h a l f b a k e r yBaker Street Irregulars
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Welcome to the halfbakery. |
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In my home state water is already a scarce commodity. Good luck with your business plan. |
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Welcome to the HB, [GranaryOaf]! |
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W.r.t. [Big]'s quibble, we need to establish
whether water needs to be 100% blessed, or
whether some proportion of blessedness is
sufficient. It may even be that blessedness, once
conferred, can propagate in water like algae. |
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Some double-blind trials are needed. One set of
people are given water which has been 100%
blessed; other sets (matched for age, sex and
socioeconomic class) will be given 90%, 80%...0%
blessed water. Benefits reported by each group
will be scored numerically, to identify the
optimum dilution/benefit tradeoff. |
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Actually, I'm wondering if I could set up a remote
water-blessing website, whereat people would pay
to have the water supply to their house blessed by
WiFi. |
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It's dangerous to put the power of holy water into the
hands of so many, especially with the ease of practicing
witchcraft through widely available Internet guides. |
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But by how much are they diluted? |
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Would it be possible to bless a normal quantity of
water, say 1l* , and then concentrate the
blessedness down to a few ml? The canny
Holy/font water user could then carry
concentrated Blessedness for dilution in everyday
drinks or baths. As an additional benefit, the
concentrated dose may be useful should one
suffer a grievous injury. |
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* assuming blessedness works equally well in both
metric and imperial units, perhaps there's
Catholic/C of E incompatibility here? |
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I agree that the first step must be to establish the
therapeutic dose. |
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But it's so much more fun to determine the LD50 ... |
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//concentrate the blessedness down// |
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A lot would depend on whether the blessed
molecules are lighter or heavier than regular water
molecules. |
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Given that normal oxygen-16 and hydrogen-1 are
the lightest stable isotopes of their respective
elements, we can safely assume that holy water is
denser, containing some combination of
deuterium, tritium, oxygen-17 and oxygen-18. |
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Either that, or it's not wholly water. |
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<Smacks [MB] on wrist with ruler> |
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Holiness is more like chirality, or nuclear
isomerism, shirley ? Or maybe proton spin,
like in NMR. |
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If an isotopic change were involved, upon blessing, a quantity of
plain water would change its mass upon being blessed.
What about the dissolved solids? Is it just the water molecules
involved, or is it possible to have holy Calcium Carbonate too?
After all, there is such a thing as holy oil as well. Maybe it's just
the hydrogen atoms that are affected. |
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Following the "Da Vinci's Last Breath" path,
since very little water is actually lost from
the ecosphere, all the holy water ever
blessed is still here - just dispersed. The
homeopathic dilution aspect then becomes
interesting. Any given sample of water has a
finite probability of containing one molecule
of holy water. |
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Hmmmm. When we work out where we're
going with this, we'll get back to you. |
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Does anyone have the protocol for making water
holey? We ought to be able to figure out what's
going on here. |
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OK, a quick online check isn't very helpful. |
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However, some of the protocols recommend
filtering the water first, so there are clearly no
blessedness particles as such. |
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Another source advises against using tap water, as
it may contain chlorine or fluoride ions. |
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Yet another source says that you have to add salt. |
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So, we're dealing with a water/solute system. The
process is disrupted by chlorine (isn't the
"chlorine" in tap water actually hypochlorite?), and
also by fluoride ions; but it's clearly dependent on
sodium chloride. |
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OK, we need a chemist here. |
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When I was a child I figured a priest could bless the ocean, and never have to do it again. My Dad suggested the water wouldn't be all that holy by the time it returned via the sewer. |
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//a priest could bless the ocean // |
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You'd probably need something more powerful than a regular priest -
better to use an Archbishop at the very least, even better would be a
Pope. As the Catholic church now has a spare pope, maybe he could
be assigned to the task. After all, retirement doesn't make him any less
papist; just because a doctor or a pilot is retired, doesn't mean they've
forgotten how to do it. |
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Also, the Pope does an annual "Urbi et Orbi" blessing, so maybe that
could just be extended to cover "Aqua" as well. |
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A convenient portable unblessing mechanism would be a real boon to demons, witches, etc. if the Pope decided to bless all the water of the world at once as [8th] suggests. |
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Come to that, in the original idea we'd need to install unblessers at the meter, or a lot of houses on the same water infrastructure as the Holy reservoir would be getting free blessedness, and we can't have that, can we? Can priests curse water? |
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Rumors have been surfacing recently of a secret lab
deep beneath the Vatican where researchers are
developing a variant of holy water known as “holy-water-nine”, which has the property of
causing any
ordinary water it comes into contact with to
reformulate into HW9 as well. The possibility of such a
substance being released into the environment is
terrifying to consider. |
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is blessing somehow dependent upon surface area?
Perhaps if the water were ultrasonically blasted into
a fine mist we might up the efficiency? |
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// is terrifying to consider // |
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Only if you're Undead, shirely ? |
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Are you suggesting that having substances
secretly introduced into the public water
supply by a shadowy organisation with
dubious motives and a total lack of
accountability is somehow a bad thing ? What
are you, some sort of leftie pinko commie
fellow-traveller ? Bet you don't like the NSA
either, and object to the government reading
emails, tapping phones and covertly aquiring
and indexing
DNA profiles from so-called "innocent"
citizens* purely for the
noble motive of National Security … |
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*It's true, 'they' really are doing this … |
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//DNA profiles from so-called "innocent" citizens// |
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I wonder if my slipshod microbiology has led to me
being recorded as a particularly well educated E.coli? |
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You're blowing the whistle on them, and you think you're
safe? Rest easy, it shouldn't be long for you. |
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..."a morally ignorant priest". Please expound. |
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^ He'd be paid a decent amount of money to use his
beliefs in this way ;) |
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The holy water would literally be used for everything
- radiators, tap water, showers, toilets etc. Hence I
would argue that trials are not necessary -
homeowners would be surrounded by a holy aura
running through the walls of the house. |
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As regards to the efficiency of the priest, I would
argue that it depends upon the proximity to water
rather than amount. Therefore I would station him
right next to the pipe pumping out the water,
allowing him to bless all the water being pumped
from a distance of 1m at most. |
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And my answers to BigSleeps questions; |
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1) I'm not so sure, that's why I'm starting in Christian
territories. I would suggest that if you mix all holy
waters, you get some form of philosophers stone.
But that is many years off. |
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2) Yes, but I'm not pumping blood to peoples houses
- I might get complaints. |
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3) 2 circles of hell per day. |
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// if you mix all holy waters, you get some form of
philosophers stone.// |
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Exactly. It's a bit like mixing the wrong sorts of
screenwash - it'll all just congeal and block the
plumbing. |
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Few people realize that most of the deposits that
form in kettles are because household water is
usually from mixed sources. River water is
relatively new, and will contain traces of recent
religious blessings; groundwater often takes
thousands of years to travel through the aquifer,
and is often contaminated with the blessings of
older, incompatible religions. Mix these together
and you have a metastable solution which, when
prodded by heating, precipitates stuff out. |
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// As regards to the efficiency of the priest, I
would argue that it depends upon the
proximity to
water rather than amount. Therefore I would
station him right next to the pipe pumping
out the water, allowing him to bless all the
water being pumped from a distance of 1m
at most. // |
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Well, basing your calculations on inverse-
square law would seem a reasonable starting
point. The rest is just basic fluid mechanics. |
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// if you mix all holy waters, you get some
form of philosophers stone. // |
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We understand that can be very painful, but
there are pills for it now. |
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// I'm not pumping blood to peoples houses -
I might get complaints // |
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As long as it's properly refrigerated, and you
get the cross-matching right, there shouldn't
be a problem. |
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What is needed is a better empirical model for holiness. |
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Is the amount of holiness absorbed from a devout believer
proportional to the distance between the emitter and the receiver ? |
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Consider the holiness to be an archetypal point source, radiating
isotropically. The amount of holiness impinging on the recipient will
be determined by the exposed area of the recipient, and the distance
from the source; the question "Does holiness attenuate with distance
?" is therefore extremely important. |
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Anecdotally, larger amounts of holiness(=benefit) can be transferred
by physical contact (direct coupling). This leads to the conclusion
that immersing the holy one in the water would work best. |
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How rapidly does holiness attenuate in pure water ? |
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//imply if you hide a few priests behind some rocks you can levitate
an evilly charged body above a nearby lake.// |
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Now, there's an idea with possibilities ... canals running beside
strategically placed churches would allow large payloads to be
transported with minimal friction, just by strapping a couple of
politicians to the top. For really big loads, you'd probably need a Bond
Supervillain, or Justin Bieber. |
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Would a swimming pool filled with holy water leak? |
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Have enough trouble keeping it fill as it is. Welcome. |
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We need a priest, a Holyness-proof barrier (with 2
slits in it) and a bunch of the as-yet-unblessed*. Then
we could determine if Blessings are particles or
waves AND what their wavelength is. |
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You might be able to pick up the Templeton AND
Nobel prizes in the same experiment. |
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Not sure that would work: in the 13th century the Vatican, as a cost-saving measure, stopped producing actual holy water, having realized that the premise of "we're all sinners" meant that the holy water doesn't have to be actually holy, merely less defiled than the recipient. |
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Today, the original formula long lost to time, what we get is "holier than thou" water. The pope, for his personal needs, uses heavily diluted saints' urine. |
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More likely the tears of children who have been maltreated and
sexually abused by adherents of the Catholic faith, such tears being in
plentiful supply ... |
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My fear is a leak in the reservoir. Everyone becomes Holy by mistake. Even the non-believers. That would be scary. I think. |
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I'd like to see a holistic theory of water which explains all of its unlikely and mysterious properties in a single model. It can remember things, which is how homeopathy works, so you can dissolve something in a sample of water and this effect will be 'remembered' and indeed, magnified, no matter how much you dilute the original sample. You can bless it, but this appears to be a mechanism which is independent of that used by homeopathy because it appears you need to bless all the water which you later want to have spiritual properties. Finally, it has an attractive force (like gravity) for twigs at a distance. It is not clear whether this force follows an inverse square law like other forces or whether it's another manifestation of the other properties of water. |
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it can also determine normal old crone from witch..
although no accurate crone/witch weight/volume
records have ever been discovered suggesting that
this may be plain old density. |
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Arthur, King of the Britons, knows the answer to that one. Something
to do with ducks ... |
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Right, you lot continue on with this quest and I'll tackle the holy lands problem. We will meet at the beach. |
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//We will meet at the beach. // |
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"On second thoughts, let us not go there. It is a silly place." |
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Experiments to test the independence of these properties of water would be interesting - e.g.:
Is holy water as good as normal water at differentiating crones and witches?
Can holy water hold homeopathic 'memories'?
Is there any difference in effectiveness of dowsing for normal water, holy water and water that has been used for sorting crones from witches? |
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Instead of derision and sarcasm, should I meet a
homeopath in the future, I will instead ask plenty of
questions about the compatibility of Holiness with
30c Arnica or whatever. One needs to be aware of
cross reactions. Also can I find lost homeopathic
medicine by dowsing? (delightfully, there are lots of
dowsing smartphone apps). |
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Is holy water FDA-approved ? |
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huh.... the FDA? they're just Big Pharma's bully boys
that stop you dealing on their patch... |
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You can buy holiness now ? Who knew … ? |
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Do they take charge cards ? |
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Using a charge card offers up to 10% off on the sale of
indulgences. |
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// Do they take charge cards? // |
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// Yes, of course they do. // |
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They also like Paypal, and are particularly fond of bitcoins. |
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Are they confident of Paypal infallibility? |
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If you could just get the glaciers themselves blessed, then the trickle down aqua sanctificus effect would be most far reaching. |
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//If you could just get the glaciers themselves
blessed// |
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Yet another area of uncertainty. Can ice be holy?
Does holy water cease to be so upon freezing?
Does it regain holyness once thawed? |
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Does anyone want to draft a letter to the Vatican
regarding the huge number of uncertainties
regarding holy water? We'd better be quick, the
current Pope is 2-3 speeches away from admitting
that the whole Catholicism jig is up. |
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And here I thought it was only the Irish Catholics that did the jig. |
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Just had a random thought: since all water molecules look the same, how can you tell which ones have been blessed? Do they wear a tiny halo when viewed under a microscope? |
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//since all water molecules look the same// I had no idea, [Canuck], I truly am impressed by your amazing scientific research achievement in managing to check every single one. How on earth did you manage it? |
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//how can you tell which ones have been blessed? // |
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Perhaps there's an assay involving vampires or
demons or something. |
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Is the pope's urine holy ? |
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Like in Gruyere ? Hence the Swiss Guards, presumably. |
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Sorry for the generalization [pocmloc]. I wasn't implying that I had checked. They just all look alike to me. |
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Now that raises a question. If someone who makes a comment about a person's heritage is considered a racist, does it follow that my gaffe about water molecules makes me a chemist? |
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A comment about writing utensils could make you a penist. |
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Water is an odd molecule though. You could consider any contiguous body of water (say, a bathful) to be a single molecule. So, I'd hypothesise that either blessing water works on all contiguously connected water, or it works to a varying amount on water depending on the distance of the water from the blesser, following an inverse square law. |
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// You could consider any contiguous body of water
(say, a bathful) to be a single molecule.// |
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You could, but only under some rather extreme
conditions. |
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// // You could consider any contiguous body of
water (say, a bathful) to be a single molecule.// |
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You could, but only under some rather extreme
conditions.// |
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I've viewed apartments with baths small enough for
this to be true, the estate agent knew how many
taps there were but not where they were going. |
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// You could consider any contiguous body of
water (say, a bathful) to be a single
molecule.// // You could, but only under
some rather extreme conditions // |
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Well … if the water is pure, and given the pKa
of water is low, the degree of ionisation into
H+/OH- is small, and they're ions, not
molecules. So although H2O is a weak proton
donor, and specific hydrogen atoms aren't
tightly bound to a specific oxygen atom,
saying that "it's all one big molecule", as if
it's a polymer, is misleading. |
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anyone know where you buy a 0.2 Angstom bath
plug? |
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So many clever anno's & nobody has pointed out that
you'd need to have 2 sets of pipes to every house to
extract the 50% surcharge? Otherwise, 1 house opts
out, but get it for free. |
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And, vampires who are exposed to such dilute holy
water might build up immunity. |
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