Sorry I’ve been away. Work ate my life for awhile. I doubt that ever happened to Thomas Parr… He knew how to live.
Today’s Satisfying Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Thomas Parr of Winnington, Shropshire, was 152 years old when he died in the 17th century. He married at 80 and was compelled to do penance for adultery at the age of 105. Seven years later he married a second time, ‘to the stated satisfaction of his new wife’. Forty years later he finally succumbed to rich food, strong drink and the sulphurous air of London.
Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears
Facts
Today’s Indoctrinated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The historical roots of militarism in Japanese schools (which was used to indoctrinate young boys to become efficient killing machines during the World War II era) stretched back to the Meiji Restoration. In the late 19th century the Japanese minister of education declared that schools were run not for the benefit of the students but for the good of the country. Elementary school teachers were trained like military recruits, with student-teachers housed in barracks and subjected to harsh discipline and indoctrination. In 1890 the Imperial Rescript on Education emerged; it laid down a code of ethics to govern not only students and teachers but every Japanese citizen. The Rescript was the civilian equivalent of Japanese military codes, which valued above all obedience to authority and unconditional loyalty to the emperor. In every Japanese school a copy of the Rescript was enshrined with a portrait of the emperor and taken out each morning to be read. It was reputed that more than one teacher who accidentally stumbled over the words committed suicide to atone for the insult to the sacred document.
Culled from: The Rape Of Nanking
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Today’s Dignified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The procession of English and Scottish kings and queens offers up few examples of dignified death and burial. Perhaps this is because medieval kings frequently met violent ends – by torture, murder, death in battle or execution; or when they did die natural deaths, lurid descriptions of their terminal agonies have come down to us. In such a pageant of ignominy and commonplace, the paradigm for a noble death was given by a queen who conspired to die in the manner in which she had endeavoured to live. Queen Victoria (1819-1901) died with regal dignity, going down “like a great three-decker ship”.
Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by many members of her large family – including her son Bertie, later king Edward VII, and her grandson the German kaiser. The queen lapsed in and out of consciousness but retained her mental functions to the last. When awake she would ask to have her Pomeranian, Turi, up on the bed beside her. Her children would come and go and at each visit would announce themselves to Victoria, who had long since been virtually blind. Finally the kaiser’s presence was revealed: “Your Majesty, your grandson is here; he has come to see you as you are so ill.” The queen smiled and understood. To everyone’s relief the kaiser behaved impeccably. Sinking by slow degrees, Victoria seemed free of pain, her expression calm and dignified “like that of an old Roman”. She would apologize for the trouble she was causing and would address the dressers as “my poor girls”.
At about 6:30 p.m. on January 22nd the family were summoned for a final time by Sir James Reid, the royal physician. The queen was supported in bed by Reid on the one said and the kaiser on the other. Victoria turned her eyes and gazed at The Entombment of Christ, hanging over the fireplace. And thus she died.
Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears by Robert Wilkins
Facts
Today’s Less Than Human Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Thousands of black men and women met a cruel death by lynching in the American South during the late 19th and early 20th century. Varying only in degrees of torture and brutality, these execution rituals were acted out in every part of the South. Sometimes in small groups, sometimes in massive numbers, whites combined the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Newspaper reporters dutifully reported the events under such lurid headlines as “COLORED MAN ROASTED ALIVE,” describing in graphic detail the slow and methodical agony and death of the victim and devising a vocabulary that would befit the occasion. The public burning of a Negro would soon be known as a “Negro Barbecue,” reinforcing the perception of blacks as less than human.
Culled from: Without Sanctuary
Facts
Today’s Incessant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Derived from both the belladonna and datura plants, atropine has been employed throughout history – particularly in India – as a particularly deadly poison. In Victorian America it was used, like morphine, both as a painkiller and as a treatment for dozens of ailments: asthma, earache, night sweats, rheumatism, seasickness, tetanus, whooping cough, and many more. Its symptoms, however, are very different from – and in some cases diametrically opposite to – those produced by morphine. The mouth and throat grow parched, and the pupils widely dilated. Victims lose control of their muscular coordination and reel around like drunks. They are possessed by a strange sense of giddiness that soon passes into a wild delirium. They may babble incoherently, burst into maniacal laughter, or emit constant, anguished groans. Perhaps the most grotesque symptom of all is their incessant picking at real or imaginary objects. They pluck at their clothing – pull at their fingers and toes – snatch at invisible objects in the air. Even when they lapse into their final stupor, they continue to mutter feverishly and make constant spasmodic motions, clutching at the bedclothes or grasping at phantoms floating over their heads.
Culled from: Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
Facts
Today’s Unmussed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Thomas Edwin “Tom” Mix (born Thomas Hezikiah Mix, January 6, 1880 – October 12, 1940) was an American film actor and the star of many early Western movies. He made a reported 336 films between 1910 and 1935, all but nine of which were silent features. He was Hollywood’s first Western megastar and is noted as having helped define the genre for all cowboy actors who followed. On the afternoon of October 12, 1940, Mix was killed in an automobile wreck in Florence, Arizona. Here is the colorful original article from the Oct 13, 1940 Reading Eagle:
Florence, Arizona, October 12 (U.P.) – Tom Mix, the shootin’est movie cowboy there ever was, died today in an automobile wreck, when his green speedster turned over on an Arizona desert highway at 80 miles an hour.
He was dead when passersby lifted him from the wreckage near here. His neck was broken.
Mix, who never was as good behind the wheel as he was at the bridle of his horse, Tony, met death near a bridge construction job. His custom-built auto swung in an arc down into a wash near a detour sign, swerved up on the other side, and whirled over. It had no top.
Construction workers and motorists pried the machine with timbers from the bridge they were building, and hauled out the body with diamond-studded belt still in place, and ten-gallon white sombrero still jammed on Mix’s brow.
He died with his high-heeled cowboy boots on. His cream jacket and cream-colored breeches were not even mussed.
Culled from: Wikipedia and the Reading Eagle
Dammit, why can’t they write fun fashion-obsessed obituaries like this anymore? I would have loved to have seen Michael Jackson’s…
Facts
Sorry I’ve been away for awhile… a combination of website issues and illness. I’ll try to get back into the daily swing of things with…
Today’s Demonstrable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Salesman Rico Vogt choked to death in Piza, Italy, when his tie got tangled round the blades of a food mixer he was demonstrating to a crowd in a shopping centre.
Culled from: Strange Deaths
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Today’s Chained Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 18th century Moscow, prisoners who had been condemned to long sentences in the salt mines of Siberia were allowed to go chained through the city’s streets, three days before their departure, crying out for food to support them on their long journey.
Culled from: Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers
Facts
You may recall the three hikers who foolishly decided to wade in the swift waters above Vernal Fall in Yosemite National Park and found out to their fatal dismay that it really was a pretty bad idea? Well, they were just the latest in a string of fatalities that leads back to the star of…
Today’s Plummeting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The first recorded death at Vernal Fall in Yosemite National Park was 16-year-old Lucille Duling, who stepped into the abyss on August 22, 1924. Lucille was enjoying her vacation at Yosemite, a giant change of scenery from that of her life in Hollywood, which was then a dusty town of orchards mixed with the emerging film industry. After a grueling climb to the head of Vernal Fall, Lucille, along with her father and her friend Riva Straub, stopped to admire the magnificent waterfall that plunges 317 feet out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The teenagers posed for photos by the guardrail, but the girls thought that they could get a more dramatic photo if they were on the other side of the River of Our Lady of Mercy. Being late summer, the river was running deceptively low and the girls had no difficulty getting across the river for their photos. Riva crossed the river without a problem, while Lucille’s father changed the film in his camera. Lucille took a different route than Riva and started to jump from rock to rock. Perhaps she slipped on the algae-covered smooth river rocks or maybe the ice-cold water numbed her feet too much; whatever the case, the teenage girl fell into the river and disappeared, only to surface in time to scream as she plummeted over the ledge to her death. The panic-stricken father ran down the trail to the base of the falls, while Riva ran to get a ranger. Lucille’s lifeless body bobbed violently around in the pool, as her father tried desperately to swim out to his daughter. They retrieved her later with a rope.
Culled from: Death In California
Facts
Today’s Honorable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The 20th century Japanese soldier identity was forged in a thousand-year-old system in which social hierarchy was established and sustained through martial competition. For as far back as anyone could remember, the islands’ powerful feudal lords employed private armies to wage incessant battle with each other; by the medieval times these armies had evolved into the distinctively Japanese samurai warrior class, whose code of conduct was called “bushido” (the “Way of the Warrior”). To die in the service of one’s lord was the greatest honor a samurai warrior could achieve in its lifetime. Such codes of honor were certainly not invented by Japanese culture. The Roman poet Horace first defined the debt owed by the young men of each generation to their rulers – Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. But the samurai philosophy went a giant step beyond defining military service as fitting and proper. So harsh was its code that its most notable characteristic was the moral imperative that adherents commit suicide if they ever failed to meet honorably the obligations of military service – often with the highly ceremonial and extremely painful ritual of hara-kiri, in which the warrior met death by unflinchingly disemboweling himself in front of witnesses.
Time did not erode the strength of the bushido ethic. During World War II the infamous kamikaze suicide missions, in which Japanese pilots ceremoniously trained to fly their planes directly into American ships, dramatically impressed upon the West how ready the young men of Japan were to sacrifice their lives for the emperor. But it was more than a small elite group that held to the view of death over surrender. It is striking to note that while the Allied forces surrendered at the rate of 1 prisoner for every 3 dead, the Japanese surrendered at the rate of only 1 per 120 dead.
Culled from: The Rape Of Nanking
Of course, it was this “never surrender” attitude that was used by Truman as justification for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan – to force them to surrender. I think he had a point.
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