You know what's hilarious? When an industrial worker on a temporarry contract dies a horrible death.

The reactions to this story disgust me.  Consider BoingBoing:

A 29-year old worker died today when he fell into a giant vat of hot chocolate at a New Jersey factory. Hope someone at the scene had the presence of mind to question the oompah-loompahs.

Vincent Smith II, a working class grunt and former coma patient, falls into a vat of boiling liquid and is killed by a blow from an industrial agitator before the third-degree burns could do him in.  I'm trying to think of something funnier than being concussed to death while drowning in a highly-viscous super-heated liquid, but I keep coming up empty.  Maybe the time that that person with the Mexican-sounding name was cooked alive in an industrial dryer?  (Which is funny-ironic on two fronts: because Mexicans are dirty and many of them are cooks.)  Suggestions?

Comments

[Jake]

Are the people who work for BoingBoing a bunch of tech geeks who post about technological oddities? I'd expect them to be disconnected from reality.

[todd.]

The comment thread on Boing Boing is pretty stunning.

A: "This seems to be in poor taste."
B, C, D: "STFU, troll."
E: "No, really. Not cool."
B, C, D: "GAWD, what is with these BABIES?"

I don't really read Boing Boing. Is it always like that, sort of the slightly more literate version of Youtube comments?

[The Modesto Kid]

You're right -- I had a similarly callous reaction to the story, to chuckle about somebody drowning in chocolate, and did not really think about what that reaction says about me. Thanks for making me reconsider my reaction.

[cp]

A pretty large part of the internet is comprised of people who never stopped fighting the battle of who can care less. Sometimes it's a downer.

My own first reaction was horror and pity. This is mostly because I'm a clumsy guy who has had terrible jobs in industrial settings, surrounded by machines that could easily kill me. I spent too many shifts to count thinking "Gosh, I hope I live long enough to clock out."

[tomemos]

I'm kind of disgusted that you're paying any attention to this given the developments in Iran today.

[Scott K]

Gallows humor, always prevalent...

[Scott K]

Tomemos, are we to only pay attention to one controversial topic per day, and perhaps eschew non-controversial topics entirely?

[arthegall]

You still read BB, Scott? I thought they jumped the shark a long time ago...

[SEK]

I don't often read BoingBoing, todd. and arthegall, but I was pointed there to find a China Mieville interview and, unfortunately, clicked around.

TMK, the twinge of conscience is a good thing, even if it's after the fact. I'm sensitized to this sort of material because my exam lists were on early 20th Century socialist/leftist literature, the staples of which are the Horror of Industrial Accident and future histories like London's "A Curious Fragment."

Scott, I assume tomemos is making fun of the Oppression Olympics, not participating in the games, but if he is -- that is, if you are tomemos, I'm a little surprised that you expected me to write about something there isn't much reliable information on. I mean, we know there were protesters in the street again, but I personally don't know what's going on with the clerics and their possible turning against the Supreme Leader, so the best I could do would be to speculate irresponsibly about what this new rounds of protests means.

cp, same here. What's odd is that on my Facebook imported note, the only person who performs actual manual labor made the Wonka joke. It's sort of, how to say, surprising?

[tomemos]

I didn't mean to be obscure. I was poking fun of you for (rightly) criticizing this kind of callousness, just after mocking people ("you have got to be kidding me") for reacting strongly to the death of Michael Jackson, precisely on the grounds that this event should be overshadowed by events in Iran.

[tomemos]

"this event"=Jackson's death.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I don't think it's odd that someone who works in that kind of job was the one to joke about it. It's the same thing with any kind of iffy humor (Jews can make Jewish jokes, etc.).

I remember reading an occupational health blog with a weekly list of deaths-on-the-job; one of them was a worker who drowned after falling into a vat of cherries. That one has shown up in at least one of my poems, I think, because of the extra resonance with the "life is a bowl of cherries" phrase. Kind of an example of how God's evil humor can twist anything and turn it into tragedy.