Media Gone Wild or Just a Drunk Janitor?

I was recently reading regional news for my area and read a short news article that said that an investigation was ongoing at a local high school. A janitor had found a bag inside a girl's locker and he belived that it contained the remains of a human fetus.

Police and forensics folks were brought in. By the end of my workday it was also splashed on local television station news. Human remains found in a schoolgirl's locker! Nothing much was said about the girl who had used the locker (like an explanation for what the bag contained or how it ended up there) and nothing much was said about what prompted the janitor to look in the locker. Since school is probably out there, though, I would think that the janitor smelled something icky and opened the locker. The girl may not have been easy to reach with school being out. Nevertheless it apparently took a few hours for experts to determine the exact nature of the contents of the bag.

In the early evening I heard a television news update and they announced that the contents of the bag had turned out to be - oranges. Yes, oranges. Dried out and rotten, to be sure, but still only oranges. No bones. No nothing, really. Just a leftover snack that didn't make it out of the end-of-school locker cleanup.

Now, I wasn't there so maybe my thoughts on this are quite moot. I'm also not even close to an expert on forensics or even biology. Heck, I was an English major! Still- I do watch shows like CSI and Bones. I even watched E/R until it seemed to dry out like old oranges. What I'm wondering is, didn't anyone notice right away that there were probably some discrepancies in the case of the human fetus? (That would have been a SCARY 'Nancy Drew' title, wouldn't it?)

I mean, one would think that if no one noticed a pretty bad smell in April or so when school was still in full swing, the oranges probably hadn't gone totally south by then. If they were starting to rot about then, they've had somewhere between 2-4 months of sitting in that locker. Perhaps an orange would dry out and turn black and slightly resemble a tiny skull? Personally, I'd think that it would collapse and look more like a dark moldy shriveled orange. I'm only guessing at what fetus remains might look like, too, based on my CSI/Bones expertise, but I would figured that if it was old enough to have a skull the size of a shrunken orange, it would have formed at least some basic bones. The most obvious one I'd think of is a spine which seems to be a distinctive feature in t.v. corpses of all ages and sizes. Maybe these were special oranges that were packaged with a free fake vertebral column?

Yes, I know, I'm poking a bit of fun at this and surely they did have to check it out. Truthfully, if I found something really weird in a locker I'd probably assume it was something ghastly as well. I have a great imagination. Sometimes I help with deconstruction projects for a local charity and each time we tear down an old building, I feel fairly certain that we'll find a body or a box of money or some other interesting thing. It never happens quite like that. So, yes, I might have thought it was a baby too. And, once that had been thought of, I'm sure an investigation had to take place. It did make me wonder a few things. Do school janitors have a lot to do in the summer? Maybe he WAS hitting the bottle a bit. It could have been a slow day for the local media too, and what a story! Great headlines if it had worked out! "Girl Puts Baby in School Locker!"

So, anyway, that's my thought-to-blog for this lovely Saturday evening. Now, off to watch a re-run of CSI.

Why Would You Grill Beans?

"Fish don't fry in the kitchen,
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin'
Just to get up that hill."

Theme Song Chorus - The Jeffersons

You know, I'd noticed something slightly funny about these lyrics way back when I used to watch "The Jefferson's" but it seemed to register mostly in my subconscious. It wasn't until recently when I heard it again that it finally bugged me. Why doesn't fish fry in the kitchen? (I've fried fish in my kitchen, though to smelly results and only years ago when I wasn't a vegetarian.) Why would you grill beans? I have this imagine of someone trying to balance all these little pinto beans on the bars of the grill and the beans falling through and getting burned that way... Yeah, I know, if you were camping or something you might put beans in a pot and cook them on some sort of grill. Cowboys probably did this a lot. But, did the Jeffersons really go camping all that much before they ending up "movin' on up?" Or maybe they were cowboys before he became a dry-cleaner?

So, that said, what does fish frying and bean grilling have to do with poverty (and rather proverbially the price of rice in China) and then moving on up? This is so interesting, really.

A friend of mine said that perhaps they were literally homeless and they put cans of beans on a kind of grill or trash-can with a fire in it. I admit, I've also put canned food on grills when camping and it does tend to burn the stuff on the bottom of the can. This seems to be a possibility. Once they moved up, they wouldn't need to cook canned beans on a grill and therefore the beans would no longer burn there. This is good, but it doesn't entirely clear up the fish part. If you'd been homeless and your fish was frying in the kitchen... No, wait, if you were homeless you wouldn't have a kitchen. Ok, well, say you borrowed a kitchen... So, you couldn't afford much food so you caught some mud cats in some pond and fried that fish in the kitchen. Once you moved up, you probably wouldn't eat those icky little catfish at all, so fish wouldn't fry in the kitchen. Plus- your servants would do the frying if it had to be done or perhaps you'd eat out all the time so the fish might fry in A kitchen but not the THE kitchen which would be your own kitchen (with those fancy silver sub-zero fridges and stuff.) Speaking of which, I'd like to have a kitchen with all those funny commercial appliances and some HUGE rack of copper pots and pans hanging overhead. That would be SO cool...

But, I digress. So, I put the questions to you as the Friday koan - Why don't beans burn on the grill? And why doesn't fish fry in the kitchen? And why would you be grilling your beans? And, finally, if your beans stopped burning on the grill (and your fish stopped frying in the kitchen) how would that assist you to get up that hill?

Happy Friday!

Info for ya (since this is Lynn's info site)

I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a geek and I use the command-line a lot. I wrote a short article to help people with some of the common and most useful commands so here it is if you want to take a look: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/63943/most_useful_run_commands_for_windows.html

How come?

How come people who make commercials actually think that the majority of viewers will buy a product or go to a website just because the commercial is so annoying that it drives you nuts? Now, I'll admit that if they are just trying to drive traffic to a site, it might work, but to spend money on it or use it? Not so much.

For example, take those horrid commercials that demand repeatedly that you "get zwinky" or something like that. Yes, they made me curious enough to look up the website. No, I didn't bother with more than a cursory glance because I'm not the target audience. So, maybe it works for the target audience? Problem with that (in my area at least) is that the ads are always on during late-night talk shows! The site appears to be intended for the junior-high crowd and I rarely saw my daughter watching "Leno" when she was that age. I don't get it...

Since my blog shall obviously be super-powerful, to all you commercial-makers who are reading this: If you want me to remember your product, annoying might work but better yet- make me LAUGH! Like the Sonic commercials with the two guys, or those gum commercials with the funny blonde lady. If you actually want me to BUY your product - tell me why I should! (I watch those swinky or zweeky or whatever commercials and I don't even know what they MEAN.) Ok, well, that's my say on commercials for right now...