Janx said
Another Urban Legend or just willful playing with your head. If, indeed, there was formaldehyde involved, it would be on the order of “parts per million” as a preservative.
Dahmer’s theme song: "My baloney has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R…
The intetines of a pig.
The reason they are “soul food” is because they were eaten by slaves and,after the Civil War, subsistence Southerners.
I’m convinced this is how chitlins came about:
White slave owner is running low on pigs but has to feed a whole bunch of people. The white folks take most parts of the pig, leaving pretty much just the intestines for the slaves.
Slave women observe bucket of hog intestines being delivered for their dinner.
“Sally, what are these?”
“Look like hog guts, Dehlia”
“Damn! What are we going do with these?”
“Well… I guess if we clean 'em up real good and boil them for a good long while they’ll be edible”
“Yeah, but if the rest of the folks as what they are what are we gonna tell 'em? You’re eating hog guts? They men will never stand for it!”
“Well… we’ll have to call them something else.”
“What?”
“How about chitlins?”
“What’s that?”
"I dunno - but it sure sounds better than hog guts!"
BTW - although it is pronounced as “chitlins”, I more commonly see it spelled “chitterlings”. Dunno why, more crazy English spelling I guess.
broomstick I admire your creativity, but “chitterlings” go back to Middle English, about 1280 in print.
“Chitlins” is almost certainly an American word from before the Civil War.
Perhaps, without the humor. Okra was imported as a cheap slave food.
Either offal was given to the slaves or utilized by them to keep from starving.
Perhaps it is French or Spanish. Barbeque is, I believe, French.
Thanks, Samclean.
And, for what chitterlings * really * are:
I seem to remember a news item about Guy Williams(the Robinson dad in Lost in Space) He died at his apartment, and it was the reek that developed that clued people to check him out. Sad to be so isolated that no one misses you.
Yeah, but if you have a couple hundred bottles to ease you on your way…
[board rings with the sound of hevy blewz]
Jest mee an mah good buddy Daniels, das all I ebber
NEEEeeD!
Just a mild interjection: in Germany the buildings are constructed entirely of concrete (I’m talking about walls, floors, etc… naturally not the roof…) and about a foot thick each. The wall between my livingroom and bedroom is at least 18" and it’s not a main support. People are also awfully paranoid of their neighbors (post Nazi Germany?) and there’s alot of stock placed in what your neighbors think or will think or might think about nearly ANYTHING you do. So it’s true that they don’t check on the neighbors very often.
Also Jeffrey Dahmer was stationed from '84-'86 (I think) in 2-68 Armor division as a Medic at the Army post in Baumhaolder Germany (several people vanished without a trace during that time…)
There was a sadly bizarre incident similar to this a few years ago in or near Worcester Mass. An elderly woman who lived alone in her own house died in her kitchen and the body wasn’t discovered for several years. She was known by her neighbors to be “stand-offish”, and she apparently had no close relatives, either emotionally or geographically. The bizarre part was that her neighbors continued to cut her grass, rake her leaves, etc. One of them even noticed the door to her house was open. He even stepped inside, saw the disarray, and stepped out and shut the door. He was apparently only a few feet from the body, but didn’t see it in the mess (she was not the best housekeeper, apparently). I abhor Urban Legends, but this was widely reported in the Boston area media within the last five years, with names, address, quotes from neighbors and police, etc.
It can happen. Trust me. It happened to me and the guy I shared an appartment with here in Germany. When I got out of the US Air Force, I found an appartment in downtown Wiesbaden. It was a largish place, and reasonably priced. The only odd thing was that there was a room that was always locked. The guy who owned the appartment actually lived in Spain and would come back to Germany once or twice a year to visit friends and go to the doctor. When he came to visit, he would use that room in my appartment. Fine. So, after I had lived there for about six months he had a major falling out with his (Spanish) wife and moved back to Germany to stay. We rearranged things in the appartment and it turned out that there was another room I that I didn’t know belonged to the appartment, so we both had plenty of room and shared the bath room and the kitchen.
He was a quiet old fellow who traveled a lot, and most of the time I only knew that he was traveling when something of his (usually a pair of dirty under wear) would stay in the bathroom for a couple of days. I would put what ever it was in a bag and hang it on his bedroom door knob - that way I also knew that when the bag was gone that he was home again.
One Sunday, he told me that he had spent the last week visiting a french guy that he had helped escape from Germany during world war II, and that he was going to go back in a few days. Wednesday of the week after, I noticed that he had left a pair of drawers in the bathroom again and I hung them on his door knob as usual. In the two weeks after that, I kept noticing a musty smell. Not the smell of something dead, it smelled more like moldy old carpet. That was no surprise - my cats had started pissing by the appartment door in protest for the late hours I had been working. As time went by, though, it got worse and finally started smelling like something dead. He still wasn’t back, and I got to sniffing around and decided that the smell was coming from his room. I figured that he had left some food standing on the table in his room, and went in expecting to find the remains of a takeout fried chicken moldering on the table. Well, yes. There was a chicken on the table, and it was rotten, but the guy himself was still there. He was lying on the floor and doing a much better job of stinking than that little bit of chicken meat on the table.
Outside the door, before I opened it, there just a slight hint of carrion in the air. When I opened the door, it was an incredible stench of slaughter house and rot and (strange though it may sound) freshly baked bread. The door to his room was very close fitting, and had kept the smell almost entirely inside the room.
It turned out I had spent the better part of two weeks in an appartment with a dead person. He told me that he was going to be traveling, so I didn’t expect to see him for a while. The door kept the smell locked in for quite a long time. It wasn’t until enough of the smell seeped through that I thought to go into his room to see about things, and even then I only expected to find rotting leftovers.
I will say this, though. The Germans are thorough and leave nothing to chance. I called the cops and told them that there was a quite obviously dead person in my appartment. They showed up with blue lights flashing, and called in an ambulance - which also came roaring up in a great hurry with lights flashing. Judging by the way they rushed in with their emergency kits and headed into the guy’s room , they didn’t trust my statement that the guy was dead and just had to hurry in case they might still be able to save him. Yeah, right. After I opened the door to his room, and opened the appartment door to let in the cops, you could smell him all the way down three flights of stairs and out onto the street.
Yes, it can happen.
I’ve been trying to find this story for a while now, with no luck.
The story goes- it was recent, like a few months ago- a insurance worker in either California or some other odd-ball, live happy, carefree, and screw everyone else state, had croaked at his desk in the middle of the office. From the report that I had heard, on the radio, it took the office people something like four or five days to realized he was actually dead and not sleeping.
The one quote I distinctly remember hearing was from an employee who apparently said something along the lines of, ‘Well, he came in early and always was the last to leave. So, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Besides, we all thought he was busy working on something really important’.
Too funny.
What’s worse- dropping dead in front of the tube and not having anyone notice you’re gone for a few years, or dropping dead in your chair at the office and having people not only not notice you’re dead, but not notice that you’ve stopped working for nearly a week.
Neither of those options sounds too fun. I want to go like that boozehound in the basement!
Here’s your story, Cnote. UL.
Like Greenbean said.
Say “several hundred” = 100.
Even if he was drinking that stuff I found by my driveway “Canadian Whiskey blended with alcohol” (WTF?) it costs say $5.00 a bottle.
That’s a grand of booze. And he’d have to be working at it for quite a while to have all those dead soldiers. Maybe he thought there was going to be a nuclear war and was stocking up. Probably hard to clean up when you are putting away two fifths a day. Hell, what did he eat?
NOOOO!!!
I heard it on the radio, it must be true!!
Shoot.
Thanks for the link, racinchikki.
YOW!
That gives me the hee-bee gee-beez!
But still, 2 weeks is not 10 months, I wonder
(assuming you just minded your own business) how much worse
the stink on your side of the door would have gotten.
also, now that I think about it, when does a rotting
putrid corps STOP stinking?
WAY before 10 months. Read some of the previous posts about dessication.
While I don’t think anyone who’s ever been around a recently dead body would mistake the smell for anything else, in my experience it’s not a smell the average person would associate with death. To me it smells sickly sweet, kind of like over-ripe oranges. Something you could smell and be aware of, but which wouldn’t make you think there was any reason to batter down someone’s door unless you were familiar with the scent.
Our noses tend to go numb to familiar smells, so I can quite believe that people would have gotten used to a smell which changed only a little each day without necessarily registering that something was very wrong.
I was about twelve when I stumbled across the corpse of the town drunk, leaning against a tree, bottle still half full propped between his legs, or rather his bones.
It wasn’t pretty to the eyes or nose.
I ran all the way home, about two miles. It’s the most I’ve ever run in my life, before or since.
I really don’t ever want to see anything like that again, up close and personal like. HeeBeeJeeBees indeed.
I check on my single friends daily so I know they aren’t rotting on the sofa.
b.