Sunday

Tired of hearing about beauty pageants? I hope not, because after the July Fourth festivities next weekend, Sunshine and I will be heading to Nha Trang to attend the actual pageant, live, and I suspect that whenever I do post during the eight days we'll be on vacation, I'll be posting about that. Between two sentences from right here, however, and Monday the seventh, I'll try very hard to post about other things. After the thirteenth it will all be blessedly over. But since Sunshine's mother was good enough to comb the whole internet for this photo of Sunshine walking alongside Miss USA during the contestants' visit to the USNS Mercy during her humanitarian mission in Nha Trang last weekend, I thought I'd pass it along. Okay, in decidedly odder news: residents of Bắc Ninh City, capital of an eponymous province situated east along the Red River Delta from Hà Nội up north, have been hearing a nasty rumor about the town's water supply since mid-month. A female HIV positive drug user, the story goes, had hit rock bottom after being dumped by her boyfriend. Distraught, immunodeficient, and singularly thorough, the woman supposedly cut her arteries and hopped into the town water tank. According to the rumor, she "wanted to take revenge on 'life'" by poisoning everyone. Then, the rumor continues, her corpse remained in the water supply for five days before facility staff discovered her. What an excellent plot!¹ Residents now worried about drugs and disease, and honestly there's nothing much creepier than realizing that the whole community has been drinking a dead woman for weeks. Officials can only refute the rumor by recounting it,* and so it's spreading much further than it ever could have gotten on its own. And frankly, who believes an official, anyway? [Cavin]