5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (22 page)

9

In accordance with the ancient Indian laws of Manu, any citizen who broke wind in front of the monarch was likely to have his anus amputated.

10

The African dictator Idi Amin dispensed advice on protocol to his fellow world leaders, from President Richard Nixon to Mao Zedong. He once reminded Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to pack her underpants.

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10

Ten Awesome

Compensation Claims

1

$1 billion: the amount claimed in 1998 by Cairo lawyer Mustafa Raslan in Damanhur, Egypt, against President Clinton. Raslan alleged that Clinton’s widely reported sexual peccadilloes made it impossible for him to raise his own children with good moral standards.

2

$9 million: paid by the New York Transit Authority in 1990 to a restaurant worker who fell in front of a train while drunk and lost an arm.

3

$6.6 million: claimed in 1997 by a Californian, who sued the owners of a house he had rented after he hurt himself diving into their swimming pool. They had failed to warn him that it also had a shallow end.

4

$3.6 million: damages claimed by Ursula Beckley of Long Island against a local supermarket in 1989 after the three-egg omelets she was making suddenly yielded an unexpected bonus in the form of a healthy, six-inch-long black snake. Her lawyers said that she had been so deeply traumatized that it was unlikely she would ever be able to look at an egg again.

5

$2.52 million: awarded to a convenience-store worker in West Virginia in 1995 after she suffered emotional distress, having hurt her back while opening a pickle jar.

6

$2 million: awarded to a convicted bank robber on parole in Oakland, California, in 1987, when the wad of money he had recently stolen from the Savings and Loan Company exploded in his pocket, releasing tear gas and dye and causing burns that required hospital treatment.

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[Ten Awesome Compensation Claims]

7

$1 million: claimed against Robert Nelson, president of a U.S. company that offered a cryogenics service, preserving in capsules of liquid nitrogen the bodies of people prepared to pay large sums in the hope that one day science will find a cure for death. In 1981, Nelson and an employee, Joseph Klockgether, were successfully sued for damages by relatives of their clients after admitting that they had allowed the frozen loved ones to thaw out.

8

$1 million: the amount claimed against Disneyland in 1997 by a woman who complained that her

grandchildren were traumatized by seeing Mickey Mouse climb out of his costume.

9

$100,000: received in damages in 1998 by Englishman Charles Cornell in the High Court, London. The plaintiff’s insurance businesses failed following his car accident. In the crash, Carnell received head injuries that his doctors testified left him with a gentler, more amiable personality, which was unsuited for the insurance business.

10

$50,000: received in a 1995 out-of-court settlement by a New Hampshire teenager from the manufacturers of a basketball net. The complainant lost his two front teeth when they became entangled in the net while he was performing a slam dunk.

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Eleven

11

Unexpected Origins

1560: Jean Nicot, a French ambassador in Portugal, gives his name to the remarkable new wonder drug nicotine, an antiseptic and universal cure-all that will put an end to ulcers, bites, headaches, colds, and rheumatism. A distinguished English doctor hails Monsieur Nicot’s discovery as “one of the best and surest remedies in the world” for apoplexy and giddiness.

1585: Sir Walter Raleigh returns home with tobacco and potatoes from the New World. It is generally agreed that potatoes are a potential health hazard leading to scrofula, consumption, flatulence, and unnatural carnal lust.

1859: Vaseline is invented in Brooklyn, New York, by a young English-born chemist, Robert Chesebrough. Ideal for removing stains from furniture, polishing wood surfaces, restoring leather, and preventing rust, it is also useful for dressing cuts and bruises. Chesebrough recommends eating a spoonful every day for good health: He ate a spoonful every morning and died at the age of ninety-six.

1876: Ketchup is marketed in the U.S. as a patent medicine to cure dyspepsia, liver and kidney complaints, and constipation.

1880: Opium is recommended as a cure for cholera, dysentery, toothache, flatulence, menopause, and mental illness and is the basis for several baby-soothing remedies.

1886: John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, stumbles upon the recipe which would become Coca-Cola. At the time,
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[Eleven Unexpected Origins]

he is working on series of failed patent medicines and hair restorers, including Triplex Liver Pills, Indian Queen Hair Dye, and Globe of Flower Cough Syrup.

1894: Dr. Harvey Kellogg creates his first breakfast-cereal product as an antidote to masturbation.

1898: Bayer, the company famous for manufacturing aspirin, launches Heroin, a new patent cough medicine. The new wonder drug, made from synthesized morphine, is also used to “cure” morphine addiction, to send babies with colic to sleep, and as a general painkiller; it is the subject of an intense advertising campaign at the turn of the century. Within twenty years, New York has fewer hacking coughs, but an estimated 300,000 heroin addicts.

1910: Salversan, the first effective treatment for syphilis, is invented by the admirably persistent Paul Ehrlich.

Popularly known as “Treatment 606,” it is Ehrlich’s six-hundred-and-sixth attempt to find a cure.

1931: A Colorado physician, Dr. Earle Cleveland Haas, obtains a patent for his invention, Dr. Haas’ Catamenial Device.

After early indifference to his project, he changes the name to Tampax, created from the words “tampon” and

“vaginal pack.”

1932: Adolf Hitler sketches a design for a new car on his napkin at a Munich restaurant table. He calls it the

“Strength through Joy” car: It later becomes known as the Volkswagen Beetle.

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Ten 10

Zealous Officials

1

When the city of Kirtipur in Ceylon fell to the king of Ghorka in 1770, the victor ordered an accurate census of the population. His officials obliged by amputating, then counting, the noses of everyone there.

2

In 1994, the regulatory authority for funeral parlors in Massachusetts suspended the license of undertaker Robert Miller for two years. It was acting on complaints that he had dug up the remains of two cremated bodies because relatives of the deceased failed to pay their funeral bills promptly.

3

In 1994, in Riga, Latvia, five local bus inspectors beat a thirty-three-year-old man to death for failing to produce a valid bus ticket.

4

In 1994, Los Angeles city officials ordered a strip-club owner to remove the stage upon which nude dancers performed. The authorities ruled that the stage was not wheelchair-accessible for disabled nude dancers, although they admitted that no such dancers had yet come forward.

5

In preparation for the first death-row hanging in fifty years, that of convicted murderer William Bailey in 1996, officials at the Delaware Correctional Center fixed nonskid safety strips to each of the twenty-three steps leading to the outdoor gallows.

6

In 1994, the Pennsylvania State Weights and Measures Office served notice of a violation on topless dancer Crystal Storm. They had ascertained that Miss Storm’s
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[Ten Zealous Officials]

bust measurement was only 50 inches, not her advertised measurement of “127,” which Miss Storm later claimed was in centimeters.

7

In 1992, the South Carolina Social Services Department sent a letter to a recently deceased man, informing him:

“Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992

because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.”

8

In the nineteenth century, Indian tax collectors persuaded defaulters to pay up by forcing them to drink buffalo milk laced with salt until they were half-dead with diarrhea.

9

In 1988, Cynthia Hess, who worked under the stage name “Chesty Love” in Indiana, claimed a $2,088 tax deduction against depreciation on surgical breast implants, weighing about ten pounds each, which boosted her bust size to 56FF. Tax officials allowed her claim: Ms. Hess’s breasts, they agreed, were so large that she couldn’t possibly derive any personal benefit from them and therefore were for business use only.

10

A man who died in his car in November 2005 was given a parking ticket as he sat slumped in his vehicle outside a busy shopping center in Melbourne, Australia. The traffic warden stuck the infringement notice on the seventy-one-year-old man’s car at Croydon Market. The mayor of the local council admitted: “It’s a sad situation. But it is simply a case of the parking officer not noticing.”

248

Ten Dea 10

ths Without Dignity

456 b.c.: Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, dies when an eagle drops a tortoise on his head.

1649:

Sr. Arthur Aston (c. 1590–1649), the Royalist commander during the English Civil War, is beaten to death with his own wooden leg by Cromwell’s men during the siege of Drogheda.

1687:

Jean-Baptiste Lully, the French composer, accidentally stabs himself in the foot with his baton and dies of gangrene.

1737:

Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, shows remarkable composure during a badly bungled attempt to cure her neglected strangulated hernia, but as she lies in bed surrounded by courtiers, her bowels burst, showering a torrent of excrement over the bed and the floor. Upon her death soon afterward, the poet Alexander Pope is moved to write:

Here lies wrapt in forty thousand towels
The only proof that Caroline had bowels.

1845:

At President Andrew Jackson’s funeral, his pet parrot, Poll, has to be ejected from the proceedings when it swears repeatedly.

1927:

Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, having just taken delivery of her brand-new Bugatti racing car, steps into it for the first time, waves gaily to her
251

[Ten Deaths Without Dignity]

friends, and speeds away. As she does so, her long red scarf becomes entangled in the spokes of her left rear wheel, snapping her neck and killing her instantly.

1975:

Claude François, “the French Elvis Presley” and co-writer of one of the most successful songs of all time,

“My Way,” dies attempting to change a lightbulb while standing in a water-filled bath, age thirty-nine.

1995:

An Italian stripper, Gina Lalapola, is found suffocated inside a cake she was supposed to leap out of at a bachelor party in Cosenza. Her body had lain inside the sealed wooden cake for more than an hour before her death was discovered.

1998:

The family of the late Russell U. Shell files a wrongful-death lawsuit against The Other Side nightclub in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, after Shell chokes to death on a miniature plastic penis in his cocktail.

2005:

Reverend Kyle Lake, thirty-three, reaches for a microphone while standing in a pool used for a Sunday-morning baptism in Waco, Texas, and is electrocuted. Pastor Ben Dudley tells the press: “At first there was definitely confusion just because everyone was trying to figure out what was going on, but then everyone just immediately started praying.”

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Twelve 12

Famous Body Parts

1

SANTA ANNA’S LEG The hero of the Alamo had a leg torn off in a skirmish with the French, but recovered it.

When he eventually became president of Mexico, he gave the limb a full state funeral. At public events he rode on horseback, waving his new cork leg over his head as a symbol of his sacrifices for his country. In 1847, facing the United States at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in Mexico, Santa Anna was enjoying a quiet roast-chicken lunch when his appetite was ruined by an uninvited regiment of Illinoisans, who stole the cork prosthetic.

Santa Anna hobbled away to fight another day, but the iconic limb remained in American hands, despite many requests from the Mexican government that it be returned. In the 1850s, army veterans charged a nickel or a dime for curiosity-seekers to handle the leg in hotel bars. Santa Anna’s trophy of war now resides in the Guard’s Museum at Camp Lincoln in Springfield.

2

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S EYES Although officially he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Delaware River, Einstein’s death led to an unseemly scramble for his body parts. Removed by his ophthalmologist Dr. Henry Abrams during the autopsy in 1955, the peepers were stored in a safe-deposit box in a New Jersey bank.

3

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE’S PENIS Removed at

autopsy by a team of French and Belgian doctors, the member has been put up for auction twice, first in 1972

at Christie’s in London, when it was observed to be approximately one inch long and was listed as “a small
253