From the Clovis, New Mexico, News Journal, Saturday, September 23, 2006: “Lessons can be learned from food scares” by Ryn Gargulinski.
In an article about the recent E. coli outbreak in spinach reaching The Land of Enchantment, the author segues into a discussion about how much poison it takes to do someone in—and even manages to get in a Lizzie Borden reference along the way.
When a friend of mine was mad at her mother, she squirted at least five solid sprays of Windex into her coffee — with no ill effects whatsoever.
Lizzie Borden, too, initially tried to poison her parents. Since they were found mutilated and decapitated with an ax, one can rest assured the poisoning didn’t work.
One can also rest assured that arsenic is easy to detect by its distinctive almond flavor. And it takes massive quantities to kill a human with it. The amount of arsenic it would take to take out a person is equivalent to the quantity needed to eradicate not only all the mice in Memphis but every single one that also floats in a soda can.
Of course, the soda-can mice are most likely already dead — but with no thanks to the arsenic.
At least a lesson or two can be learned from all this talk of fatal food.
The best way to stay safe is to simply eat dirt. Unless, of course, the E. coli spinach was grown there or mad cows once grazed there or the plot was used to bury Memphis mice.
The second lesson may be more helpful — never use Windex to plan a murder.
