Lessons Learned from This Weekend pt 2

So these are the lessons learned from this last weekend...

- On any given day 400,000,000 people around the world -- 1 in 17 of us -- will have sexual intercourse. Broken down further, 4,000 people are having sex at any given time.

- Sex cures headaches. Endorphins released into our bloodstream when we have sex not only give us pleasure but also act as painkillers. Useful information to whip out the next time your partner uses a headache as a reason to say no.

Death by Garbage

Homer and Langley Collyer [wiki] were compulsive hoarders. The two brothers had a fear of throwing anything away and obsessively collected newspapers and other junk in their house. They even set up booby-traps in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.

In 1947, an anonymous tip called that there was a dead body in the Collyer house, and after much initial difficulty getting in, the police found Homer Collyer dead and Langley no where to be found. About two weeks later, after removing nearly 100 tons of garbage from the house, workers found Langley Collyer’s partialy decomposed (and rat-chewed) body just 10 feet away from where they had found his brother.

Apparently, Langley had been crawling through tunnels of newspapers to bring food to his paralyzed brother when he set off one of his own booby-traps. Homer died several days later from starvation.

Death From Holding a Pee In

Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe [wiki] was one interesting fellow. He kept a dwarf as a court jester who sat under the table during dinner. He even had a tame pet moose.

Tycho also lost the tip of his nose in a duel with another Danish nobleman and had to wear a "dummy" nose made from silver and gold, but that’s another story.

It was said that Tycho had to hold his pee during one particularly long banquet in 1601 (getting up in the middle of a dinner was considered really rude) that his bladder, strained to its limits, developed an infection which later killed him!

Later analyses suggested that Tycho died because of mercury poisoning but that’s not nearly as interesting as the original story.