Foreigner – "Cold As Ice" (1977)

You know that you are

Cold as ice

The last few 2 or 3 lines posts have featured the tabloid-style e-mail subject lines that the snooty Washington Post is hoping will cause people to visit its website and maybe click on some ads.  

Give the cheap tricks I stoop to in order to get you people to click on the ads on 2 or 3 lines, I have no business casting the first stone at the Washington Post.  But wouldn’t you think that a newspaper with 47 Pulitzer Prizes in the bank would hold itself to a higher standard than I do?

A Pulitzer medal

Here’s the headline from a Post story that was highlighted in an e-mail sent to subscribers earlier this month:

From the Post:

When the Goldsboro, NC, resident spotted the freezer at her neighbor’s yard sale last month, she thought she was getting a good deal.  The neighbor was charging $30 for a deep freezer with a hinged lid — the kind of freezer large enough for someone to climb inside.

But there was a catch.  The buyer was told she couldn’t start using the freezer immediately because the neighbor had promised to lend it out to her church’s Sunday school class.

Surprise!

The neighbor told her the church would come to pick up the items inside the freezer, which was sealed shut with duct tape.  But when three weeks passed and the church folks never showed up, the buyer began to get suspicious.

More from the Post:

[The buyer] was keeping the freezer plugged in in the corner of a spare bedroom, alongside houseplants, an armchair, a vacuum cleaner and spare toiletries.  Last Friday, she peeled off the duct tape and looked inside.

The first things the woman saw were a green sheet and a bag of kitty litter.  Then, her eyes landed on a human foot.

“I saw toes and a foot and ankle,” the woman said.  She slammed the freezer shut.

An autopsy confirmed that the freezer did contain human remains.  The medical examiner detected no sign of foul play, and ruled that the death resulted from natural causes.  

But that doesn’t mean the woman is off the hook entirely.  Concealing the death of a person is a felony in North Carolina, and disposal of bodies is regulated by state public-health and environmental laws.

Here's how one local TV station reported the story:

The woman who bought the freezer told a reporter that she knew immediately who the victim was:  “I recognized the foot.  It was her mother’s foot.”

The neighbor’s mother lived with her, but hadn’t been seen since suffering a stroke last September.  

The neighbor told friends that her mother was in a nursing home in West Virginia, and that she was moving there to be closer to her.  It appears instead that she had stuffed her dead mother inside the freezer some nine months ago and skedaddled out of Goldsboro after selling the freezer at her garage sale in May.

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Foreigner’s “Cold As Ice” was released on the album of the same name – which was the band’s debut album – in 1977.  

Here’s “Cold As Ice”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: