Thanks to a co-worker, I recently became aware of a rather unique aside published within Thomas Tidewell's somewhat dated Tetrahedron Report on the Addition Reactions of Ketenes (Tetrahedron, 1986, 42, 2587–1613). Found spread over pages 2587–2588 is the following:
It turns out that this note originates from a satirical piece in Chemistry in Britain (Chem. Br., 1965, 1, 230) published some 20 years previously. As far as I can tell, the root cause was an unfortunate typo in a Chemical Abstracts entry (Chem. Abst., 1965, 62,1561d) reporting on the discovery of a new chemical species, namely "O-Silylated Vinyl Ketene Animals" by K. Vijayakumaran in Paris. If only such errors were uncommon enough (and chemists good natured enough) for this kind of banter in the literature of today! Have a good weekend!
