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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Falukorv posted:

Yeah i might be wrong, it is insanely bitter but according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine_poisoning#Notable_strychnine_poisonings) several people have been fooled anyway.

But even if you can taste the bitterness, one might be fooled anyway if it's laced in a drink that is expected to have a bitter taste. Like a guy in that linked who drank it from cough syrup, which is essentially a foul tasting concoction of bitter plant-based alkaloids in the first place.
So if you can trick someone that they're drinking medicine, you can also trick them into drinking strychnine.

Anyway, surprising to hear about this more modern cases, as strychnine is something i imagined people were doing pre-1930's. You know, royal assassinations, 19th century crime novels type poo poo.

Hmmn.. what's this?

quote:

Oskar Dirlewanger, the notorious leader of the SS Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger in the Second World War, was known to have murdered several Jewish women by stripping them naked and having them injected with strychnine. He and his officers then watched them convulse until death, just for their entertainment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger

Well ,that's pretty terrible, lets see if that guy was any wor- oh, he was.

quote:

He was invariably described as an extremely notorious figure by historians and researchers, including as "a psychopathic killer and child molester" by Steven Zaloga,[1] as "violently sadistic" by Richard Rhodes,[2] as "an expert in extermination and a devotee of sadism and necrophilia" by J. Bowyer Bell,[3] and as "a sadist and necrophiliac" by Bryan Mark Rigg.[4] World War II historian Chris Bishop called him the "most evil man in the SS."

Well, those are certainly descriptions but how bad was he really?


quote:

After the end of World War I, Dirlewanger, described in a police report as "a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic, who had the habit of erupting into violence under the influence of drugs,"[9] joined different Freikorps right-wing paramilitary militias and fought against German communists in Ruhr and Saxony..

In 1934, he was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl from the League of German Girls (BDM), as well as the illegal use of a government vehicle and damaging said vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. Dirlewanger also lost his job, his doctor title and all military honours, and was expelled from the NSDAP. Soon after his release from the prison in Ludwigsburg, Dirlewanger was arrested again on similar charges for criminal recidivism. He was sent to the Welzheim concentration camp, as was standard practice for deviant sexual offenders in Germany at the time.


Ok, that's pretty terrible and we haven't even gotten to World War 2

quote:

At the beginning of World War II, Dirlewanger volunteered for the Waffen-SS and received the rank of Obersturmführer. He eventually became the commander of the so-called Sonderkommando Dirlewanger (at first designated as a battalion, later expanded to a regiment and a brigade, and eventually a division), composed originally of a small group of former poachers. Later, Dirlewanger's soldiers were mostly recruited from volunteers among the ever broader groups of German convicted criminals (civilian and military) and concentration camp inmates, eventually including even mental asylum patients, interned gypsies, and (at the end of the war) political prisoners sentenced for their anti-Nazi beliefs and activities.

What could possibly go wrong?


quote:

The unit was assigned to security duties first in German-occupied Poland (General Government), where Dirlewanger also served as an SS-TV commandant of a labour camp at Stary Dzików. The camp was a subject of an abuse investigation by the SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who accused Dirlewanger of wanton acts of murder, corruption and Rassenschande, that is the crime of sexual relations with non-Aryans (Morgen consequently himself got reduced in rank and sent to the Eastern Front).[18] According to Morgen, "Dirlewanger was a nuisance and a terror to the entire population. He repeatedly pillaged the ghetto in Lublin, extorting ransoms."

You know things are bad when the SS investigates you for abuse.

quote:

In January 1942, however, the local Higher SS and Police Leader, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger threatened: "[Unless] this bunch of criminals disappears from the General Government within a week, I will go myself and lock them up."[23] In February, the unruly unit was promptly reassigned for anti-partisan duties in German-occupied Belarus, "with a speciality of 'pacifying' an area by slaughtering every man, woman and child." "Dirlewanger's preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape."[6] Rounded-up civilians were also repeatedly used as human shields and marched over minefields.[7] In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes wrote that Dirlewanger and his force also "raped and tortured young women and slaughtered Jews Einsatzgruppen-style in Byelorussia beginning in 1942."[2] Snyder cautiously estimated that the Sonderkommando, by then regiment-sized, killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians



In Warsaw, Dirlewanger participated in the Wola massacre, together with police units rounding up and shooting some 40,000 civilians, most of them in just two days.[6] In the same Wola district, Dirlewanger burned three hospitals with patients inside, while the nurses were "whipped, gang-raped and finally hanged naked, together with the doctors" to the accompaniment of music.[6] Later, "they drank, raped and murdered their way through the Old Town, slaughtering civilians and fighters alike without distinction of age or sex."[7] In the Old Town – where about 30,000 civilians were killed – several thousand wounded in field hospitals overrun by the Germans were shot and set on fire with flamethrowers.[6] Reportedly, "the Dirlewanger brigade burned prisoners alive with gasoline, impaled babies on bayonets and stuck them out of windows and hung women upside down from balconies."

"After the door of the building was blown off we saw a daycare-full of small children, around 500; all with small hands in the air. Even Dirlewanger's own people called him a butcher; he ordered to kill them all. The shots were fired, but he requested his men to save the ammo and finish them off by rifle-butts and bayonets. Blood and brain matter flowed in streams down the stairs".



:stare:


quote:

He died after World War II while in Allied custody, apparently beaten to death by his guards.

Poetic justice.

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 03:38 on Jun 12, 2014

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Zeroisanumber
Oct 23, 2010

Nap Ghost

Nckdictator posted:

*Oskar_Dirlewanger*

I'm not a violent guy, but I don't blame those Polish guards in the slightest.

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

The most shameful part is that it took until he was captured for someone to decide to street justice him. As far as I'm concerned his men are just as terrible as he was for not mutinying against him and executing him, even if they thought he was a butcher.

Frostwerks
Sep 24, 2007

by Lowtax

Zeroisanumber posted:

I'm not a violent guy, but I don't blame those Polish guards in the slightest.

It's like that "massacre" that took place at the conclusion of hostilities in the war where it's concentration camp survivors killing the guards and it's like the least offensive massacre I can think of.

Mr. Gibbycrumbles
Aug 30, 2004

Do you think your paladin sword can defeat me?

En garde, I'll let you try my Wu-Tang style

Nckdictator posted:

Oskar_Dirlewanger

I am now going to devote the rest of my life to the invention of a time machine so I can go back and do something unspeakably horrific to this man.

Miranda
Dec 24, 2004

Not a cuttlefish.
I watched a vice documentary on scopolamine in South American countries used to make people bend to the users will with no recollection the next day. Apparently they administered it by blowing the powder in the victims face. They then proceeded to happily empty their bank accounts and have sex and things with their attackers and have no idea what they did the next day.

What I also find interesting, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that hyoscine (the active ingredient in the awesome stomach cramp medicine buscopan) is a derivative of scopolamine. It annoys me greatly because you can get it OTC in Aus but not in the US :(

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007
How legitimate is this stuff about scopolamine. I'm not trying to be a naysayer it just sounds a bit like an email forward or one of those SCARY RUMOR stories on Facebook.

In a carefully administered dose, by a doctor, it can cause some memory loss? Sure.

Getting a handful blown in your face means you turn into a zombie slave up to and including emptying your bank account and loving the guy who blew it on you? Eehhh. Maybe not.

I can't seem to find any hard evidence with googling, just a dozen unsourced stories and a Vice documentary. How reliable is Vice? I watched it and it seems more clickbait than reasoned investigation.

Miranda
Dec 24, 2004

Not a cuttlefish.
Yeh it does sound pretty ridiculous. I've had pretty good experiences with vice docs actually. They're usually just in your face, I like Louis Theroux better.

chefvinny
Apr 5, 2009
I worked with someone who was drugged with scopalomine, and the stories seem to be true. All I got was a broken text from him the day he didn't show for work, and at first I was going to fire him for not showing up, but, to hear him tell the story, it certainly seems like something very traumatic happened.

He was at a bar drinking with his friends, when another group of people came up and joined them as they were about to leave. He was probably given a spiked drink - I also don't think getting a powder blown in your face will do much of anything. The next 8 hours came in a series of 'clips' of memories. He said that he remembered that he was in a cab going uptown, past 140th street (in NYC), then walking into a store-front after hours Latino dance club. He said the strangest part of it all was that he was totally unafraid during this entire experience. Walking in, he was stopped by the bouncer, but allowed into the club when one of the group he was with said 'he's with me.' He remembered dancing, then a large blank, after which he remembered staggering down Grand Concourse with the sun coming up and hailing a taxi. He managed to get home and sent the text that he wouldn't be at work.

Later he came to find, and showed me the records, that there were four $200 withdrawls from his bank account in the Bronx between 3 and 5:30 AM.

Naturally we asked if he checked if his rear end after the experience. To which he replied,

'That was the first thing I checked.'

chefvinny has a new favorite as of 13:55 on Jun 12, 2014

ElMaligno
Dec 31, 2004

Be Gay!
Do Crime!

I have a story not about scopolamine, but about Propofol.

So last year I dislocated my shoulder, a friend of mine rushed my to the hospital. In there I got 4 shots of morphine but was still feeling a moderate ammount of pain. Here comes the Propofol shot and inmediatly I feel my veins and arteries heat up and feel "euphoric/drunk". The nurse does her standard "count from 10 to 1" thing and I do, and talk... and talk... and talk... and nothing was happening, no doctors where comming to reset my shoulder. "Hey Nurse" I ask her "when are they going to reset my shoulder". She smiles and responds "They already did". I freak the gently caress out and ask my friend what the gently caress happened. In his own words I was acting like a very docile black-out drunk person, talking poo poo, apparently trying to flirt with the nurse and expressed a bit of pain when the doctors reset my shoulder.

This was the first, and so far the only, time I have "blacked out" in my life. Freaky? gently caress yeah it was, I am ok about loosing some control, but I DREAD loosing all control and blacking out (which, again, I have never blacked out before) so this was a surprise to me.

NuminaXLT
Nov 11, 2002

Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:

I am now going to devote the rest of my life to the invention of a time machine so I can go back and do something unspeakably horrific to this man.

quote:

He died after World War II while in Allied custody, apparently beaten to death by his guards.

Go back further next time.

GOTTA STAY FAI
Mar 24, 2005

~no glitter in the gutter~
~no twilight galaxy~
College Slice

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

This is one of the craziest loving things I've ever read.

I love how loving a dolphin was such a minor thing for her. "Oh yeah he was horny all the time so I helped him with that. Anyway, back to what I was saying about the Dolphin House..."

bean_shadow
Sep 27, 2005

If men had uteruses they'd be called duderuses.

ElMaligno posted:

I have a story not about scopolamine, but about Propofol.

So last year I dislocated my shoulder, a friend of mine rushed my to the hospital. In there I got 4 shots of morphine but was still feeling a moderate ammount of pain. Here comes the Propofol shot and inmediatly I feel my veins and arteries heat up and feel "euphoric/drunk". The nurse does her standard "count from 10 to 1" thing and I do, and talk... and talk... and talk... and nothing was happening, no doctors where comming to reset my shoulder. "Hey Nurse" I ask her "when are they going to reset my shoulder". She smiles and responds "They already did". I freak the gently caress out and ask my friend what the gently caress happened. In his own words I was acting like a very docile black-out drunk person, talking poo poo, apparently trying to flirt with the nurse and expressed a bit of pain when the doctors reset my shoulder.

This was the first, and so far the only, time I have "blacked out" in my life. Freaky? gently caress yeah it was, I am ok about loosing some control, but I DREAD loosing all control and blacking out (which, again, I have never blacked out before) so this was a surprise to me.

I had a similar experience when I dislocated my elbow. Afterwards the nurse asked me if Propofol sounded familiar. I said no and she said, "That's what Michael Jackson died of!" Oh...thanks?

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Expelled from the Nazi party.

The Nazis actually looked at him and went "okay this is a bit much, even for us".

Sand Monster
Apr 13, 2008

This likely was discussed in the last thread, but I was reading about the helicopter accident on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (resulting in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children) and it is all kinds of scary how reckless some people were and how it could have been prevented:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone:_The_Movie#Helicopter_accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_tragedy
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/not_guilty/twilight_zone/1.html

That last link is particularly thorough.

Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Sand Monster posted:

This likely was discussed in the last thread, but I was reading about the helicopter accident on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (resulting in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children) and it is all kinds of scary how reckless some people were and how it could have been prevented:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone:_The_Movie#Helicopter_accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_tragedy
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/not_guilty/twilight_zone/1.html

That last link is particularly thorough.


Maybe it's just misguided outrage on my part but it pisses me off that Landis still found work in Hollywood after that.

ChickenOfTomorrow
Nov 11, 2012

god damn it, you've got to be kind

ElMaligno posted:

I have a story not about scopolamine, but about Propofol.

Referred to in the Health Care Stories thread as Milk of Amnesia.

Pennywise the Frown
May 10, 2010

Upset Trowel

ElMaligno posted:

I have a story not about scopolamine, but about Propofol.

So last year I dislocated my shoulder, a friend of mine rushed my to the hospital. In there I got 4 shots of morphine but was still feeling a moderate ammount of pain. Here comes the Propofol shot and inmediatly I feel my veins and arteries heat up and feel "euphoric/drunk". The nurse does her standard "count from 10 to 1" thing and I do, and talk... and talk... and talk... and nothing was happening, no doctors where comming to reset my shoulder. "Hey Nurse" I ask her "when are they going to reset my shoulder". She smiles and responds "They already did". I freak the gently caress out and ask my friend what the gently caress happened. In his own words I was acting like a very docile black-out drunk person, talking poo poo, apparently trying to flirt with the nurse and expressed a bit of pain when the doctors reset my shoulder.

This was the first, and so far the only, time I have "blacked out" in my life. Freaky? gently caress yeah it was, I am ok about loosing some control, but I DREAD loosing all control and blacking out (which, again, I have never blacked out before) so this was a surprise to me.

I was getting propofol 3 times a week for a month in March while getting electroconvulsive therapy. I ended up starting to like it to be honest, just the feeling right before passing out. They have to mechanically breath for you though when you're under. Or they did me at least with the amount they used. The only part that really sucked was waking up. Apparently I became really aggressive each time they put me under so they had to give me something to calm me down... so I'd stumble out of the VA hospital and pass out at home for a number of hours.

Lolitas Alright!
Sep 15, 2007

This is your friend.
She fights for your freedom.

Guavanaut posted:

The nearest modern equivalent is probably kaolin & morphine, which is still OTC in some UK pharmacies. It's sold as a liquid in a solution/suspension of water with some alcohol and ether. The active dose is very low though, it's for symptomatic relief of diarrhea/stomach pain as opposed to the huge (and dubious) range of things laudanum was prescribed for.


There have been cases in the past where people have attempted to consume a number of bottles of it for recreational purposes. Ingesting that much suspended clay alongside something that reduces gut water content is a bad idea.

Laudanum is still available by prescription for cancer patients here in the US. When I worked at Walgreen's, the pharmacist told me about how one of the pharm techs at the Walgreen's in the next town over who didn't lock up the laudanum bottles overnight. See, the store was being renovated and there were straight-up holes in the walls, but there were security guards and the tech figured a bunch of east Texas rednecks wouldn't even know what the hell laudanum was.

Long story short, they knew what it was and the pharmacy staff came back the next day to find that they were plum out of laudanum.

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007
Man, I don't know how those guys interpreted state law, but locking up a c2 should be a pharmacist's responsibility not a tech's. Or at least, that's how it worked in Texas when I was a tech. (DFW area and Houston area).

I also just cannot imagine a pharmacist NOT locking up tincture of opium especially if the walls were compromised. That's a good way to get fired and potentially lose your license to practice pharmacy.

Arsonist Daria
Feb 27, 2011

Requiescat in pace.

nucleicmaxid posted:

Man, I don't know how those guys interpreted state law, but locking up a c2 should be a pharmacist's responsibility not a tech's. Or at least, that's how it worked in Texas when I was a tech. (DFW area and Houston area).

I also just cannot imagine a pharmacist NOT locking up tincture of opium especially if the walls were compromised. That's a good way to get fired and potentially lose your license to practice pharmacy.

A friend of mine worked as a pharmacy tech for a while. While it may be their responsibility, oh man do some of them not give a poo poo.

Strongylocentrotus
Jan 24, 2007

Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him - stop that pigeon NOW!
From the tenacious search-and-rescue guy who brought us last thread's tale of the Death Valley Germans comes a new(-ish), almost more perplexing missing hiker cold case: Where is Bill Ewasko?

Short summary: In 2010, a 65-year-old hiking enthusiast and fan of Joshua Tree National Park goes on a hiking vacation to said desert park and vanishes on a Thursday, his first day in, failing to contact his fiancee (at home in Georgia) by phone at the prearranged time. She contacts authorities with her concerns, and search-and-rescue are dispatched to look for him.

They don't find him.

Seems standard enough. Hikers sometimes go missing, get injured or stuck in offbeat places, and it takes prolonged searching or dumb luck for park visitors to later stumble over them, or what remains of them. See the other two cases profiled on the above site.

But the thing about the Bill Ewasko case is that nothing makes sense in the way you'd expect it to. It doesn't add up. The meager evidence is just plain weird. And the kicker? The SAR guy who found the Death Valley Germans, along with his buddies and other interested hikers, have been out searching for Bill's remains at least 60 times since 2010, following the best theories and clues they could put together. Nothing. Nada. No go.

Here's some of the oddball evidence:

- Bill had spoken to his fiancee by phone on the morning of his planned hike. He had listed Cary's Castle as his destination, but his car was found at a totally different parking area near Quail Mountain
- For some reason, park rangers didn't scan his Senior Pass at the entrance
- His arrival time (after 10 AM per witnesses of his car) was way later than expected for an attempt on Quail Mountain
- SAR dogs signal a bandanna on the front face of Quail Mountain as possibly being Bill's, but then they also signal a cache of water bottles that were later revealed to belong to another regular hiker, so no one knows if the bandanna is meaningful or not
- Several witnesses saw Bill's car, a white sedan, in the parking lot on Thursday and Friday morning. However, a park ranger involved in the official SAR operations claims he saw the parking lot empty on Friday afternoon, and he drove past it 4 times
- A SAR helicopter spots the car in the parking lot on Saturday, jiving with the initial witnesses but not the park ranger
- A woman who witnessed the car on Thursday confidently claims that it was moved/parked differently in the photos she was shown of it on Saturday
- On Sunday morning, a Verizon tower in the park received a single ping from Bill's cellphone. The catch? It had to be within a ~10 mile radius of the tower, placing Bill (or at least Bill's cellphone) in the opposite direction of any logical help for someone who is ostensibly injured or distressed (i.e. if injured, he would have been moving away from his vehicle rather than back toward it)
- He had given his fiancee the number of a "Ken and Helen", but when officers called, Ken claimed to not know Bill or anything about him

So what on earth happened to Bill Ewasko, and where is he? Is this just a case of a hiker getting terribly lost or injured, passing away somewhere the searchers haven't scoured yet? Was it foul play? Intentional "vanishing" to start a new life? Aliens?

Amphigory
Feb 6, 2005




I guess calling off the wedding wasn't an option

Gripen5
Nov 3, 2003

'Startocaster' is more fun to say than I expected.
Many of those can be attributed to the fact that eye witnesses are poo poo. We often forget or ignore unimportant facts until we realize they are important. What is worse is that our subconscious starts to make poo poo up when we realize we missed important details and now our memory is filled with stuff that never happened.

I would be more likely to believe the witnesses after they knew someone was missing and actively looking for something specific (a white car). Such as the guy in the helicopter spotting the car. From the timeline you state, its hard to tell if the ranger who checked the parking lot 4 times knew what he was looking for or not at the time. He could have easily said to himself "Man this parking lot is empty, I expected more cars," and now his memory is of an empty parking lot rather than a lot with one car in it. The woman saying that the car looked different than a picture is meaningless. Perspective and angle really makes things look weird.

Still sounds like an interesting case. I will read up more on it.

Rev. Bleech_
Oct 19, 2004

~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Mikl posted:

From today's Wikipedia featured article.

Two people cross a racetrack to go help a driver whose car had caught on fire, just as four more cars are coming around a curve. One of the guys narrowly makes it to the other side. The other... Doesn't.

Emphasis added by me.


High-speed accidents scare the poo poo out of me :stonklol:

then don't watch this :nws: video of the kid getting struck and torn in half :nws: then

EDIT: Yeah I'm crazy beaten on this but yeah, a proper accident will gently caress you up. A friend of mine and an acquaintance of his were once riding motorcycles and going 60+ in a 45. His friend drifts just over the line on a curve and met a panel truck going 55 in the opposite direction. Finding his head took a couple of hours, but at least the left arm and part of the torso were easy to find, as they were jammed in the truck's grille. I don't think he's ridden a bike since.

My dad was a coroner's photographer in the late 60s, and after he started working for the newspaper he would still do accident and crime scene shots for the coroner off and on until the late 80s. So as I've been going through piles and piles of negatives, I will occasionally find some really fun poo poo mixed in with the landscapes and local news that just makes my day. Life before safety glass was all rainbows and unicorns.

Rev. Bleech_ has a new favorite as of 18:01 on Jun 13, 2014

Atmus
Mar 8, 2002
I used to process worker's compensation claims. Machinery, Glass, and Tomfoolery were the biggest sources of claims. 'Lifted too much' and 'Tripped' were waaay off in the distance.

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

Finding his head took a couple of hours, but at least the left arm and part of the torso were easy to find, as they were jammed in the truck's grille. I don't think he's ridden a bike since.

I sure hope not, it's hard to control a bike with one arm and no head.

Atmus
Mar 8, 2002

nucleicmaxid posted:

I sure hope not, it's hard to control a bike with one arm and no head.

Even a horseman needed both arms.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Nckdictator posted:

Maybe it's just misguided outrage on my part but it pisses me off that Landis still found work in Hollywood after that.

quote:

Both Folsey and Landis did read remarks at Morrow's funeral. "If there is any consolation in this," Folsey told the assembled mourners, "it is that the film was finished. Thank God. This performance must not be lost. It was Vic's last gift to us."

Landis' eulogy sounded equally self-serving and clumsily ironic. "Tragedy can strike in an instant," an obviously distraught Landis said, "but film is immortal. Vic lives forever. Just before the last take, Vic took me aside to thank me for the opportunity to play this role."

Cat Hassler
Feb 7, 2006

Slippery Tilde
From "The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s" by Paul Slansky:

9/10/1986

Director John Landis reveals the hitherto-unguessed-at depths of his immaturity when, following the hostile testimony of a witness, he blocks her exit with his outstretched legs and makes her climb over him.

5/29/1987

(He is acquitted) "My wife and I are still in a daze," exults John Landis, two days later to USA Today. "I'm having lox and bagels by the pool."

6/25/1988

John Landis invites the jury that acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter to a private screening of his new Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America". He does not offer to fly them in by helicopter.

Pizza Segregationist
Jul 18, 2006

Nodding disease is pretty freaky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodding_disease

It's a mysterious disease that has so far only appeared in Africa, around South Sudan. Basically it only affects children and stunts their growth as well as their brain development. Parents often tie their affected children up to prevent them from wandering off and hurting themselves. The weirdest part is the nodding seizures, where the victim will stare into space and continually "nod off" and perk back up. The seizures are often brought on by presenting the kid with food. Even weirder:

quote:

A curious feature is that no seizures occur when victims are given an unfamiliar food; for example, a candy bar.[9]

Ellie Crabcakes
Feb 1, 2008

Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

Withdrawal Plans posted:

From "The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s" by Paul Slansky:

9/10/1986

Director John Landis reveals the hitherto-unguessed-at depths of his immaturity when, following the hostile testimony of a witness, he blocks her exit with his outstretched legs and makes her climb over him.

5/29/1987

(He is acquitted) "My wife and I are still in a daze," exults John Landis, two days later to USA Today. "I'm having lox and bagels by the pool."

6/25/1988

John Landis invites the jury that acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter to a private screening of his new Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America". He does not offer to fly them in by helicopter.
Huh. I guess the apple indeed doesn't fall far from the tree.

Rev. Bleech_
Oct 19, 2004

~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

nucleicmaxid posted:

I sure hope not, it's hard to control a bike with one arm and no head.

oh cut it out you :allears:

The thing that bugs me most about those kind of wrecks? Often no effort is made to clean up the pavement. An intersection near my parents' house was smeared with some poor motorcyclists' dried blood for over a year after he was wiped out by some idiot running the stop sign.

Strongylocentrotus
Jan 24, 2007

Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him - stop that pigeon NOW!

Amphigory posted:

I guess calling off the wedding wasn't an option

Honestly, this isn't even the craziest theory people have put forward. In the Death Valley Germans case, some internet people theorized that the missing family had somehow been vanished by the US Government for getting too close to a military facility. :v:

Gripen5 posted:

Many of those can be attributed to the fact that eye witnesses are poo poo. We often forget or ignore unimportant facts until we realize they are important. What is worse is that our subconscious starts to make poo poo up when we realize we missed important details and now our memory is filled with stuff that never happened.

I would be more likely to believe the witnesses after they knew someone was missing and actively looking for something specific (a white car). Such as the guy in the helicopter spotting the car. From the timeline you state, its hard to tell if the ranger who checked the parking lot 4 times knew what he was looking for or not at the time. He could have easily said to himself "Man this parking lot is empty, I expected more cars," and now his memory is of an empty parking lot rather than a lot with one car in it. The woman saying that the car looked different than a picture is meaningless. Perspective and angle really makes things look weird.

Still sounds like an interesting case. I will read up more on it.

Yep, eyewitness reports are notoriously inaccurate, and it sucks that they're the main source of the timeline in Bill Ewasko's case. The guy who wrote the blog is working under the same assumption about eyewitness testimony, hypothesizing that the woman who saw the car in the lot simply didn't get the details right when asked to recall them a few days later. I'm inclined to agree with you and the blogger too, especially since, if I read the articles correctly, the female witness never even stopped in the lot but instead merely saw Ewasko's car while driving by.

The ranger's reports are trickier to explain. Apparently he was part of the search and had details about the missing hiker's car at the time he was driving through the park; that is, he knew to look out for a white sedan belonging to the missing person. The Juniper Flats parking lot is highly visible from the road, so it's baffling that the ranger never noticed the car on any of the 4 passes of the lot that happened between Friday PM and Saturday AM. All I can figure is that a.) the ranger was lazy/negligent and really not watching the parking lot as he went past, b.) the ranger had poor eyesight, or c.) he lied about even going out to search and sat twiddling his thumbs at HQ the whole time.

This thread about the case is long but worth skimming. The blog guy posts there a few times with interesting info.

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

The thing that bugs me most about those kind of wrecks? Often no effort is made to clean up the pavement. An intersection near my parents' house was smeared with some poor motorcyclists' dried blood for over a year after he was wiped out by some idiot running the stop sign.

:stare:

That sounds like a biohazard.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

Strongylocentrotus posted:


That sounds like a biohazard.

I too often stop my car, get out, and rub an open wound on the road.

Strongylocentrotus
Jan 24, 2007

Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him - stop that pigeon NOW!
Nah, I'm thinking the more immediate aftermath and subsequent weeks or days while there's still liquid blood around, before it has turned into a perma-stain. I guess the relative degree of risk would depend on where the accident happened, but if it was in a neighborhood rather than off on a highway somewhere, it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could have kids running around the area riding bikes/scraping knees/messing around on the pavement. Rev. Bleech's post makes it sound like the accident was in a residential area, so I'm kind of surprised that cleanup wouldn't involve powerblasting the stuff away and/or dumping some kind of sterilizer on it.

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007
Eh, the animals and insects take care of it pretty quick.

ReidRansom
Oct 25, 2004


Plus UV wrecks poo poo pretty good.

bean_shadow
Sep 27, 2005

If men had uteruses they'd be called duderuses.

Withdrawal Plans posted:

From "The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s" by Paul Slansky:

9/10/1986

Director John Landis reveals the hitherto-unguessed-at depths of his immaturity when, following the hostile testimony of a witness, he blocks her exit with his outstretched legs and makes her climb over him.

5/29/1987

(He is acquitted) "My wife and I are still in a daze," exults John Landis, two days later to USA Today. "I'm having lox and bagels by the pool."

6/25/1988

John Landis invites the jury that acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter to a private screening of his new Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America". He does not offer to fly them in by helicopter.

Yeah, it's no surprise that Landis' relationship with Steven Spielberg was destroyed after the Twilight Zone incident. They haven't spoken since.

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Strongylocentrotus
Jan 24, 2007

Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him - stop that pigeon NOW!

ReidRansom posted:

Plus UV wrecks poo poo pretty good.

Good call, I hadn't even thought about that. The sun is some good stuff.

nucleicmaxid posted:

Eh, the animals and insects take care of it pretty quick.

Which actually makes me think of something mildly unnerving that fits this thread...

Meet the Calyptra moths. This genus of moth looks, well, about as generically moth-y as you can get. But beneath their drab brown exterior lies a dark evolutionary secret.

These guys are vampires.

More specifically, most members of the genus are adapted to be able to take an occasional blood meal from mammals, though unlike our best friends the mosquitoes, they aren't obligate blood feeders. A few of the so-called "vampire moths" are even capable of drilling into human skin to drink our blood.

The good news is that these guys aren't at the point where they actively and obligately parasitize humans or other animals. The bad news (or interesting news, if you're a biologist) seems to be that they're kinda midway on that evolutionary ladder between "juice drinker" and "strict blood-drinker". So give or take a few hundred thousand years of evolution in a particular direction, these guys might become true vampires ala vampire bats and ticks. Fortunately we'll all be dead by then, so we don't have to worry about fending off vampire moths in the dark of night.

Nat Geo video showing some hot blood-sucking action (in which scientists willingly offer their hands as sacrifice)

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