Death, Where is Thy Sting?

There's a lot of nasty ways to shuffle off this mortal coil.

There's also some that are just kind of ridiculous. If nothing else, perhaps these brief tales can be a good reminder not to take oneself too seriously, and make it clearer that it's how we live that counts...
















because you never know...when the Grim Reaper turns up beside you, he just might look a lot like Bozo.

Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunken donkey attempt to eat figs.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone.

The Greek mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered by a mob by having her skin ripped off with sharp sea-shells and what remained of her was burned.

Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace was stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse. He was hanged, drawn and quartered—strangled by hanging but released while still alive, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then cut into four parts.

William Henry Harrison the 9th President of the United States, died of pneumonia one month after delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in cold weather without an overcoat.

French president Felix Faure died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office.

Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee bourbon distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination code.

Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and a broken neck when her scarf caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

In March 1981, Carl McCunn, a nature photographer, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."

2005: 28-year-old South Korean Lee Seung Seop, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing Starcraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.

you can learn more
about Jose Guadalupe Posada,
who by the way never heard of
the the Grateful Dead,
inasmuch as he had been dead
for decades before any of them
were even born, @
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Guadalupe_Posada


and here's an interesting series of covers for a serial on the history of Mexico.... worth going through for both the colour (!) images and the translation of the titles, like
La Matanza de Chulula o Sangre y Fuego, Fuego y Sangre
The Massacre at Chulula or Blood and Fire, Fire and Blood http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/charlotcoll/posada/posadabiblio1.html


more deathly images informed by the Plague
and the Apocalypse from the fabulous Holbein family...







































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