Funny you should mention that. I was thinking about that case a lot recently ... it gets cited a lot as frivolous, and most people don't know -- and often don't care -- that she wasn't burned as in "her skin turned red" but as in "her skin turned black and sloughed off." And that it had happened to other people. A lot.
A similar situation happened to my mother a couple years ago on a British Airlines flight. The coffee scalded her to where she had second degree burns (blisters) on her legs. Fortunately, she was okay with OTC medicine and a few days of recovery. And this was in the "post-McDonalds lawsuit" era, so presumably the coffee wasn't as hot as it could have been. But I could easily see how at a higher temperature, the injury would have been even more serious.
Yeah. I've been known to ask people (especially guys) how they'd like having water just short of boiling dumped over their genitals. But the thing is, even knowing the facts doesn't do much to change the minds of people who are ALREADY CONVINCED that the urban-legend version is the true one. I actually had one person say flat out that the facts didn't matter, it was a horrible verdict. This was after he'd gotten the Infodump From Hell on a newsgroup, and had it proven to him beyond any doubt that every single thing he thought he knew about that case was wrong.
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No further comment, except that I can't IMAGINE sitting in scalding liquid for a minute and a half.
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---Ellen
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