I hope this resolves the issue. Mr. Brock Way should email Phil privately if he would like to discuss this further with him. ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Albro Greetings. I am the biochemist who minored in geology and organic chemistry, who for 26 years did research at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, followed by 10 years as Technical Director and internal consultant for an environmental analysis company. The one who has been teaching environmental chemistry at the graduate school level for the past 19 years. No secret, you can determine all that with a Google search. I am the one who wrote the article on how using shaving cream to make tombstone inscriptions easy to read causes them to weather more rapidly in climates where the temperature drops below freezing in the Wintertime. And so it does. If you smear shaving cream on the highly polished surface of a granite stone marker, it can be rinsed off completely. If you smear it in the roughened, carved out inscription of a granite (or other) stone marker, it will not rinse off completely with water. It will soak into the myriad of surface cracks. The emollients will retard its evaporation, but not prevent its freezing and thawing. This accelerates the natural edge-crumbling that eventually makes exposed gravestone markers illegible. If you rinse with water to get a sample for analysis, you won't find anything. That is what I just said above - you can not rinse it completely from the cracks with water. To get a sample for analysis, wet a pre-cleaned cotton ball with high-purity methyl alcohol and press it in the inscription region. The alcohol will break the capillary attraction and surface tension that are holding the water + emollients in the cracks, and they will seep into the cotton ball from which they ca! n be extracted for analysis. Yes, I have done this, using discarded stone work. I don't need to pick which articles by others I choose to believe on these matters. I too have read the original story about "DHMO", although I had nothing to do with it. It was not intended by its author to be a hoax, it was intended to be a joke! DHMO stands for "dihydrogen mono-oxide", which is water. It was a parody of the EPAs tendency to use acronyms for the chemicals it bans or restricts. The tendency to turn joke into hoax, the next level being "conspiracy", is indeed something to worry about. Phillip Albro palbro@mindspring.com

I hope this post resolves the issue. If Phil would like to discuss this further, he can subscribe to this list and post here. > If you smear it in the roughened, > carved out inscription of a granite (or other) stone > marker, it will not rinse off completely with water. Interesting claim. Too bad there is no evidence to support the claim. > The emollients will retard its evaporation, but not > prevent its freezing and thawing. Another really fascinating claim. Too bad there is no evidence to support this claim, either. > If you rinse > with water to get a sample for analysis, you won't > find anything. That's not what was done. What was done was practice engraving stones (of the same materials as is used in regular tombstones) were shaving creamed, then a sample of THE STONE ITSELF was taken and homogenized (crushed, etc.). This homogenized sample was then subject to a battery of analytical tests (NMR, HPLC, etc.), as I described prior, and compared to both a part of the stone that was similar, but not shaving creamed (i.e., the "back" of the stone), and also to positive controls (i.e., known constituents of shaving cream and various derivatives, like oxidation products, etc.). The result is that the stone that was shaving creamed was indistinguishable from the backside of the stone, and showed no overlapping peaks with the positive control peaks alone. That is to say, there is NO RESIDUE. The idea that shaving cream causes harm to tombstones is a really compelling idea. Too bad that when it is actually tested...it fails miserably. And the reason it fails testing is because the whole thing is a hoax, just like "ban DHMO". By the way, the "Ban DHMO" is technically neither a joke, nor a hoax, since the intent is not to deceive. The intent of the site is to demonstrate the danger of believing what people write without doing any investigation into the true nature of the claims made. Let me say that again....danger of believing what people write without doing any investigation into the true nature of the claims made. This is exactly the same case as shaving cream. People claim it is harmful, but nobody has ever produced even the slightest shred of evidence to support the claim. There is only claim of damage, and claim of experimentation that shows harm. There is the CLAIM only, and nothing else. Brock Way __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html