So my good doctors. Is too-many-birthdays always fatal?
TMB is 100% fatal.
IANAD
It’s also a tautology because one less birthday wasn’t. Ditto one less blow to the head, one less bout of pneumonia. Whatever does finally get you, one less of it wouldn’t. At least not right away.
If you can figure out what that one-less quantity and item is, that’s your cue to party like there’s no tomorrow. Because for a suitably small number of tomorrows, you’ll be right.
It’s “The Big Ray”, 9/4/52, Episode 167. You can hear it here. As near as I can tell, they never identify what the poison was, just refer to it as “the poison”.
Maybe it was almond milk…
Cyanide is said to smell like “bitter almonds”. One of those weird Med school factoids that is useless since few people know what bitter almonds actually smell like.
I’d wager it was cyanide.It is very fast acting and is said to have a bitter taste. As far as “bellyful”, well a little goes a long way. I’ve seen a few cases of cyanide poisoning. The ones I can remember off the top of my head were suicides by people who had some formal background in chemistry. One was a grad student. They used reagent grade cyanide they got their labs.
Cyanide is said to have a “bitter almond” odor. It is also said that the ability to smell it is a genetic trait and only a minority of people can so detect it. I do not think I am one of those people, because I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary (for an autopsy, that is) while I did those cases. Then again, I’m not sure what “bitter almonds” are supposed to smell like.
When I did my training, there was one pathologist who had a little dispenser from which she’d pull a small strip of paper and wave it over the stomach of a decedent, right after she open it on the autopsy table. I wondered what she was doing, and she didn’t offer an explanation until I asked. She then said the paper was a colorimetric indicator that would detect cyanide. You see, she was also a nonsmeller. I then started to wonder if I had missed a whole lot of cyanide poisonings.
But turns out cyanide shows up on standard toxicology testing, at least that which we get where I work now. Sometimes we see small amounts of it in fire deaths, as the burning of some plastics generates cyanide, and it comes in with the smoke people inhale. It’s also generated in very small amounts by decomposition. In fact, we have a small hand held cyanide detector (not a strip of paper, but a meter that beeps and gives you a digital ppm readout). It is sensitive enough to pick up the tiny bit from decomp.
As far as 86, I can’t speak to the etymological origin, but the origin in my lexicon is indeed from the food service industry. I cut my teeth (as well as many fingers) as a working lad in the kitchens of restaurants.
The “smells like bitter almonds” factoid is repeated ad nauseum in DoD training on detecting and countering chemical weapons. But nobody knows what they smell like. :smack: Useless factoid indeed.
Wiki (Almond - Wikipedia) tells us they’re a related cultivar to the “sweet” almonds we eat. And that some shady suppliers have some bitter ones mixed in their crop. :eek:
I listened to it and it is always just referred to as the poison. The detectives eventually find the druggist who sold it to her and she admits to doing it. She claims to have only been trying to make him sick and not kill him. It turns out that the wife was a shrew and the husband was going to a bar to avoid her. She thought he was cheating on her at the bar and claimed she wanted to make him sick so he would have to stay home with his family. Despite her unpleasant attitude the mother in law was determined not to have known about the poison.
Arsenic seems like it would have taken too long to work. Strychnine is more likely. It has a bitter taste, kills quickly, and was available in drugstores around the time of the episode.
While we’re waiting for the real question to get posed, we should ask…
Robert David Hall or Jack Klugman?
David McCallum. Klugman was good until his show got preachy.
Almonds. With a hint of acrid bitterness ;).
We used cyanide to make kill jars when I was an entomology student.
Wally Nydorf. That was the character’s name. I don’t recall the actor. He was the medical examiner on several episodes of Hill Street Blues.
Those folks usually don’t mind waiting.
I like Ducky but I’m getting pretty fond of Loretta Wade (CCH Pounder on NCIS NO).
What happened to the OP? Did he…oh you know.
His show was preachy from Day 1. Jack Klugman only agreed to do the show in the first place if he would be allowed to use it as a platform to promote the issues he cared about. I’m a big fan of Quincy, but the idea that it was a good show that was somehow ruined by its social conscience is a myth. The social conscience was the entire point of the show from the very beginning.
The wonderful Pat Corley. He was best known for his role as Phil the bar owner on Murphy Brown. Apparently he claimed that of all the many roles he played on T.V., his favorite was Wally Nydorf.
I’m a big fan of T.V. coroners. No one has mentioned Jordan Cavanaugh of Crossing Jordan, or her boss Garret Macy, played by the late Miguel Ferrer.
Quincy will always be my favorite, though.
Well, I remember it different, but it’s been what 40 years?
I grew up watching Quincy. But my real inspirations were Kolchak The Night Stalker and Jim Rockford.
Thanks. He was great. I loved his final collapse, where he was the last one to realize it was really over. Such a tragic character. I loved his monologue about the case he figured out when no one else could. “Me! Wally Nydorf!”