popcorn munching great…but I have to know what happened to Badbaby’s Dad…
This isn’t exactly gross, but it was disturbing for me.
When I was seven or so, Little Chris (a kid known in the neighborhood for torturing animals) invited my brothers and I down to a local drainage ditch to see a dead beaver. And dead it was. It was pregnant too, as Chris pointed out. It was the first dead thing I had ever seen, and it spooked me. I can still see it in my head, lying on its side, its buck teeth sticking out. Chris threw a rock at it and it rolled over on its back.
Of course, later in life I was to see much worse things, but that really stuck in my mind.
Oh man. These are some great stories.
I am familiar with the horrifying Aquarium Stench of Death™. When I was a kid, my father was one of those people who just love the living shit out of aquariums. I’m talking magazines, books, conferences, dealer’s lists for exotic fish that cost $1,500 a pop, re-inforced floors, and a basement full of bizarre equipment that looked disturbingly like 19th century enema pumps. Those filters are made from the strung bowels of Satan himself. What IS that smell?! It’s unmistakable aquarium funk, and they ALL have it, no matter how clean and well-kept they are.
But the smell of a terrarium full of newts after the bloodworms have thawed will linger with me forever. :eek:
Incredibly Disturbing Stench I Have Actually Encountered: decomposing horse placenta. Knowing what was causing the smell was somehow even worse than the smell itself. Horrible. And why is it that the people who routinely keep this kind of stuff never have their freezers hooked to generators, for those just-in-case moments you know full well will only happen in the middle of a heat wave?
Well, there was the little package, 1/4 pound of chicken livers, someone at work dropped behind the radiator. Found only after it silently signalled its existence. Consensus upon discovery was, someone did it on purpose.
But the big one was a dead whale that washed up on the beach south of San Francisco. I drove upwind toward it with the top down, and the coast highway wound in and out of the great stream of stench flowing from it. The air was just oily from the thickness of the smell.
People had stopped there to see the dead whale, in fact some of them must have made the trip on purpose. One guy had climbed up and was standing on top of it. The skin didn’t burst and let him sink in, so I guess he won that one.
It was my job to empty the pool filter. There was a hatch to lift up.
I went to empty the leaves out of the filter and floating there on the surface of the water underneath was a huge long-dead partially decomposed rat, compete with squirming white slimy maggots.
I’m soooo glad this didn’t happen in summer, we hadn’t been swimming for a while, thank og. Had to empty the pool after that too!
Another story is not stinky, but it’s funny and it does involve dead animals. We were driving along a road out in farming country and there was a lady beside the road who had hopped out of her car and was waving us over.
So, we pulled over to see what was up. She pointed towards a nearby hill. On top of the hill was a bloated cow, obviously long dead, with its feet up in the air.
“Do you think it needs help?” she asks. hehe
My Father told me this one the last time I visited home.
Years ago, he worked as a mechanic for a Mack Truck dealership. There was a recall on one model of garbage truck that went out. The company that made the frame rails for Mack had screwed up the heat treating, and the rails could crack and split. Replacing the rails pretty much meant teaing the truck all apart and rebuilding it.
The local garbage company had a bunch of the trucks involved in the recall, so they brought in the first one. On a Friday afternoon. Late. Did I mention it was summer?
The dealership had specified that the trucks were to be brought in CLEAN. Well, the garbage company washed the OUTSIDE of the truck and had it nice and clean. It seems, though, that they’d had a trip by the local dog pound that day. For whatever reason, they didn’t dump the bed and clean it out, they just brought it in as it was.
THIRTY dead dogs in the closed bed of the garbage truck.
The heat did what you would expect, and come Monday morning the whole shop stank so that no one could go inside. The manager called up the head of the garbage company to send out a crew to come pick up the truck and to clean up the serum that had leaked out onto the shop floor - and incidentally told him to make damned sure to clean out the fucking trucks like they were supposed to do in the first place.
Funny this post should come up today.
Yesterday, Easter Sunday, I got a call from a new tenant. Her husband found a piece of old blanket sticking out of the lawn and tried to pull it out. He ended up digging the thing out of the gound only to find a large, partially decomposed dog wrapped in it.
So that’s how I spent my Easter Sunday… disposing of the former tenants former pooch.