Shaw - 5 people who died during sex & 100 other terribly tasteless lists

Comedy equals tragedy
plus timing.
anonymous

Contents

Introduction

It all began with Queen Carolines bowels. I found them whilereading a book about King George II. His wife Caroline, itappears, could swear like a trouper, but she showed remarkablecomposure when she was at the receiving end of a badlybungled attempt to cure her neglected strangulated hernia in1737. After her operation, as she lay in bed surrounded bycourtiers, her bowel burst open, showering excrement all overthe bed and the floor. One of her courtiers said that she hopedthe relief would do her majesty some good; the Queen repliedcalmly that she hoped so too, because that was probably the lastevacuation she would ever have. Upon her death soonafterward, 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 KingGeorge (grandfather of the mad one who lost the colonies)was an inveterate gambler and would bet on anything thatmoved, but he lost his appetite for it when he found out thathis loyal subjects were laying bets at odds of 101 that hewould be dead within the year. In fact, he lived on a whilelonger than some had hoped, eventually dying on the toilet,Elvis-style, while straining to overcome his king-sizedconstipation.

I was hooked. What about that poemdidnt you lose yourhead for that kind of thing? And what were those royal doctorsdoing while the Queen was redecorating her bedroom? Hadthere been any more hideous royal deaths? What about embarrassing deaths in general? How many famous people diedduring, um, sex?

Books about exploding bowels are rarely bestsellers, but Icouldnt resist writing one anywaya celebration of thegrotesque aesthetic, of lifes cultural underbelly; a compendiumof wicked and indelicate facts. I soon discovered that insixteenth-century Europe it was conventional for men to greetfemale guests by fondling their breastsproviding they wererelated, of course; that when Alexander the Great died his bodywas preserved in a large jar of honey; that some SouthAmerican cannibals believed you could cure a limp by eatingsomeone elses good leg; that Samuel Pepys chronicled his dailylife in the minutest detail, but only once in nine years does hemention either himself or his wife taking a bath; and that inthe Indian state of Baroda, the Maharajah had criminalsexecuted by having elephants step on their heads. Wow.

Bad taste is a wonderful thing. Where would good taste bewithout it? The following is dedicated to the heroes andheroines of bad taste, including E. Mackerchar, author of TheRomance of Leprosy; to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whohad his late wife exhumed after seven years to recover anunpublished manuscript; to the inquisitive Roman emperorFrederic II, who butchered his dinner guest so that he couldstudy the human digestive system; to George Appel, themurderer of a New York policeman and of a pun, whoobserved as he was being strapped into the electric chair,Pretty soon youre going to see a baked Appel; and to the lateLord Erskine of Rerrick, who bequeathed his testicles to theBank of Scotland because it had no balls.

Enjoy!

Chapter One

Choice Cuts

Goats Testicles to Go:
TenNational Delicacies

1 Cena Molida (contains roasted mashed cockroaches) [Belize]

2 Fried, roasted, or boiled guinea pig [Ecuador]

3 Rat meat sausages [Philippines]

4 Desiccated petrified deers penis [China]

5 Boodog (goat broiled inside a bag made from the carefully cut and tied goatskin: the goat is either barbecued over an open fire or cooked with a blowtorch) [Mongolia]

6 Monkey toes [Indonesia]

7 Larks tongues [England (sixteenth century)]

8 Salted horsemeat sandwiches [Netherlands]

9 Durian fruit (has a fragrance identical to that of a rotting corpse) [Southeast Asia]

10 Khachapuri, the traditional cheese pie of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In 1995 authorities closed down a bakery whose specialty was khachapuri when it emerged that the pies were being baked in the Tbilisi morgue.

Food for Thought:
TenGreat Gourmands

1 EMPEROR ELAGABALUS Even in an age of culinary surprises, the emperor shocked his guests with the novelty of the dishes on offer at his 12-hour banquets by serving up camel brains, the combs from live chickens, peacock and nightingale tongues, mullets livers, flamingos and thrushes brains, parrots, pheasants, and peacocks heads, and sows udders. He also served his guests exact replicas of the food he was eating, made out of wood, ivory, pottery, or stone. The guests were required to indulge his practical joke and continue eating. He ate as Romans often did, reclining on couches scattered with lilies and violets, feasting between bouts of self-induced vomiting and demanding sex between courses. A couple of dinner guests once complimented him on the flower arrangement in the middle of the imperial table and carelessly conjectured how pleasant it might be to be smothered in the scent of roses. The Emperor obliged: The next time they sat down to eat with him he had them smothered to death under several tons of petals.

2 JOHN MONTAGU, FOURTH EARL OF SANDWICH In 1762, Britains First Lord of the Admiralty, a notorious gambler, gave his name to the worlds best-known convenience food when he placed a slice of beef between two pieces of bread so that he could carry on eating at the gaming tables without the distraction of greasy fingers. It was not, however, for his peerless snack that Montagu became the talk of the taverns. When he wasnt gambling or helping lose the Revolutionary War, Montagu was caricatured by the press as a notorious philanderer who was said to spend his evenings in a private garden of lust featuring hedges pruned to resemble a womans private parts.

3 KING GEORGE IV The poet Leigh Hunt was sent to prison for libel when he dared to suggest that the thenPrince of Wales was overweight, but Hunt was only stating the obvious. The new king, who was fond of hosting one-hundred-course feasts, got his reign off to a flying start at his coronation banquet when he served up to his guests 7,442 pounds of beef, 7,133 pounds of veal, 2,474 pounds of mutton, and an unweighed mountain of lamb and poultry. This orgy of conspicuous consumption so offended his subjects that coronation banquets were banned forthwith. By early middle age George had a fifty-inch waist and it took three hours to squeeze him into the royal corset, and a pulley system was required to enable him to mount a horse. Even on his deathbed, his appetite was undiminished. Shortly before expiring from cardiac and respiratory problems at the age of sixty-seven, he ordered two pigeons, three steaks, a bottle of wine, a glass of champagne, two glasses of port, and a glass of brandy.

4 KING LOUIS XVIII The French Bourbon kings were all thought to have suffered from a family overeating disorder. Before he lost his appetite and his head, the ample Louis XVI, known to his courtiers as the fat pig, was such a prolific gourmand that his gut was rumored to be infested with a giant tapeworm. Younger brother King Louis XVIII, the largest of all the Bourbons, thought that he could deflect attention from his enormous girth by dressing in diamond-studded clothes. In the last years of his reign he suffered from a variety of illnesses, including gout, and he became completely disabled. He was in such a state of physical decay that one evening in 1823, as his valets were removing the kings shoes, a gouty toe accidentally came away with his sock.