This Job Stinks

Alternate Title: "This Place is (near) the Dumps"

So I work in a dump. And by that I don't mean that things are worn and/or broken down around my office. I mean that there is a dump right outside the place that I work. It's not a straight up "landfill", but it's pretty close. Here's the bird's eye with my office in relation to the dump. My office is the helicopter, the dump is the red hazard sign. After that is a close-up of the dump itself. Pretty good resolution around here. You can almost see the rats.


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Anyway, I'm about 3/4 of a mile from the dump and on a hot day (like today), you'd think it was right out my window. For some reason, the wind almost always blows northeast around here, placing us upwind from the stench.

Let's say you lived and worked in the dump, or perhaps a sewage treatment plant. So every minute of every living day you'd smell the unrelenting stink of decaying refuse and/or human feces. After a certain period of time, you've got to become immune to it, right? The same way that you don't notice the smell of your house unless you leave on an extended vacation, then come back to realize that your house has a particular odor that you've just gotten used to. In the same vein, the stench of crap and trash would just become part of your smell landscape. You'd stop noticing it. Assuming that to be the case, then would you every think anything smells bad? If you forget to take out your trash, or an egg rolls under your counter and starts rotting, would you notice the smell? Would a different kind of stench register with you, like a skunk? Or would your sense of smell just become dulled? Would you be able to enjoy a pleasant smell, like fresh baked bread or flowers, while living in the foul air everyday?

It doesn't smell bad enough here for me to conduct an objective observation, but maybe I can get the Germans who work at the dump to help me out.

Buried Alive

I was relaying a story to a Bulgarian about safety coffins. For those of you not in the know, people in Victorian England and Europe would get these coffins that had bells attached to strings that the departed could pull in the event that they "wake up" from an accidental burial. Sounds crazy, but I guess it happened on more than one occasion back then. Check out this passage from deathonline.net:

Fear of premature burial was widespread in 18th and 19th century Europe, leading to the invention of the safety coffin. Over thirty different designs were patented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The common element was a mechanism for allowing the 'dead' to communicate with people above ground. Many designs included ropes which, when pulled, would ring the church bell, or a purpose-mounted bell. Others replaced the bell with a raiseable flag, a powerful fire cracker or a pyrotechnic rocket. Some included a shovel, a ladder and a supply of food and water. An essential element, which was overlooked in some designs, was a breathing tube to provide air and occasionally even sustenance.

Weird, right? So after reading this, my first question was, "How did people get mis-diagnosed as dead?" Any suggestions, Wikipedia?

At least one report of accidental burial goes back to the 13th Century. Hundreds of instances of accidental burials were documented in the 1600s during epidemics of plague, cholera, and smallpox. Revivals have been triggered by dropped coffins, grave robbers, embalming, and attempted dissections. Fearing premature burial, George Washington, on his deathbed, made his servants promise not to bury him until three days after his death. Patients in the 1990s have been documented as accidentally being bagged, trapped in a steel box, or sent to the morgue.

Sucks to be the doctor that mistakenly pronounced someone dead when they weren't. That's got to be the ultimate "D'oh!"

I also came across this super creepy painting by Antoine Wiertz called The Premature Burial. What kind of a wacked out painter do you have to be to paint this?



Oh wait, he's Belgian. No further explanation needed.

Oooo-oooo, That Smell!

I checked into my hotel room yesterday here at the luxurious National Hotel in Sliven. Immediately, I notice a powerful and somewhat familiar smell. Holy dog crap! Where have I smelled that before? It's like an old lady funeral home. It's like a flower farted. It's what I imagine Sex Panther smells like. Oh yeah, it was the same smell that was in my hotel room the last time that I was here in the Hotel National. Except it was a different room in the hotel.
When I was here then, I thought that the smell was maybe from the strange dried flowers that were in the room last time. Some sort of bizarre, Bulgarian potpourri. But here I am in a totally different room with the same stench and no dried Bulgarian flowers. So what gives?? A couple minutes of frantic searching reveals the culprit:



Some shitty Plug-In? That's been causing this epic aroma? Jessica and I have had these things in our house before, and they usually aren't worth a damn after about one week. But not this little bastard; he's cranking out the juice. Well, mystery solved. Pretty lame, after all.

**UPDATE**

Just got off the phone, and my luggage is en-route from Sophia to Sliven, with a short detour into Plodiv. It should be here sometime this afternoon. I can finally change my underwear. After three days, it's starting to wear a little thin. Gross.