Kathe sent me this:
Hungary workers get shock at bottom of rum barrel
Thu May 4, 9:49 AM ET
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.
According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.
The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.
According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-liter barrel had a "special taste" so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.
The wife has since died and the man was buried in a proper grave.
To which I replied:
1) I'm glad to see that you thought to send this one to Corinna [who is currently an apprentice mortician].
2) I don't know if they still do, but within living memory, British sailors referred to rum as "Nelson's Blood" because of the depleted state of the cask in which the martyred Admiral was shipped home.
3) This bit of morbid tippling, distressing as it may sound, is far less so than that story we both know from old Portland, the one where the man arrived at work to find five men slumped unconscious around the barrel they'd been drinking from, loaded them hastily onto a wagon and sold them to a ship's captain in the old Shanghai fashion (thereby making them someone else's problem), then went back to the funeral home and put the lid back on the barrel of formaldehyde.
//The Magic 8-Ball says, "DOn't try to drink this blue stuff inside me, either."\\
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