My first thought when I saw this headline was simple: she must have been a huge fan. And she didn’t even have TiVo! But then the word “dead” hit me, and it realized that it wasn’t so simple.
Apparently, in 1966, this woman in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) sat down in front of her black-and-white TV — probably to catch the second installment of the Batman! when the Penguin pretended to have gone straight and formed his Penguin Protection Agency — and at some point, up and died.
Nobody found her for 42 years. 42 years! That’s longer that any most a couple of your ‘lopers have even been alive! Ladies and Gentlemen, is there any more damming evidence that on a day-to-day basis, living in a Communist country just totally and utterly sucked?
Not to mention a paper tiger. Here we spent 50 years and untold zillions of dollars waging a Cold War with these people, and yet their police force was too incompetent to think that maybe a missing person might be inside of her own house.
A police spokesman said: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.
Ya think? Sure, Tito and the Yugoslav government had more important things to worry about, what with the ongoing tension with the Russkies, building perfect athletes for the Olympics, and the ongoing competition that their state-run electronics consortium had with the Moldova-based DuroSport Electronics company, whose Black Market success with the DuroTube apparently threatened them.
Of course, if she was watching a DuroTube, she probably would have been killed by the radiation eventually.
But it’s not just the Yugoslav / Croatia governments who seem dodgy and incompetent, but this poor woman’s neighbors. While the neighbors apparently thought that she had moved out of the flat — despite that noone actually saw her move — was it such a terrible place — think the area that became Hamsterdam in The Wire — that they weren’t even bumped a little bit by the fact that nobody ever moved in?
Not to mention the fact that, if she was gone, wouldn’t anybody have noticed the fact that there was the telltale TV glow coming from her flat 24 hours a day for 42 years!! Or if she lived in apartment building, the sound of snow in the middle of the night? I mean, it wasn’t if she was watching MTV. I can see it if she was watching MTV, because it was on all of the time.
And in all of that time, no burglars ever broke in, no neighbors ever tried to introduce themselves, no kids tried to pull a prank, no druggies made it a squat house.
Instead, she just sat there and decayed. For 42 years. You can totally picture the scene when they found her, can’t you? And if the TV stayed on all of that time, at least the quality of the programming got better and better over the years.
But there are just more questions, and the biggest one is this: why now? What changed? What suddenly happened to make somebody think “gee, maybe I oughta check out that place with the weird glow and TV all hours of the day and night?” Or was the TV even still on? Does a black-and white TV last for 42 years of continual use?
It’s very frustrating, because these are all incredibly important questions, and I have a feeling that we’ll never have all of the answers.
One thing is for sure: I hope that she at least lived long enough to see Batman and Robin escape The Penguin’s diabolical trap.
Considering the electricity bill probably wasn’t paid in the 42 years, my guess is that the TV was probably cut off after a month. The one question I have is– HOW DID NO ONE SMELL HER ROTTING FLESH???