I believed it. Sadly it’s not real: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/plutonium-jazz
It seems believable given the story of the “Radium Girls”, workers who painted radioactive paint on watch dials to make them glow. They’d lick the tips of the brushes when they got too frayed… which eventually led to cancer.
Whoa. Eating radioactive material isn’t great at all.
From a different time, too: An X-Ray shoe fitter
This sounds like something that was made up for a fallout game.
Of course, so does “bombarding myself with xrays and moving around to entertain the audience looking at my bones” and “including uranium in paint to make watch dials glow”
Uranium wasn’t used for watch dials, but Uranium Orange is a colour of cermic glaze. It was pretty popular in America from the 1930’s to around 1942, when the government needed all the uranium for some big secret project. After the 60’s it was made with depleted uranium, instead of natural ore, until someone realized this still wasn’t a great idea.
Fun fact: fiestaware plates (this was the company that made the uraranium glazed ceramics) are commonly used by radiation safety folks as check sources and for teaching how to use survey meters. This is because they usually aren’t considered a radioisotope source, so there’s less paperwork to keep them around.
I believed this was real until I searched for it 😂 To be fair to my own credulity, Plutonium Jazz would not be the most insane thing people did with radioactive materials back then. The “medicines” alone make Plutonium Jazz sound pretty tame.
But Geiger counters aren’t rhythmic at all, radioactive decay is, pretty famously, random.
The third sentence makes it clear it’s fake
- Geiger counters aren’t rhythmic, they’re random
- How would the audience know the beat matches the counter?
- Random music doesn’t sound good, the audience would be more excited for good music
Disappointed in the people who believed this.
Well… This is jazz… I’m skeptic as well, but what if it was some sort of experimental modern jazz where the musicians would try to predict the next click?
You can’t predict the next click, that’s what random means. This would never have gotten far enough to appear in front of an audience. They would have tried it at rehearsal and realised it was impossible.
It does have a rate though. Each click is random, but overall they’re at a predictable rate. Still, it wouldn’t be useful for music really. I could see someone trying to make it happen though. I’ve heard of dumber things.
