And somewhere in the darkness // the Gambler, he broke even...

RIP, Kenny Rogers.

81 years old, natural causes, peacefully at home with his family.

When I was six years old I took Christmas present secrecy very seriously. Also when I was six years old, both my parents bought each other the same Kenny Rogers 8 track. I did not know that it was okay to tell people what they were getting for Christmas if it meant they would thereby avoid duplicating their own gift. But I did hear a lot of Kenny Rogers in the coming several months as a result. Unless you count John Denver, Kenny was the first country singer I ever knew, and set a pretty dang good example for all the others to come.

TIL: the first recorded chemist in history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapputi

"Tapputi, also referred to as Tapputi-Belatekallim ("Belatekallim" refers to female overseer of a palace), is considered to be the world’s first recorded chemist, a perfume-maker mentioned in a cuneiform tablet dated around 1200 BC in Babylonian Mesopotamia. She used flowers, oil, and calamus along with cyperus, myrrh, and balsam. She added water or other solvents then distilled and filtered several times. This is also the oldest referenced still.

"She also was an overseer at the Royal Palace, and worked with a researcher named (—)-ninu (the first part of her name has been lost)."



... man, suddenly the fact that I learned more about how organic chemistry actually works and what all the individual components of complex compounds actually do from soap-making than I ever did from my high school AP and college chemistry teachers (no offense, Sister Marybeth who taught the introductory high school chemistry class, you were actually pretty good at it) just seems... kinda historically appropriate.