The Miasma Comes in on Giant Fat Feet

Greetings, fellow educators with a snow day to burn, and carefree retirees looking for trouble. At the time of this writing, Friday morning, I am out of my element. Val is a nighttime blogger. To create a tale of intrigue so early in the day is not in her DNA. Nothing has happened yet! Sure, some of you might consider this to be a blog about nothing anyway. But I assure you, it is no internet-screen version of Seinfeld.

Since nobody and no thing has conspired yet to derail Val from her mission to take over the world, you will be treated to yesterday's news. PEOPLE AT A LOS ANGELES HOTEL DRANK CORPSE WATER! It's true! Here's a link. I saw a smidgeon of the story on the news, and I just had to know more. My BFF Google and I convened to get to the bottom of this secretive cistern.

I foresee a miasma of emotional-suffering lawsuits stomping in on giant fat feet. Seriously. People sue because their coffee is hot. Do you really think they will drink corpse water lying down? I, myself, do not. Think so, that is. Not drink corpse water lying down. But I don't do that, either. Or sitting up. I'm pretty sure that drinking water in which a corpse has been decomposing for two weeks is one of the things that is kind of unhealthy for you.

Hick says it isn't. "They treat that water with chemicals! It's safe to drink. And anyway, that's probably toilet water. Not drinking water."

Well. The last time he was in charge of the rooftop water system at a Los Angeles hotel was...let's see...I believe it was...NEVER! So I said to him, "Oh, so it's okay for corpses to be floating willy-nilly in the water supply tanks of hotels in California?" Maybe that explains how some people check out but never leave.

I'm no water quality technician, but I would bet a 44 oz. Diet Coke that people are not supposed to drink corpse water. I reminded Hick that in Cold Mountain, Jude Law came upon Giovanni Ribisi trying to move a dead bloated cow out of the creek, because it was upstream from his homestead, and was ruining his water. In fact, Jude loaned him his newfound friend, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and his stolen two-man saw, and they set about hewing that deceased bovine in half to remove its carcass from the creek. That's a lot of work to go to if it's perfectly all right to drink corpse water. And do you know what Hick said to me?

"VAL! That was a COW!"

Like decaying cow microbes are unhealthy, and decaying people microbes are no big deal.

Besides Hick's frivolous attitude towards corpse water, here's another thing I find disturbing. Guests at the hotel reported to reporters that the water they had been drinking for EIGHT DAYS had a funny taste, but since they were from Britain, they simply assumed that's the way it was over here. Like we are a nation of corpse-water drinkers! Oh, and furthermore, the water that came out of the shower head was black for the first few seconds. But they did not complain! Heavens to Betsy! Are the British THAT polite and unassuming and reluctant to make waves?

I read on another source that this couple was paying $65 per night for their room. I don't know about you, but I, like Vern in Stand By Me expecting more for his seven cents than hamburger and Coke, would have expected more for my $65 than corpse water and a black shower.

Val has expensive tastes and unrealistic expectations, it seems.