# Reddit's "dirty little secrets" thread - some thoughts **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [August 20, 2013, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743 "2013-08-20T20:48:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/21 "2013-08-23T01:58:13Z")
For a long time I wanted my body parted out, and then it turns out that nobody is that desperate that they’d need my parts. Then I said, donate it to Science. Science isn’t that desperate, either. Then I told my husband that I wanted my remains made into a [diamond](http://www.lifegem.com/), and he has to give that diamond to his next wife as her engagement ring. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/22 "2013-08-23T03:26:44Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > For a long time I wanted my body parted out, and then it turns out that nobody is that desperate that they’d need my parts. Then I said, donate it to Science. Science isn’t that desperate, either. > > Then I told my husband that I wanted my remains made into a [diamond](http://www.lifegem.com/), and he has to give that diamond to his next wife as her engagement ring. I figure I would be good for a laugh in autopsy if nothing else. The diamond idea is neat, though I could see lots of women grossed out by the idea. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/23 "2013-08-23T03:43:08Z")
Why else do you think I want my body made into a diamond? 😃 It’s not enough to gross people out while I’m alive, I want to do it when I’m dead, too! ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/24 "2013-08-23T05:51:05Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > I read a book back in the 90s that was an expose on the funeral industry … it is _not_ new. > > hell, padding costs probably dates back to Pharaonic Egypt … you don’t really think it took 500 weights of natron to pickle someone, did you? 😛 Was it “The American Way of Death”? That originally came out in the early 1960s. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/25 "2013-08-23T06:36:50Z")
p.s. Thanks for the timesuck. ---
**Author:** ![B.Serum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/b.serum/32/14266_2.png) [@B.Serum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/B.Serum)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/26 "2013-08-23T06:58:49Z")
I saw that thread back when Boing Boing (I think) mentioned the funeral director post. I didn’t make it through the entire thread but it was simultaneously the most fascinating and most demoralizing thing I’ve ever read in my life. That said, there’s no mechanism to confirm that they are who they say they are. While lots of those posts had some amount of detail that supports (to varying degrees) that they are who they say they are, I have no doubt that there are some more posts in there that simply have an axe to grind with a certain sector they have identified as “the enemy.” Still. Jesus. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/27 "2013-08-23T07:07:46Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > Was it “The American Way of Death”? That originally came out in the early 1960s. That sounds about right, though I don’t remember the publication date. I was playing library roulette [close eyes, randomly open a card drawer and pick a book to read. Amazing what you do when you have to be stuck on base for 9 or 10 hours and get bored. I hate radiology appointments for stuff other than swilling radiological slime.] ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/28 "2013-08-23T10:43:14Z")
> [@B.Serum](#): > > That said, there’s no mechanism to confirm that they are who they say they are. While lots of those posts had some amount of detail that supports (to varying degrees) that they are who they say they are, I have no doubt that there are some more posts in there that simply have an axe to grind with a certain sector they have identified as “the enemy.” > > Still. Jesus. I was also a bit bemused by how many complaints boil down to “my company expects to make a profit on its products”. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/29 "2013-08-23T20:26:34Z")
I used to work for a major over-the-counter-medicine packing and shipping plant, filling aspirin bottles, labeling cough syrups, heat-sealing the tamper seals, etc. It was commonplace for the assembly line to jam up somewhere due to unique bottle shapes, a strange batch of labels, or just Murphy’s Law. The most common screw up was the heat-sealed or conductively sealed tamper films. The slightest bottle flaw (like a little bump on the rim from the mold of the bottle) or variation in the seals meant that the whole run needed to be manually resealed. The packing machines would also commonly have bottles spill on the conveyer, jam and crush something (cough syrup cleanup was the worst). And when I mean manually, I mean minimum-wage Kelly staffers peeling off the old seals, razor blading off any goo, reapplying the seal, and usually spilling a lot of pills in the process to get repacked into the bottles. We were directed to never waste product, so even the bottles that fell and spilled all over the floor were dusted off and put back in bottles. There was a well-defined “look the other way” system of QA inspectors with scheduled walk-arounds and walking more slowly when they needed to to allow cleanups to finish before the QAs arrived. One day, a super-market brand load of cough syrup came through, in a colossally stupid designed triangular profile bottle. Pallets and pallets of it. Non of the labeller or sealer machines would accept the funky bottle without jamming, gobbing up a bad label, or tipping syrup all over the conveyer. Half the warehouse was put on manually fill-label-seal-cap duty by hand to get the product through, while everything else backed-up for us to pull a double-shift on for as long as it took to get it done. I walked out. ---
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/30 "2013-08-23T20:38:45Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > That sounds about right, though I don’t remember the publication date. I was playing library roulette [close eyes, randomly open a card drawer and pick a book to read. Amazing what you do when you have to be stuck on base for 9 or 10 hours and get bored. I hate radiology appointments for stuff other than swilling radiological slime.] The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford. It was published in 1963 and the author wrote an updated version called The American Way of Death Revisited in 2000. I highly recommend these books, they are not only informative but written with a dry humor that is very amusing. ---
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/31 "2013-08-23T20:49:51Z")
I must be jaded or really well informed or probably both, because I read the entire Reddit thread and didn’t see one thing that I didn’t already know. ---
**Author:** ![Incubus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c68b51/32.png) [@Incubus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Incubus)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/32 "2013-08-23T20:58:12Z")
What I learned from that Reddit thread: -Everything has semen on it. Everything. -Anything marketed as high quality is made with the shoddiest labor by wage slaves who, when not snorting cocaine off underage hookers on top of factory equipment, are leaving semen on everything. -The contents of an expensive bottle of liquor are identical to a different brand/quality/price bracket elsewhere. The only difference is % of semen by volume 😛 -Every factory or construction job is managed by some slimy manager like the Asshole in a Hardhat Middle Manager in Elysium. Part of their job is to ignore the copious amounts of insect larvae and/or semen encrustring the equipment. -Most semen is infact artificial made from Industrial-Grade Glyceryn imported from 3rd world countries. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/33 "2013-08-23T21:18:40Z")
The white specular highlights on the Dope’s ‘post reply’ and ‘quote’ buttons? High color depth .png graphics? Nope, semen. ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/34 "2013-08-23T21:19:38Z")
> [@Incubus](#): > > -Most semen is infact artificial made from Industrial-Grade Glyceryn imported from 3rd world countries. Nah, you can’t get good glyceryn anymore; most of it has semen in it. ---
**Author:** ![Incubus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c68b51/32.png) [@Incubus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Incubus)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/35 "2013-08-23T21:44:54Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > Nah, you can’t get good glyceryn anymore; most of it has semen in it. The problem is that there is so much pressure in the competitive semen based glycerin substitute business these days that the glycerin companies kept asking for lower and lower quality semen to keep costs down. Eventually it got to the point that semen from human sources wasnt cost effective to sell anymore. Most of it is made from squirrels and pigeons. And dont think they are humaine about extracting it. Fluffers and their unions were driven out of business back in the 70s. Typically they just shove a truckload of Assorted Pigeons and Squirrels into a refurbished olive press, wring out the fluids, and skim off the semen from the squirrelpigeon slurry. ---
**Author:** ![Incubus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c68b51/32.png) [@Incubus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Incubus)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/36 "2013-08-23T21:48:12Z")
Slurm Queen: “And dont even get me started on where toothpaste comes from!” …semen ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2013, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743/37 "2013-08-23T22:25:54Z")
I must have missed all those semen posts, but I didn’t read all 20,000-plus posts. Sure seemed like it, though. Regarding restaurants, there’s only been one I worked in that I wouldn’t eat at. It was a Pizza Hut when I was in college, and it closed shortly afterwards anyway. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reddits-dirty-little-secrets-thread-some-thoughts/666743.md?page=1)