and I expect the above link to go quickly as well, so laugh at it while you may.

I can remember getting a chemistry set, a big one, for Christmas one year. Even had an alcohol burner in it. I can’t help but wonder what the police would make of that these days.

UPDATE: I was wrong stating that the Asheboro Courier-Tribune doesn’t archive articles–they do, and I simply missed it. Here’s a link to the original article, which makes the whole story even funnier. A night-long stakeout and when they finally decide to make their grand entrance:

The officer responding entered the apartment and immediately recognized a cache of chemicals as the components for the manufacture of methamphetamine…

Maybe we need to introduce Officer McGruff to Officer Friendly.

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