BLUE IS THE NEW SILVER

Without belaboring travel details...

Sat next to a very nice ceramic engineer from upstate New York on the flight from JFK to Taipei. He was en route to Indonesia, where he does interesting work with low-tech, hi-result ceramic water filters.

Strange thing was that, from the first glance, all i could think was 'this guy's face is blue'. After chatting for a while, that initial notion subsided a bit. Subsided until his end-of-flight plug for the wonders of silver solution (AgNO1- silver nitrate?) in fighting bacterial infection. After heaping praise upon silver (shown to cure AIDS, etc), he lamented that the FDA would not approve it due to some outlandish belief that it turned users blue. Thanks in large part to jetlag, Fee and I somehow managed to stifle our laughter (later released in the airport).

I seemed to recall one of Garcia-Marquez' characters in Love in the Time of Cholera taking silver for medicinal purposes and turning a slight shade of blue. Though our seatmate did not get his in some small Colombian port town, the bottles label was in spanish, purchased from a Mexican apothecary.