Death, ah death. Our fascination with the subject is right up there with our obsession with sex. But unlike sex, death is the universal human experience that none of us can do anything but speculate about. That is, anything but gossip, mock, ridicule or nervously titter over.
Humans love a good death tale or celebrity obit. After all, most of us live at ground level and any death interesting enough to be discussed in the popular culture is unlikely to be the death of anyone we know, or even more importantly, of ourselves. There's an old joke about turning to the obits first to make sure you aren't listed there, and after that, every day's a good day.
The Web has a wealth of sites that either caters to our fascination with departures from this mortal coil. Pop culture is all about bread and circuses, and when you mix the craving for celebrity gossip and the morbid fascination with death, often weird death, you've mixed up a seductive brew.
That's just what the creator of "You're Outta Here." (http://home.kscable.com/yohms/) strives to achieve a site that answers the question "who daid?" This month at YOH, you can find the obituaries of former world's oldest man, Antonio Todde, former first dog Buddy Clinton and yuppie-revered brewer Freddy Heineken. YOH's links page points intrepid death-surfers to a wealth of demise. The site also features an enjoyable area for obits of ordinary people who died under humiliating circumstances or through acts of great stupidity.
At "Find a Grave" (www.findagrave.com), I'm able to look up the final resting places of individuals by birth date or death date. It doesn't really matter how tenuous the connection is. The more a death has in common with my own life, the more interesting it is, so naturally my searches use my birth date for both. I learn that amongst the casualties that share my birthday are Jimmy Stewart, Dolley Madison and Henrik Ibsen.
Those ill-met by moonlight on the anniversary of my nativity include Christopher Marlowe and Gilda Radner. Thanks to this site's investigative work, I now know where I can pay my respects.
Window to the soul
If you want to cut a little closer to the bone, try the Death Clock ("The Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away") at www.deathclock.com. Entering my birth date and gender, and selecting "normal" from actuarial tables labeled "normal," "pessimistic," "optimistic" and "sadistic," and the site tells me I will meet my end on Wed., March 1, 2034. The countdown clock showing my remaining seconds of life (still over a billion as of this writing) is especially unsettling. More comforting is the warm glow I feel upon discovering that the site's author had gone to the trouble of archiving death clocks for all three brothers that constitute the singing group Hanson. Bravo.
The National Funeral Directors Association has a site at www.arrangeonline.com called the National Obituary Archive. I find complete obits for many recently departed notables. I'll wager that like me, many of you didn't know that Rufus Thomas, Foster Brooks, Dick Schaap and Mary Kay Ash all managed to avoid the holidays this year.
One of the most entertaining death sites is the "Archive of Strange Deaths" (www.castle-brass.co.uk/). What else can trivialize and diffuse the threat of extinction better than focusing on demises so bizarre and implausible that they seem utterly fantastic. On the other hand, what worse reminder that no matter how prudently you live, death is ever the unseen sword of Damocles dangling overhead.
The site provides two obituaries that include the word "trampled," one for "electrocuted," six for "bitten" and two for "severed." Failing to find any reference there for one of my favorite forms of death, defenestration, I decide to look elsewhere.
Simply put, "defenestrate" means to throw out of a window. In all my experience, the only acts of this that I've encountered were fictional accounts in movies and television programs. Do people really defenestrate each other? Perhaps it's just a case of "Windows don't kill people screenwriters do."
Since I can pretty much find anything on google (www.google.com), I look there. A quick scan of initial search results shows numerous connections between defenestration and Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Narrowing my search, I learn that throwing people from windows in Prague is such a rich tradition that references are made to the First Defenestration of Prague, in which Hussites threw seven members of the Czech Town Council out of Prague's New Town Hall window and to their deaths on the points of Hussite-wielded pikes below. For the Second Defenestration, two vice-regents of the Austrian monarch and some governors of the Czech lands were thrown out of a tower window at Prague Castle. Alas, there were no fatalities in this second event. It seems the victims landed on a trash pile in the moat.
If you truly find death diverting, especially when it involves famous folks, try playing the Celebrity Death Pool at http://melodyr.com/celebritydeathpool. There, participants seek a moment of Web fame by correctly predicting the next notable corpse to grace the cooling board. Like the song says, death don't have no mercy in this land.
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