Rolf Weutherich lies beside James Dean's wrecked "Little Bastard". Alas, Dean's body had already been removed.

Culled from: Car Crash Culture

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

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

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

Culled from: National Geographic (October 2009)

Shooting With Abandon

This is my favorite:

Here’s a sample of his brilliant work:

Delft Artist Charles Krafft

Thanks to Layna for the recommendation!

The Specimens of Alex CF

Here’s his Facebook page, for those so inclined:

The Art Of Alex CF

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

British WWII fighter found in Egyptian desert

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

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