Today’s Blue Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Blue man Paul Karason – who used a silver preparation to treat dermatitis.
Silver, if ingested, colors the skin blue. Permanently. And it’s actually worse than that sounds. Calling silvered skin “blue” is easy shorthand. But there’s the fun electric blue in people’s imaginations when they hear this, and then there’s the ghastly gray zombie-Smurf blue people actually turn. Thankfully, this condition, called argyria, isn’t fatal and causes no internal damage. A man in the early 1900s even made a living as “the Blue Man” in a freak show after overdosing on silver nitrate to cure his syphilis. (It didn’t work.) In our own times, a survivalist and fierce Libertarian from Montana, the doughty and doughy Stan Jones, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2006 despite being startlingly blue. To his credit, Jones had as much fun with himself as the media did. When asked what he told children and adults who pointed at him on the street, he deadpanned, “I just tell them I’m practicing my Halloween costume.”
Jones also gladly explained how he contracted argyria. Having his ear to the tin can about conspiracy theories, Jones became obsessed in 1995 with the Y2K computer crash, and especially with the potential lack of antibiotics in the coming apocalypse. His immune system, he decided, had better get ready. So he began to distill a heavy-metal moonshine in his backyard by dipping silver wires attached to 9-volt batteries into tubs of water – a method not even hard-core silver evangelists recommend, since electric currents that strong dissolve far too many silver ions in the bath. Jones drank his stash faithfully for four and a half years, right until Y2K fizzled out in January 2000.
Stan Jones.