5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (20 page)

2 & 3

BARS (“PANTHER”) AND LISICHKA

(“LITTLE FOX”) Killed on July 28, 1960, on board the Soviet
Vostok
spacecraft when their rocket booster exploded during launch.

4 & 5

BELKA (“SQUIRREL”) AND STRELKA

(“LITTLE ARROW”) Launched into space on board
Sputnik 5
on August 19, 1960, accompanied by forty mice, two rats, and a number of plants. All were safely recovered after spending a day in orbit. President John F. Kennedy demanded to know why the world’s first pair of space dogs were called Belka and Strelka and not Rover and Fido. Soviet scientists took note: After their hounds returned to earth, they bred puppies from Strelka and gave one to Kennedy. Ignoring warnings that the Russians may have hidden microphones inside the dog, the president ordered her life spared.

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[Ten Canine Cosmonauts]

6 & 7

PCHELKA (“LITTLE BEE”) AND MUSHKA

(“LITTLE FLY”) Launched on board
Sputnik 6
on December 1, 1960. The launch went well and the dogs spent a day in orbit, but there were problems with reentry and the rocket and its passengers were incinerated.

8

CHERNUSHKA (“BLACKIE”) Launched on March

9, 1961, on board the spaceship Vostok, accompanied by a “dummy cosmonaut,” mice, and a guinea pig. The flight was a success and Chernushka was recovered successfully.

9 &10

VERTEROK (“BREEZE”) AND UGOLYOK

(“LITTLE PIECE OF COAL”) Launched on

February 22, 1966, on board
Kosmos 10
, returning safely on March 16 after a twenty-two-day flight, an all-time canine space record.

218

10

Ten Items Yet to

Appear on eBay

1

ADOLF HITLER’S TOILET SEAT In 1968, the

lavatorial requisite allegedly belonging to the Führer was put up for auction in Los Angeles. The seller, a former U.S. fighter pilot named Guy Harris, claimed he rescued it from Hitler’s bunker in 1945 because it was the only item he could find; everything else had been scavenged by Russian troops.

2

JEFFREY DAHMER’S REFRIGERATOR In 1996, the fridge in which Dahmer, “the Milwaukee Cannibal”

serial killer, stored his victims’ skulls was to be auctioned to settle claims made by the families of some of his victims. The sale was called off after a civic group, fearing bad publicity for their fair city, pledged to pay $407,225 for the famed cannibal’s household appliance.

3

TOTO In 1996, the stuffed carcass of Toto, the dog who starred with Judy Garland in the 1939 film
The Wizard
of Oz
, fetched $8,000 at auction.

4

LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S TOE TAG In 1992, the

bloodstained toe tag from Oswald’s corpse was sold at auction in New York for $6,600. The item was removed from Oswald by the ambulance driver as he drove him to the Dallas morgue.

5.

BONNIE AND CLYDE’S HAIR In May 1934, the

legendary bank robbers were ambushed in their car by a posse of patrolmen and perforated by seventy-seven bullets, which sprayed their brains all over the upholstery. The vehicle and its contents were quickly
219

[Ten Items Yet to Appear on eBay]

trashed by local people hunting for trophies, including locks of Bonnie Parker’s hair. One man was apprehended by a coroner as he attempted to saw off one of Clyde Barrow’s ears.

6

ANATOMICAL ARTIFACTS The surgeon John

Hunter, the unrivaled expert of eighteenth-century anatomy, was a tireless collector of embalmed fetuses, corpses, and human and animal skeletons. Over a period of thirty years, Hunter amassed about 65,000 items. His uncomplaining wife Anne is said to have registered a protest only once when he brought home a stuffed giraffe that was too tall to fit inside his house. Hunter shortened it by hacking off the legs below the knees and placed it in his hall. He bequeathed his collection to the Company of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn, London, but in May 1941

the building took a direct hit from a German bomber.

Only some 3,600 specimens were spared.

7

BLADDER STONES OF THE FAMOUS The finest

collection of bladder stones ever assembled by one man was the pride and joy of Sir Henry Thompson, urologist to the crowned heads of Europe. When Sir Henry died, he bequeathed all one thousand of his bladder stones, including a couple removed from Leopold I, king of the Belgians, and France’s Napoleon III, to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

8

EVA PERÓN’S SHROUD In 2004 the silk shroud covering the embalmed remains of Eva Perón, wife of
220

[Ten Items Yet to Appear on eBay]

the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, sold at auction for $160,000.

9

THE LAST DYING BREATH OF THOMAS

EDISON Henry Ford captured it in a bottle in 1931.

10

THE WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE TURD The

most collectible piece of human ordure in history is a nine-inch stool known as the Lloyds Bank Turd. The unique Viking stool, so called because it was found in an archaeological dig under a Lloyds bank in the UK, is insured for $400,000. It is so highly valued because of its near-perfect condition, a rarity among thousand-year-old pieces of feces.

221

Ten 10

Surprising Firsts

1

Buzz Aldrin was the first man to defecate on the moon.

2

Before he became the first to lose his head, Louis XVI was the first French king to use a knife and fork and to brush his teeth.

3

George Bush was the first U.S. president to be seen throwing up on live TV.

4

Joseph Stalin was the first dictator to have a theme park dedicated to him—Stalin World, ninety miles southwest of Vilnius in Lithuania.

5

Fatty Arbuckle was the first alleged rapist to have a chain of fast-food restaurants named after him.

6

Henry Laurens, a South Carolina statesman, was the first person to be formally cremated in the U.S., in 1792.

7

James Madison was the first president to wear long pants instead of knee breeches.

8

Frenchman Louis Sebastian Lenormand was the first man to use a parachute, in 1783. He tested it by dropping live domestic animals from the top of the tower of the Montpelier Observatory.

9

The first Frisbees were invented by children on the Oregon Trail, who flung discs of buffalo dung in a Frisbee-like manner during play.

10

The first World Testicle Cooking Championship was held in Serbia in 2004.

222

Y

10

ou Shouldn’t Have:

Ten Great Gifts

1

During Christmas in 1888, Vincent van Gogh called at a Paris brothel with a present for a girl called Rachel and told her, “Keep it and treasure it.” It was his ear.

2

The Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo signaled the imminent death of an inner-circle adviser by awarding him the Christopher Columbus medal. It became a tradition after the first recipient of the Columbus medal died from tetanus because Trujillo inadvertently stuck him with the pin.

3

King Edward VII owned a golf bag made from an elephant’s penis, a gift from an admirer, an Indian maharajah; it was a sly reference to Dirty Bertie’s love of golf, hunting, and sex, but not necessarily in that order.

4

In 1995, Lord Erskine of Rerrick bequeathed his testicles to the Bank of Scotland (which had declared him bankrupt), because it had “no balls.”

5

Pills made from the toxic metal antimony were highly esteemed in medieval times as bowel regulators. The pills irritated the intestinal tract, causing loose motions, and would pass through the body unharmed, so they could be handed down from father to son and from mother to daughter as precious family heirlooms.

6

Moulay Ismael, the sultan of Morocco, gave samples of his bowel movements to ladies of the court as a mark of special favor.

7

Pope Pius IX gave Queen Isabel of Spain, on the occasion of her birthday, the embalmed corpse of Saint Felix.

223

[Ten Great Gifts]

8

Warriors of the cannibalistic Brazilian Cubeo tribe gave their wives the penis and scrotum of a defeated victim.

The wife was expected to eat them to make herself fertile.

9

The 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order catalog offered a selection of hypodermic syringe kits for shooting up heroin.

10

During a drug raid on a house party in Kansas in 1994, police officers found a mummified female head in a box marked “Eight-Piece Party Cook Kit.” The head was wrapped in a white lab smock and had blond hair and eyebrows, but no brain. The owner, fifty-one-year-old Donald Donohue, said it was a gift from a medical student.

224

Ten 10

Litigious People

1993 Vicki Daily of Jackson, Wyoming, runs over and kills a man while driving her pickup truck, then files a lawsuit against the dead man’s widow. Lawyers acting for Ms.

Daily say she expects compensation for the “grave and crippling psychological injuries” she suffered while watching the fifty-six-year-old victim die.

1993 A New York appeals court rejects housewife Edna Hobbs’s lawsuit against a company that sold a sound-activated switching device, The Clapper. The complainant says that in order to turn her appliances on, she clapped until her hands bled. The judge found that Mrs. Hobbs had merely failed to adjust the sensitivity controls.

1994 Bernadette French, a thirty-six-year-old manic depressive, successfully sues the Wilmington Hospital in Delaware for $1.1 million. A judge rules that hospital staff had been very negligent in allowing her to gouge her own eyes out.

1994 Robert Jones, from Berkshire, England, files an insurance claim for the loss of his parrot. The recently deceased Polly, killed by Jones’s dog, had been kept in the family freezer for posterity, but during a power cut had thawed and decomposed.

1994 A jilted Spaniard breaks into his ex-girlfriend’s car in Barcelona and blows his own brains out with a gun.

Vehicle owner Maria Valdez sues his family for ruining the interior of her car.

225

[Ten Litigious People]

1995 Joel Ford from Jackson, Mississippi, files a $45 million lawsuit against the Oxford University Press, publishers of the principal edition of the Bible. Ford complains that the book is “based on hearsay” and “oppresses blacks and gays.” He drops his action a few weeks later, however, claiming to have received death threats.

1996 A fifty-four-year-old truck driver files a $10 million lawsuit in Gallatin, Tennessee, after receiving a less-than-perfect penile implant. He claims he suffered blisters, bruising, infection, and embarrassment. An attorney explained: “He could be just walking down the street, and it would erect on its own.”

1996 Popular Israeli Channel 2 weatherman Danny Rup is sued for $1,000 by a woman from Haifa. She was seeking damages after he predicted sunshine for a day that turned out wet and windy. Thanks to Rup’s erroneous forecast, she left home lightly dressed and as a result caught the flu, which caused her to miss four days of work and spend $38 on medication.

1997 The journal
Biological Therapies in Psychiatry
reports that a thirty-five-year-old woman is claiming damages after her regular antidepressant was switched to bupropion. As a side effect of the new drug, the journal reports, she experienced spontaneously and without physical stimulation a three-hour orgasm while shopping.

1999 Donald Drusky from Pennsylvania receives the final rebuff in his thirty-year battle against his former
226

[Ten Litigious People]

employees for “ruining his life” by firing him in 1968.

Drusky sued “God the sovereign ruler of the universe”

for “taking no corrective action” and demanded that the Almighty compensate him with professional guitar-playing skills and the resurrection of his late mother. A federal judge in New York rejects the lawsuit.

227

Twelve

12

Occupational Hazards

1

King John of Bohemia (1296–1346) became completely blind at the age of forty-four. When a team of palace surgeons failed to restore his eyesight, he had all of them drowned in the Danube.

2

In 1895, a dispute over trading rights resulted in an attack by more than a thousand angry tribesmen, led by King Koko, on the British-owned Niger Company in Akassa. The native chiefs later sent a letter to Britain, addressed to the Prince of Wales, expressing their deep regrets for having taken the law into their own hands, and especially for having eaten his employees.

3

The Ottoman sultan Mahomet IV (1648–87) appointed a historian called Abdi to write a running biography of his reign. One evening, the sultan asked Abdi if he had written about his reign that day. Abdi replied in the negative: Nothing particularly noteworthy had happened.

Mahomet calmly picked up a hunting spear and impaled the scribe with it. “Now,” he told Abdi, “thou has something to write about.”

4

In 1994, the U.S. author Gavin Whitsett was mugged and badly beaten in Evansville, Indiana. He is chiefly known for writing a surprise best-seller,
Guerrilla Kindness: A
Manual of Good Works, Kind Acts and Thoughtful Deeds
, which urges his fellow Americans to indulge in random and spontaneous acts of kindness.

5

In May 1994, a French clown, Yves Abouchar, choked to death after receiving a custard pie in his face from a colleague.

228

[Twelve Occupational Hazards]

6

In the court of Imperial China, human wet nurses were trained to suckle the royal Pekingese puppies.

7

The ancient Egyptian pharaohs employed human fly-traps who were smeared with asses’ milk and made to stand in a corner of the room.

8

The diamond company De Beers once employed security guards to undertake fingertip searches through the feces of their fellow employees to ensure that they weren’t taking their work home with them.

9