Decidedly Grim

Today’s Virulent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Zambia is a sprawling, landlocked nation carved out of the fertile bushland of southern Africa. It’s difficult to comprehend how thoroughly Zambia has been devastated by malaria. In some provinces, at any given moment, more than a third of all children under age five are sick with the disease. Worse than the sheer numbers is the type of malaria found in Zambia. Four species of malaria parasites routinely infect humans; the most virulent, by far, is Plasmodium falciparum. About half of all malaria cases worldwide are caused by falciparum, and 95% of the deaths. It’s the only form of malaria that can attack the brain. And it can do so with extreme speed – few infectious agents can overwhelm the body as swiftly as falciparum. An African youth can be happily playing soccer in the morning and be dead of falciparum malaria that night.

Falciparum is a major reason nearly 20% of all Zambian babies do not live to see their fifth birthday. Older children and adults, too, catch the disease – pregnant women are especially prone – but most have developed just enough immunity to fight the parasites to a stalemate, though untreated malaria can persist for years, the fevers fading in and out. There are times when it seems that everyone in Zambia is debilitated to some degree by malaria; many have had it a dozen or more times.

Culled from: National Geographic, July 2007

Facts

Today’s Almost Unbearable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In November 1941, Charles Minot Dole, the head of the National Ski Patrol System, was encouraged to recruit the country’s best skiers and mountaineers to begin training as U.S. mountain troops. The mountain troops trained in Camp Hale, Colorado for three full years, waiting for the call to fight. The conditions were severe and the training brutal. The men were constantly sick from the unprecedented physical duress and exposure to cold and altitude. In a memoir of his experiences in the 10th Mountain Division, Robert Ellis reprinted a letter he wrote home in April 1943 describing the legendary “D-Series” training maneuvers, which an official army report called “the most grueling training test ever given to any U.S. Army Division.” During a storm that would dump eight feet of new snow in the high mountains and drop temperatures to 30 below zero, some 12,000 troops left their barracks on skis and snowshoes for six weeks of training maneuvers. Soldiers carried some 90 pounds of gear on their backs, and practiced war games at 13,000 feet. One day, more than 100 cases of frostbite had to be evacuated.

Easter weekend 1943 was the worst. Saturday night, Ellis and his regiment started on snowshoes and skis through snow up to their waists. They hiked until 1:30 a.m., then laid out their sleeping bags and fell asleep in the snow. They were awakened two and a half hours later, packed up their gear in a snowstorm, and began climbing again to outflank another regiment. With no sleep, empty stomachs, and suffering from extreme cold, they hiked through a blizzard for four hours, when Ellis and another soldier fell out to rescue a companion who had fainted in the snow. After building a shelter and snatching some rest, Ellis and his mate, by now without food or water other than handfuls of snow for thirty-six hours, had to hike 15 miles to the next nontactical “problem area,” where they stayed for a day and two nights. “My feet were covered with blood from where the snowshoe laces and shoepacs had cut my feet and toes. The medics bandaged me up, and when Wednesday rolled around I was ready again. Everything went all right until Friday when I got dysentery somehow, and was up all Thursday night as well as Friday morning. Feeling terribly weak and nauseated I again left the forced march and was given medical attention at the battalion aid station. I rested for a couple of hours, and then set off to find the company.

“I caught up with them about noon, and we hiked on in regimental offensive until 10:00 p.m. We slept until 4:30 a.m. and continued the attack until around noon when the problem ended. They decided the men could no longer stand two more weeks of maneuvers, so the ordeal ended after three weeks. We made the 20-mile trip back to camp and arrived really tired. Along with other discomforts my back and shoulders broke out with sores, my fingers cracked at the ends, my ears were frozen once, etc. I’ve been tired many times but never so completely washed out in every way. The never-ending snow and standing for hours in an icy fox hole was almost unbearable.”

By the time the “D-Series” was over, the army reported the “proud record” of no fatalities and only 195 cases of frostbite, 340 injuries, and nearly 1,400 cases of sickness, including more than a total 1,100 evacuations.

Culled from: The White Death

Facts

Today’s Speeding Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The mother of all celebrity car crashes took place at 5:59 p.m. on September 30, 1955, at the intersection of routes 41 and 466 near Pasa Robles, California. A week after completing shooting on Giant, James Dean, the enfant terrible of car crash culture, was, as everybody who cares knows, on his way to a sports car rally in Salinas in his silver Porsche Spyder, the “Little Bastard.” A few hours earlier, in Bakersfield, Dean had been issued a speeding ticket and warned to slow down, but when his car crashed head-on into an oncoming vehicle, he was reportedly driving at a speed of at least 86 mph. His last words – to passenger Rolf Weutherich – were apparently “he’s got to see us.” Dean’s head was nearly severed from his body by the crash; Weutherich suffered a broken leg and head injuries, and the driver of the other vehicle, Donald Turnupseed, was only slightly injured.

Culled from: Car Crash Culture

“Donald Turnupseed”. If ever a name was destined for infamy from birth…

Facts

Today’s Virulent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1918, the final year of the savage trench fighting of World War I, something else began felling the soldiers. No one knows for sure when or where the Spanish flu emerged, though it certainly wasn’t in Spain. As a neutral country, Spain had no wartime censorship, and the flu apparently got its false pedigree from news reports about outbreaks there in May 1918. In fact the disease was already spreading on both sides of the European front, laying low entire divisions through the spring and early summer. Then it seemed to subside.

In late summer, though, the Spanish flu returned, and this time its virulence was unmistakable. The sick took to their beds with fever, piercing headache, and joint pain. Many were young adults, exactly the group that normally shrugs off the flu. About 5% of the victims died, some in just two or three days, their faces turning a ghastly purple as they essentially suffocated to death. Doctors who opened the chests of the dead were horrified: The lungs, normally light and elastic, were as heavy as waterlogged sponges, clogged with bloody fluid.

After flashing through crowded military camps and troopships in Europe and the United States, the flu leaped out of uniform to ports and industrial cities. In Philadelphia, historian Alfred Crosby found, 12,000 people died of flu and pneumonia in October – 759 in a single day. Schools and businesses were shut down and church services cancelled. Morgues overflowed.

By then the sickness had spread to the far corners of the planet, from the South Pacific to the Arctic. “Everybody on Earth breathed in the virus, and half of them got sick,” says Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland. More than 50 million people died – at least three times as many as in the war.

Culled from: National Geographic, October 2005

Facts

Today’s Cold Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Cold water saps body heat. A human can survive barely 30 minutes in a 40°F sea.

Culled from: National Geographic (October 2009)

Facts

Today’s Macabre Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At the end of the 19th century, Paris’s morgue sat perched just behind Notre Dame cathedral, on the edge of the island in the Seine, l’Ile de la Cité. Two-thirds of the corpses dealt with by the morgue would have been fished out of the Seine – suicides, accidental drownings or murders. The morgue attendants would carefully study the dead person’s clothes, scars and wounds – often caused after they had hit the water, by a boat or by the hooks used to fish them out. Then the bodies would be displayed on 12 black marble slabs propped up in the morgue window for the public to view and decide whether they recognised any of them. This macabre showcase became one of the most popular pieces of entertainment in Paris. Locals and tourists peered in at the forsaken departed souls. People of all ages, including children, would visit the famous window of the dead – Émile Zola, in his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, described gangs of boys, aged from 12 to 15, “who ran the length of the window, only stopping in front of the female corpses.”

Earlier, in the 18th century, families would traditionally float a plank of wood on the river, bearing blessed bread and a candle for the dead. But nothing disturbed and captured the imagination like suicide – especially that of a beautiful young woman who might have taken her life because of a broken heart. When the British director Peter Greenaway made an eerie documentary, Les Morts de la Seine, retelling the tales of 23 drownings between 1795 and 1801, he learned that young women made up the biggest proportion of apparent suicides, appearing to favour drowning, while men opted for hanging. The true stories he recreated included bizarre findings, such as a naked woman in her 70s, dredged from the Seine clasping two leeks in her left hand.

Culled from: The Guardian

Facts

Today’s Smoky Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

During prohibition, legal and safe alcohol was replaced by cheaply made, unsafe, and often quite foul-tasting alcohol. At the underground clubs, inventive bartenders enjoyed new respect for disguising the taste of the day’s alcohol. They created a new generation of cocktails heavy on fruit juices and liqueurs to mix with the bathtub gin, bright and spicy additions to cover the raw sting of the spirits. There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).

At least, those were the kind of drinks served at New York City’s classier joints – say Jack and Charlie’s 21 on 52nd Street. Or Belle Guinan’s El Fay Club on West 45th, where the hostess gleamed like a candelabrum and the house band played “The Prisoner’s Song” when dry agents were spotted in the crowd. Down in the Bowery, as the police could tell you, the drink of choice was a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans. The drink was blessedly cheap – fifteen cents a glass – and just about pure methyl alcohol.

In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail swore that it was served right from cans stenciled with the word POISON – and that people didn’t care. They just gambled that it wouldn’t kill them and drank it anyway.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Facts

Today’s Speckled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Seventeen-year-old Willie Francis of St. Martinsville, Louisiana, survived his 1946 electrocution in the state’s traveling electric chair, then sat in prison for a year while appellate courts and the Supreme Court decided that the state had the right to execute him again, though sentence had been carried out: Francis had been hit with the full 2,000 volts required by his death sentence. Francis said green, pink, and yellow speckles came to his eyes when the current surged through his body and that his mouth tasted like peanut butter. He was finally fatally electrocuted on May 9, 1947.

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

Facts

Today’s Irreversible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

When core body temperature hits 107.6°F, heatstroke can’t be reversed and will prove fatal.

Culled from: National Geographic, October 2009

Facts

Today’s Invisible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On January 27, 1967 astronaut Gus Grissom and his crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, clambered into the first flight-ready Apollo module, atop a half-sized version of the Saturn rocket. This was supposedly a routine check-out procedure, during which they would run a simulated countdown with all systems running and bring the ship to the very last second before take-off, without actually igniting Saturn’s engines. Morale around the pad was poor, even before the test began, because the new capsule had not come up to expectations. The detail work on the electrical and communications systems was inadequate, prompting the astronauts to stick a mouldy lemon on top of the capsule’s duplicate simulator to show their contempt for the overall design. When Chaffee climbed through the hatch of the flight vehicle to start the test, he complained that the interior smelled of sour milk. The consensus was that the balky environment control hardware was generating fumes. Then the radio system glitched. Furious, Grissom shouted, ‘How the hell are we supposed to communicate with mission control from space when we can’t even talk to them on the ground!’ The mood around the Kennedy launch complex was distinctly strained as the technicians locked Apollo’s heavy hatch into place, sealing the crew inside.

Five hours into the test, Grissom’s garbled voiceon the crackling radio link said, ‘We’ve got a fire in the capsule.’ A few seconds later, another voice (possibly White’s) was more urgent. ‘Hey, we’re burning up in here!’ There was a scream of pain, then just a hiss of static as the radio went dead. Suddenly the side of the capsule split open. There was a horrifying ‘whoosh!’ as the top of the launch tower was engulfed in thick, acrid smoke and flames. The pad crew, high atop the gantry, tried desperately to get the astronauts out, but the smoke was impenetrable and the heat quite overpowering. It took four minutes to open Apollo’s hatch, by which time all three astronauts were dead.

Culled from: Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

Facts