5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (4 page)

6

In 1885, the U.S. army captain and part-time naturalist John Bourke published a detailed description of the Urine Dance of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. Bourke related how he had been privileged to witness this unique ritual, which involved a dozen Zuni Indians dancing around a fire while drinking several gallons of fresh urine. When the Zuni invited their guests to participate in a similar ceremony, this time involving human excrement, Bourke made his excuses and left.

7

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, the remains of the former Dean of St. Paul’s, John Colet, were rescued from the cathedral where they had lain since 1509.

Although protected by a lead-lined coffin, it was noted by two gentlemen called Wyld and Greatorex that the Dean’s remains had become cooked in his preserving fluids and had dissolved into a soupy substance.

They sampled the “soup” and declared that it tasted

“only of iron.”

8

When Britain’s great naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson died, his corpse was placed in a keg of brandy to preserve
23

[Ten Exclusive Beverages]

it on the long journey home. Although Nelson’s body bubbled away in it for days, that didn’t prevent his crew from drinking the spirits later.

9

The Cocoma tribe of Peru drank the ground-up bones of a deceased relative in a fermented brew. They believed that it was much better for the dead to be inside a warm friend than outside in the cold earth.

10

Adolf Hitler once attempted to cure his chronic flatulence by drinking machine-gun oil.

24

10

Ten Alternative

Uses for Coca-Cola

1

As a spermicide
[India]

2

As a pesticide
[India]

3

As a toilet bowl cleaner

4

As a windshield washer

5

As a rust-spot remover

6

As a bloodstain remover

7

As a grease-stain remover

8

As a sink cleaner

9

As a meat tenderizer

10

As a wallpaper-paste remover

25

Waiting f 10

or a Grill Like You:

Ten Human Recipes

1

Adolph Luetgert, a Chicago master butcher in the 1870s, was fired by a driving ambition to make his sausages famous all over America. Luetgert’s dream came true when he was arrested and tried for the murder of his wife Louisa after disposing of her corpse by melting it down in one of his giant vats and incorporating her into his sausage production line. For two years after Luetgert’s conviction, sausage sales in Illinois and neighboring Michigan hit an all-time low.

2

The British explorer Captain James Cook often wrote in his journals about the cannibalistic habits of some of the natives he encountered on his trips to the South Seas.

Ironically, he ended his days as a Hawaiian buffet. All that Cook’s men could find of him after he had been killed and dismembered at a traditional
heianu
ceremony at Keala Kekua were a few bones and some salted flesh.

3

In 1991, Wang Guang, owner of the White Temple restaurant in China, built up a huge following for his heavily spiced Sichuan-style dumplings. Over a four-year period the exotic fillings were supplied by Guang’s brother, who worked as an assistant in the local crematorium. The secret ingredient of White Temple’s menu—human flesh—was exposed after police were tipped off by the parents of a young girl who had died in a road accident. When they came to cremate her body they discovered that parts of it were missing.

4

The Carib Indians of the West Indies, encountered by Columbus, were the world connoisseurs of human haute
26

[Ten Human Recipes]

cuisine. Caribs bred children expressly for edible purposes: the male children were castrated because it improved the flavor. According to Caribs, the best bits on a human being are the palms of the hands, the fingers, and the toes. Columbus noted that the Caribs considered the French to be the very tastiest people.

5

Marco Polo noted in 1275 that the people of Southeast Asia ate the feet of their captives, believing them to be

“the most savory food in the world.”

6

When the Chinese famine of 206 b.c. killed half the population, human flesh became the staple diet. The taste for people, however, lingered on long after famine conditions had gone. During the T’ang dynasty in the late ninth and tenth centuries, cannibalism was permitted by law and human flesh was sold publicly in street markets.

7

The Tartar hordes that swept across Europe in 1242 were particularly fond of girls. Appetizing young maidens were issued as rations to army officers, while common soldiers chewed on the tough flesh of older women.

Breast meat was regarded as the finest tidbit and was reserved for the prince’s table.

8

Fijian cannibals acquired a taste for hanks of salted human flesh—a variation on European or American chewing tobacco.

9

During World War II, the British Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, carefully considered but finally rejected a plan,
27

[Ten Human Recipes]

proposed by his government scientists, to feed the country on black pudding made from surplus blood-bank donations.

10

In 1977, the U.S. government staged the official grand opening ceremony of their brand-new Department of Agriculture staff canteen, which was attended by Robert Bergland, the agriculture secretary. Mr. Bergland unveiled a brass plaque naming the canteen the Alfred Packer Memorial Dining Facility after one of America’s most famous nineteenth-century frontiersmen. A few months later, the plaque was removed when someone remembered what the late Mr. Packer had been chiefly famous for—killing and eating five Colorado gold prospectors in the 1870s.

28

20

Gluttons for Punishment:

Twenty World

Eating Records

1

50 hot dogs in 12 minutes

2

57 cow brains (18 pounds) in 10 minutes

3

3.5 pounds of cooked dog in 18 minutes, 10 seconds 4

100 yards of spaghetti in 28 seconds

5

12 slugs in 2 minutes

6

28 cockroaches in 4 minutes

7

60 earthworms in 3 minutes, 6 seconds

8

100 live maggots in 5 minutes, 29 seconds 9

2 pounds of eels in 32 seconds

10

144 snails in 11 minutes, 30 seconds

11

12 bananas (including skins) in 4 minutes, 14 seconds 12

13 raw eggs in 1.4 seconds

13

65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes, 40 seconds 14

7 quarter-pound sticks of salted butter in 5 minutes 15

5.75 pounds of asparagus spears in 10 minutes 16

6 pounds 9 ounces of cabbage in 9 minutes 17

1 gallon 9 ounces of vanilla ice cream in 12 minutes 18

6 pounds of tinned Spam in 12 minutes

19

3 onions in 1 minute

20

4 32-ounce bowls of mayonnaise in 8 minutes
29

Love Hurts

Twelve 12

Celebrity Celibates

1

KING EDWARD “THE CONFESSOR” Edward had

no sexual relations at all with his wife Edith, a curious state of affairs known in theological terms as a “chaste marriage” by which Edith came to be known as a “virgin queen.” There was some confusion whether Edward abstained for religious reasons or from his aversion to his wife, but tradition has it that it was the former, and Edward was duly made a saint in 1161. Some of Edith’s contemporaries were less sure of her virginity.

2

SIR ISAAC NEWTON A lifelong bachelor and rigidly puritanical, he was said to have laughed just once in his life, when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid.

He severed all relations with a friend who once told him an off-color joke about a nun.

3

NIKOLA TESLA The Serbian-American scientist who invented AC power transmission avoided all romantic entanglements, believing that sex was a drain on creativity. When asked by a reporter why he never married, Tesla replied, “I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.”

4

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN The fairy-tale

writer made highly publicized declarations of love for prominent, unattainable women, including the “Swedish nightingale,” Jenny Lind. He also visited prostitutes, but he paid them just to sit and chat with him. He died unmarried and a virgin, so terrified of being buried alive
33

[Twelve Celebrity Celibates]

that he left a written request that one of his main arteries be severed before he was placed in his coffin.

5

J. M. BARRIE The creator of Peter Pan, the little boy who refused to grow up, was barely five feet tall and always blamed his short stature for his lack of success with women. In 1894, however, while seriously ill, Barrie made a dramatic deathbed marriage proposal to Mary Ansell, a beautiful actress who had starred in one of his plays. She accepted, but on their honeymoon it became apparent that the recuperating Barrie had little interest in normal marital relations. The union was never consummated.

6

LEWIS CARROLL A mathematics teacher, amateur photographer, and author of some of the great classics of children’s literature, including
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
, Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, had no relationships at all with women, although at one point there was talk of an affair with the leading actress of the day, Ellen Terry. She was dismissive of the story; when asked to comment about her reported liaison with the author, she replied, “He was as fond of me as he could be of anyone over the age of ten.”

7

EDGAR DEGAS The French Impressionist painter and sculptor spent long hours gazing at naked women getting in and out of bathtubs, but he was probably impotent.

One day a wealthy hostess asked him; “Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?” He replied, “Because, madam, women in general are ugly.”

34

[Twelve Celebrity Celibates]

8

GEORGE FREDERIC HANDEL The unmarried

German-born English musician gave away few clues about his private life. His royal patron, King George II, was one of many contemporaries who was kept guessing; when the king asked Handel why there was no Mrs.

Handel, the great composer replied, “I have no time for anything but music.” Handel did, however, have a stormy relationship with a close friend, the young German composer and singer Johann Mattheson. One day at the opera, he and Mattheson had a spat over who should play the harpsichord. Handel refused to budge, and a fistfight broke out in the orchestra pit.

9

SØREN KIERKEGAARD The solemn Danish

philosopher considered sexual relations an abomination;

“My depression,” he said in one of his lighter moments,

“is the most faithful mistress I have known.” When he was twenty-four, however, he fell in love with a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl named Regine Olsen, and they were briefly engaged before he broke it off. Kierkegaard never really got over Regine, and over the years he tried to woo her back by bombarding her with his books of gloomy reflections. Although she never wrote back, he named her his sole beneficiary.

10

EDWARD LEAR The Victorian polymath and

“nonsense poet” lived alone with his cat, writing limericks about men who he drew with long, unmistakably phallic noses. Lear’s illustration for his limerick “The Old Man with a Nose,” for example, shows a man poking his very long nose at three
35

[Twelve Celebrity Celibates]

frightened children—possibly a reference to some sexually abusive childhood experience of his own.

Throughout his adult life he suffered from what he called “the Demon” or “the Morbids”—epilepsy, a state of mind that he personally attributed to excessive masturbation.

11

HENRY MORTON STANLEY The journalist and

explorer became a household name when the
New York
Herald
commissioned him to “find Livingstone” in Africa, which he did, with the famous greeting, “Dr.

Livingstone, I presume.” Stanley emerged from the nether regions of darkest Africa to marry, at the age of forty-nine, the high-society portrait painter Dorothy Tennant in a lavish wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey, but on his wedding night he informed his wife that he considered sex “fit only for beasts.” The marriage was never consummated.

12

MOHANDAS “MAHATMA” GANDHI In his thirties and long since married with children, Gandhi surprised Mrs. Gandhi by taking a vow of celibacy, explaining that total control over his “vital fluids” would enhance his spiritual powers and give him strength during his long fasts. His wife was even more surprised when in his seventies he employed a string of young women to massage him and sleep nude with him to “test” his celibacy. Not everyone understood, and he abandoned his nocturnal “experiments” when several of his followers resigned in disgust.