ISDP: Close But No Cigar

Despite the prophecies of the Goracle, it’s been a cold damned winter hereabouts. How cold is it? Well, last month we came up empty. And this month looks pretty bleak as well.

Normally, we’d be all over a story like this: smell leads to the discovery of human body parts in a garbage bag on a Bronx street. The remains were those of a 45-year old woman thought to have been murdered and dismembered by her own son. However, the fact that her remains were sniffed out by Nana, “a 10-year-old boxer-pit bull mix,” rather than by the guy at the other end of the leash, means the incident doesn’t qualify as a bona fide ISDP event. Sorry, but we have strict editorial guidelines and that’s that.

Our second candidate case comes from the Cecil Hotel, located near skid row in downtown Los Angeles. After residents complained about low water pressure and “funny” tasting tap water, hotel management sent a maintenance worker to check out the water tanks on the roof. According to one account,

he made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young woman, lying at the bottom of the tank. The body was soon identified as that of 21-year-old Elisa Lam, a Canadian student, who had been missing for three weeks. The cause of death, said LAPD Sergeant Rudy Lopez, remained uncertain. Foul play had not been ruled out, nor had the possibility of “a very, very strange accident”

We think Sergeant Lopez has a firm grip on the forensic difficulties of the case. What leaves us puzzled is whether this is a legit ISDP item. We could call it I Taste Dead People but that would blur our brand identity. We considered submitting the incident to the judgment of the ISDP ombudsman, but we never got around to hiring one. We interviewed one guy who looked promising until he started rambling on about the Vibration Theory of Olfaction. The topper was he wanted us to pay his relocation expenses—from Greece! Get real, dude.

We hate to disappoint our loyal readers, so as sort of a lagniappe we offer a link to Metalunderground, where you can listen to the new album by Spanish band “Scent Of Death.” Here’s a snippet from their press release:

“The Spaniards have been doing their thing for a long time and it shows as they blast with the same brutal intensity and technical dexterity as bands like Immolation, Origin, Morbid Angel and Behemoth. This is some serious death metal that will surely appeal to all fans of intense and downright brutal extreme music.”

Brutal intensity and technical dexterity—that’s our new ISDP motto!