Welcome to the first Chemicals Confidential blog, on the RBI Charity Blogathon today, Monday 24 September 2007. Reed has generously promised to donate £50 to charity for every blogger, and extra for every hit on the blog
http://www.icis.com/blogs/icis-chemicals-confidential/
and every comment you post here today, so go ahead and make a comment - it's all in a good cause ...
If you've got this far you're friends, family or someone who subscribes to ICIS out there in the petchem world. Here's a taster of things we're talking about today. The theme is trivia and gossip in the chemical industry.
Memory lane:
While you will be sorting out solvents and aromatics in Berlin, I will be covering life- and-death pharmaceutical topics at a conference in Copenhagen. Petrochemicals... Pharmaceuticals... Italians win the fashion stakes every time.
Best drive nominations:
1) Dharhan to Al Jubail on the east coast of Saudi Arabia in a big Mercedes at high speed through the desert at night. Al-Jubail looked like New York City as we approached ... but they were distillation towers rather than skyscrapers!
2) Nice airport to Monaco in a taxi on the autoroute. Way better than a stomach-churning helicopter ride.
Romance:
Perhaps you have in your files some evidence, photographic or otherwise, of a Dutch and Scottish union in Belgium?
Well all for a good cause. Thought for Today: "Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear." — Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher (1632-1677).
Trivia for Prince fans -- today back in 1982, he released his single 1999