5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (21 page)

The ancient Egyptians were martyrs to their bowels: Believing that all diseases were diet-related, they binged on laxatives such as castor oil, figs, and dates and purged themselves for three days at a time. The court official who supplied the enema to the pharaoh was given the title Shepherd to the Royal Anus.

10

The world’s most difficult stand-up comic gig was performed by the eunuch dwarfs in the court of the Ottoman sultans. The dwarfs were required to keep the royal womenfolk amused while they gave birth.

11

In 1983, Mike Stewart, president of the Auto Convoy Company in Dallas, Texas, was standing on the back of a flatbed truck as it passed under a low bridge. He died instantly. At the time, he was fliming a TV item about the dangers of low bridges.

229

[Twelve Occupational Hazards]

12

The body mass attained by Japanese sumo wrestlers—

average weight around 320 pounds—renders many of them incapable of wiping their own backsides, a task that novice wrestlers are expected to perform for them. Six out of every ten novices run away from their workplace in the first year of apprenticeship.

230

Ten 10

Election Fixes

1868: Thaddeus Stevens, a popular Republican congressional candidate from Pennsylvania, dies at age seventy-six. His party nominates him for the House of Representatives anyway as a belated tribute to “our most able and distinguished champion of justice.” The corpse is elected with a large majority over its Democrat rival eight weeks later.

1928: The incumbent president of Liberia, Charles King, enjoys a landslide electoral victory, beating his rival, Thomas Faulkner, by more than 600,000 votes. The size of the victory is a surprise, as Liberia has only about 15,000 registered voters.

1955: South Vietnam is asked to choose between its former emperor, Bo Dai, and Ngo Dinh Diem, who is backed by the U.S., which calls him the best man to keep South Vietnam from falling under the control of Communism.

France gives contrary advice, pointing out that Diem is

“not only incapable but mad.” When the voters arrive at the polling station, they are handed two ballot papers, red for Diem and green for Bo Dai; in Vietnamese tradition, red signifies good luck, green indicates bad fortune.

Diem’s supporters are also on hand to advise voters to put the red papers in the ballot box and to throw the green ones into the wastebasket; the few who do not take their advice are savagely beaten. Six Buddhist monks, demonstrating against Diem’s corrupt rule, commit suicide in public by pouring gasoline over their heads and setting fire to themselves. Unmoved, Diem offers to supply all of his country’s Buddhist monks with free gas.

231

[Ten Election Fixes]

1961: Haiti’s president, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, takes his countrymen to the polls, where they find printed at the top of each ballot the words “Doctor François Duvalier, President.” When the votes are counted, it is announced that Papa Doc has been unanimously reelected because his name appears on every ballot. A few years later, he uses a similar tactic to prolong his stay in office ad infinitum: When Haitian voters are asked, “Do you want your president elected for life?” the answer was a convenient and overwhelming “Yes”; the ballot did not include a “No” box.

1975: Philadelphian Frank O’Donnell is elected to serve on the city council despite his death from a heart attack a week before election day. A spokesman explains, “It seemed appropriate to remove his name from the ballot, but there just wasn’t enough time.”

1981: Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran is going badly, and with morale low, he calls a meeting of his cabinet ministers and offers his resignation. Most take the hint and vote that he stay on. His health minister alone takes him up on the offer and votes for Saddam to step down. Saddam takes him into the next room, shoots him in the head, and sends the man’s butchered remains home to his wife in a shopping bag.

1982: Texas Democrat John Wilson is elected to the Senate with 66 percent of the vote. Senator Wilson has been dead for two months, but his name could not be removed from the ballot sheet for “technical reasons.”

232

[Ten Election Fixes]

1990: Frank Ogden III enjoys a surprise landslide local election victory in Oklahoma over Josh Evans. The loser, Evans, is disconsolate. He was convinced that his campaign slogan of being an “able lawyer and a living person” would give him the edge over Ogden, who had died three months before polling day.

1991: Texas state legislator Larry Evans is discovered dead in his Austin apartment. His demise causes some confusion when it emerges that although he has been dead for a week, according to House records, he voted on at least one measure that very day.

1996: The former mayor of the cult-dominated town of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, confesses to organizing several deterrents to keep the noncult townspeople away from the ballot box during local elections. His methods include making them ill by tampering with the food at a local restaurant and coating courthouse doorknobs with a chemical irritant as election day approaches.

233

Ten 10

Short Leaders

1

King Pepin “the Short”—3' 6''

2

Pope Gregory VII—4' 1''

3

King Charles III of Naples—4' 5''

4

Attila the Hun—4' 6''

5

Queen Anne—4' 9''

6

Queen Victoria—4' 10''

7

King Emmanuel III of Italy—4' 11''

8

Alexander the Great—5'

9

Napoleon Bonaparte—5' 4''

10

Joseph Stalin—5' 4''

234

Ten Her 10

oic PR Campaigns

1

In 1994, the world’s media descended on Gloucester, England, following the discovery of bodies in a “garden of death” belonging to Britain’s then-biggest serial killers, Frederick and Rosemary West. Gloucester city fathers, upset by the negative publicity generated by the murders, decide to launch an advertising campaign to improve Gloucester’s image. The Touchpaper agency emerges with the winning slogan, “Gloucester—easy to get to, hard to leave.”

2

The slogan used by brewers Coors, “Turn It Loose,” was translated into Spanish as “Suffer from Diarrhea.”

3

The Ramses brand of condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II, a man who fathered more than 160

children. In the late nineteenth century, British condoms were illustrated with a portrait of Queen Victoria: She was a mother of nine.

4

Chicken magnate Frank Perdue’s ad campaign was based on the slogan, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” The Spanish translation came out as, “It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.”

5

When the president of Haiti, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, discovered that tourism in his country was down by 70

percent, he found himself torn between his country’s need for revenue and his natural and deep mistrust of foreigners. “Papa Doc” hit upon a compromise. He launched a publicity drive to tempt the visitors back,
235

[Ten Heroic PR Campaigns]

then had the corpse of a dissident flown into the capital Port-au-Prince, where it was left to rot in public. It was strategically placed by an exit from the airport next to a sign that read “Welcome to Haiti.”

6

Israel’s notoriously reckless drivers kill about five hundred people per year. In 1994, a Tel Aviv advertising agency erected posters around the city chastising drivers with the message: “Research proves: Drivers who get rowdy on the road have small penises.”

7

In 1994, Holland’s National Liver and Intestine Foundation, which supports research on digestive problems, launched a publicity campaign encouraging people to fart fifteen times a day to ease intestinal discomfort.

8

When Gerber first started selling its baby-food products in Africa, it used the same packaging that had been so successful at home, featuring a baby on the label. The company was perplexed when it failed to get anywhere near projected sales figures, until someone pointed out that it is common practice in Africa to put pictures of the contents on food package labels.

9

Coca-Cola launched its product in China for the first time in the 1920s, unaware that its famous brand name translated literally as “Bite the wax tadpole.” It was hurriedly changed to something that translated roughly as “happiness in the mouth.” When Pepsi Cola was launched in China in the 1970s, the company’s marketers
236

[Ten Heroic PR Campaigns]

opted to play it safe with their award-winning slogan

“Come alive with Pepsi.” Predictably, however, it did not translate quite as intended, so the product was introduced to a quarter of the world’s population with the line,

“Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”

10

A men’s-underwear advertisement on billboards in Tel Aviv featured a photo of the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir with the slogan, “Eventually we remember those who had balls.”

237

Fat Ca 10

ts and Top Dogs:

The World’s Ten

Wealthiest Pets

1

GUNTHER IV, GERMAN SHEPHERD DOG

$328 million: German countess Karlotta Libenstein left $109 million to her dog Gunther III when she died in 1992, but clever trustees invested well and tripled the fortune for Gunther III’s pup.

2

KALU, CHIMPANZEE $96 million: Owner Patricia O’Neill made a monkey of her husband, Australian swimmer Frank, by changing her will while he was away at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

3

TOBY RIMES, POODLE $82 million: This

descendant of the original Toby, who inherited $27

million from the New York eccentric Ella Wendel in 1931, benefited from investments made by trustees.

4

GIGOO, HEN $18 million: The nest egg was left by publisher Miles Blackwell after his wife Briony predeceased him by a few weeks in 1999.

5, 6 & 7 FRANKIE, CHIHUAHUA; AND ANI AND PEPE

LE PEW, CATS $5.5 million each: The three pampered pets live in an $18 million San Diego mansion while their caretaker, Lerissa Patrick, lives in a small adjoining apartment.

8 & 9

HELLCAT AND BROWNIE, CATS $3.6 million

each: Offspring of the original fat cats Hellcat and Brownie, who inherited $750,000 from San Diego owner Dr. William Grier.

10

MOOSE, JACK RUSSELL TERRIER $3.3 million: Better known as Eddie on
Frasier
, he earned $11,000

per episode.

238

Ten 10

Francophobes

1

“You must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king: and you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.”

—L ord Horatio Nelson

2

Guillotine,
n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

—Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary

3

“The French; utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language . . .

racial characteristics; sawed-off cissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people’s feet.”

—P. J. O’Rourke, National Lampoon 1976

4

“I remember being much amused last year, when landing at Calais, at the answer made by an old traveler to a novice who was making his first voyage. ‘What a dreadful smell,’ said the uninitiated stranger, enveloping his nose in his pocket handkerchief. ‘It is the smell of the continent, sir,’ replied the man of experience. And so it was.”

—Mrs. Frances Trollope

5

“France is a dog-hole, and it no more merits the tread of a man’s foot.”

—William Shakespeare, All’s Well T hat Ends Well
6

“France is a country where the money falls apart in your hands and you can’t tear the toilet paper.”

—Billy Wilder

239

[Ten Francophobes]

7

“There’s always something fishy about the French!

Whether Prince or Politician

We’ve a sinister suspicion

That behind their savoir-faire

They share

A common contempt

For every mother’s son of us.”

—Noël Coward, from Conversation Piece
8

“Having to go to war without France is sort of like having to go deer hunting without an accordion.”

—Ross Perot

9

“There is no hell. There is only France.”

—Frank Zappa

10

“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

—Bart Simpson

240

Now W10

ash Your Hands:

Ten Rules of Etiquette

1

According to British royal etiquette, men suffering from ringworm are not obliged to remove their hats in the presence of the monarch.

2

It is traditional for Russian cosmonauts to urinate on a tire of the bus that takes them to the launchpad, a custom initiated by Yuri Gagarin.

3

In Nepal, Narikot wives are obliged to wash their husbands’ feet, then drink the dirty water as a token of their devotion.

4

The typical greeting of Masai tribesmen is to spit at each other.

5

In sixteenth-century Europe, it was customary for men to greet female guests by fondling their breasts, provided they were related.

6

The sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died after attending a banquet hosted by a baron in Prague. Brahe drank heavily, but etiquette prevented him from leaving the table to relieve himself before the host left. His bladder burst and he died of a urinary infection eleven days later.

7

Nineteenth-century sailors in the British Royal Navy were forbidden to eat with forks because the utensils were considered unmanly.

8

Fijian cannibals usually ate with their hands, but as a token of respect for the dead, they used a ritual wooden fork when consuming people.

241

[Ten Rules of Etiquette]