My Grandma the Poisoner | Hacker News Reader

My Grandma the Poisoner

vice.com

51 pointsGuiA16 comments

Since someone else was also thinking that the story seems too unbelievable, I looked up the "Canned beets and sunflower seeds" recall to see if it existed (and just because I was curious of what happened). Google search doesn't return anything meaningful for me. Does anyone know what incident that was?

The story sound like fiction to me, and it was posted just a couple of days before Halloween.

I don't know, causing a miscarriage at that stage of the pregnancy too is not that simple.

EDIT: The story was first published October 6 on the American edition of Vice and there is a metafilter thread about it http://www.metafilter.com/143959/What-do-you-do-when-you-thi...

The story also has some whoppers about scuba diving, and the replica of James Randi's blood of St Januarius deal (the red oil in a glass vial in a fancy container). And methane sprayed on an arm and set afire.

It reads very realistic fictionally. I don't believe a word of it other than an impressionistic setting of mood and scene. That aspect of it is pretty good.

There is a genre of lit where you put in technical errors so you can attack the people who notice them for not getting the point, that he loved his grandma although she was obsolete and toxic in the modern world although still physically barely living in it. Yeah author, I get it, you don't have to put intentional errors in it so your little english lit buddies can feel all superior when the unwashed masses of "nerds" find it full of mistakes. Much like hollywood intentionally screwing up everything involving computers because it'll only offend nerds.

This is a great work of fiction, but I don't feel it's relevant as HN content. What does everyone else think?

According to the guidelines, content is relevant if it is:

> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

Do we consider a story fiction unless explicitly stated otherwise?

I searched after beet recalls and found no such evidence anywhere

The tags at the bottom read "personal history" and "personal essays", and there's no explicit indication that this is a piece of fiction.

This might actually be (based on?) a real story.

"Anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on-topic at HN.

Also, it's posted as a work of non-fiction.

It's not fiction, as far as I'm aware. No need to be passive-aggressive about it. It was an interesting piece of writing, and that's enough.

Well, I tried looking up the beet recall but it doesn't seem to have ever existed, so I made the assumption.

As a side note, I actually rewrote my comment a few times because I thought I was being too passive-aggressive. Could you explain why it still seemed passive-aggressive and suggest a way to state it that would be less so?

I'm not posting this as OP, but as a very active HN user who has been on the site for a few years now: 99% of the time, comments that say "this doesn't belong on HN" on front page stories are more out of place than the story itself.

That was a really interesting read, but on the creepy/terrifying side of things. One line especially stood out to me:

> When we announced my wife’s pregnancy, Grandma freaked out about how there’d be another mouth to feed and we couldn’t afford it.

Assuming the miscarriage happened intentionally, as a consequence of Grandma's food, then I am taken aback by how this woman acted autonomously and intrusively, attempting to covertly control the lives of others, for their "benefit," because she "loved them."

I suppose that's a remarkable example of the danger of not understanding boundaries: where social responsibilities end, and where dangerous overreach begins.

Wow , just wow.

OMG

That was an amazing read

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