So Adrienne and a friend were watching Hairspray the musical recently and I ended up watching most of it with them. For those who’ve not seen the movie yet I’m not spoiling anything by mentioning that at the very beginning the protagonist belts out a song called Good Morning Baltimore in which she soliloquizes the city while marveling at it’s assorted vermin, bums and deviants.
This got me pondering a serious question which seems to have been overlooked by accredited historians and other limbs of what might be called “The Establishment”. I know ya’ll are from Salisbury, but my hope was this might be an issue that some of you folks from the Maryland Krew might be help shed some light on. My question is this:
What evidence can you provide to support the theory that after his death the body of Lord Baltimore was not in fact buried as is commonly thought, but was instead brought to his eponymous city where it is maintained in a tank of formalin and rare earth salts and kept animate through a combination of geomancy (ie. Look at the map of Baltimore for crying out loud! Druid Hill Lake ring a bell? I defy any right thinking person to look at this map and tell me those highways don’t correspond to major ley lines.), ritual magic, and increasingly with an array of modern biomedical devices fed via thick snaking cables and tubes implanted in his back and abdomen; and that he stands at the head of a “shadow government”, controlling the state of Maryland, and indirectly much of our country’s national policy, through a set of political agents working in the Maryland Chamber of Commerce?
And if I might add a corollary question to this, it would be: Which Lord Baltimore is really running things? Are we only dealing with a Cecilius Calvert here? Or is he in turn actually the puppet of the good old original Baltimore, the real power behind the throne: George Calvert, who wanted the land not for the originally stated purpose of giving good Catholics a refuge from the wrath of British tyranny, but instead as a base from which to pursue his own existential domination, first over North America and thence the world?
I think that it is quite likely. After all, McCormick, the spice company, is from Baltimore. I’m sure they have some special ‘pickling’ spices that could be used for preservation…
As to the corollary, I can’t help you there.
Yeah I heard that too. The story I heard was that he was pickled in Old Bay. But Old Bay has supposedly only been around since 1939… so there might be some holes in the Old Bay theory.
I think you guys are on to something. I was actually suspicious that there might be some sort of pungent herbs in Baltimore’s brine, but thought that suggestion was going out on a limb. But as you present the evidence it all adds up.
McCormick? Of course! It makes perfect sense. A well established spice company would be the prefect front. No one would notice a few pounds of herbs going missing from the warehouse.
Old Bay? Definitely! That is some of the foulest mix of herbs I have tasted (the Old Bay biscuits from the cooking contest of Prozoicon long past still haunt my memory), yet how else to explain it’s popularity?
And Old Bay makes sense in a way even with it’s relatively short history. A body, even a well preserved one, is bound to undergo certain changes after a couple centuries. So the “Old” Bay may be a more recent reformulation of the mixture, designed to offset certain unpleasant side-effects of the Baron’s advancing years.
I think you need to lay off the LSD and start taking something less harmful. Like ‘ludes.