5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback
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Authors: Karl Shaw
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Peopl
5
e
Who Died
During
Sex
Also by Karl Shaw
Gross
Gross 2
The Mammoth Book of Eccentrics
The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists
Royal Babylon
Comedy equals tragedy
plus timing.
—anonymous
Broadway
Books
New York
Peopl
5
e
Who Died
During
Sex
&
100
Other
Terribly
Tasteless
Lists
Karl
Shaw
published by broadway books
Copyright © 2007 by Karl Shaw.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
broadway books and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book appeared in
The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists,
The Mammoth Book of Eccentrics, Gross,
and
Gross 2.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress
eISBN: 978-0-7679-2296-8
v1.0
Contents
Goat’s Testicles to Go: 10 National Delicacies
Food for Thought: 10 Great Gourmands
Cereal Killers: 10 Food-Related Deaths
History’s 10 Least Appealing Dinner Dates
10 Alternative Uses for Coca-Cola
Great Balls of Fire: 40 Syphilitics
10 Milestones in Contraception
The Stuff of Fairy Tales: 10 Royal Marriages
History’s 10 Least Romantic Honeymoons
Chapter Three: Courting the Muse
The Grim Rapper: 10 Most Dangerous Bands in
Last Curtain Calls: 10 Showbiz Exits
Killing Me Softly: 10 Musical Moments
Shock of the New: 10 Great Moments in Art
Essential Elvis Trivia: The Top 10
10 Hollywood Suicide Shootings
Pennies from Heaven: The World’s 10 Highest-Earning
Foul Play: 10 Great Sporting Scandals
Read ’Em and Wipe: 12 Magic Moments in Toilet
History’s 10 Greatest Fashion Mistakes
10 Facts about the Human Condition
viii
10 Health Problems that Helped Napoleon Meet
Of Lice and Men: 10 Great Unwashed
’Rhoid Rage: 10 Hemorrhoid Sufferers
10 Cures No Longer Recommended by the
10 Celebrity Fashion and Beauty Tips
Chapter Five: Crime & Punishment
Hard Ax to Follow: 10 Famous Executioners
10 Most Dubious Legal Defenses in a
12 Original Observations Made by
10 Questionable Murder Motives
10 Causes of the Black Death According
Beyond Belief: 10 Routes to Sainthood
10 Things You Are Very Unlikely to Learn in
ix
Chapter Seven: Unstrung Heroes
10 Lesser-Known Scientific Endeavors
Shot in the Foot: 10 Military Bloopers
10 Former Occupations of Dictators
10 Household Accessories Belonging to
10 Monarchs Madder than King George III
Uneasy Lies the Head: 10 Paranoid Rulers
Leaders at Leisure: 10 Hobbies of Dictators
Bark at the Moon: 10 Canine Cosmonauts
10 Items Yet to Appear on eBay
You Shouldn’t Have: 10 Great Gifts
The World’s 10 Wealthiest Pets
Now Wash Your Hands: 10 Rules of Etiquette
10 Awesome Compensation Claims
x
Where There’s a Will: 10 Last Testaments
It’s Your Funeral: 10 Reasons Why You May
Wish You Had Died in Ignorance
Dying Optimists: 10 Last Words
12 Suggestions for Further Reading
xi
Introduction
It all began with Queen Caroline’s bowels. I found them while reading a book about King George II. His wife Caroline, it appears, could swear like a trouper, but she showed remarkable composure when she was at the receiving end of a badly bungled attempt to cure her neglected strangulated hernia in 1737. After her operation, as she lay in bed surrounded by courtiers, her bowel burst open, showering excrement all over the bed and the floor. One of her courtiers said that she hoped the relief would do her majesty some good; the Queen replied calmly that she hoped so too, because that was probably the last evacuation she would ever have. Upon her death soon afterward, the great poet Alexander Pope was moved to write: Here lies wrapt in forty thousand towels
The only proof that Caroline had bowels.
Gripping stuff, but there was more. Her husband King George (grandfather of the “mad” one who lost the colonies) was an inveterate gambler and would bet on anything that moved, but he lost his appetite for it when he found out that his loyal subjects were laying bets at odds of 10–1 that he would be dead within the year. In fact, he lived on a while longer than some had hoped, eventually dying on the toilet, Elvis-style, while straining to overcome his king-sized constipation.
I was hooked. What about that poem—didn’t you lose your head for that kind of thing? And what were those royal doctors doing while the Queen was redecorating her bedroom? Had there been any more hideous royal deaths? What about
[Introduction]
embarrassing deaths in general? How many famous people died during, um, sex?
Books about exploding bowels are rarely bestsellers, but I couldn’t resist writing one anyway—a celebration of the grotesque aesthetic, of life’s cultural underbelly; a compendium of wicked and indelicate facts. I soon discovered that in sixteenth-century Europe it was conventional for men to greet female guests by fondling their breasts—providing they were related, of course; that when Alexander the Great died his body was preserved in a large jar of honey; that some South American cannibals believed you could cure a limp by eating someone else’s good leg; that Samuel Pepys chronicled his daily life in the minutest detail, but only once in nine years does he mention either himself or his wife taking a bath; and that in the Indian state of Baroda, the Maharajah had criminals executed by having elephants step on their heads. Wow.