This week’s New Yorker has the big David Grann piece on the shocking death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the authority on Arthur Conan Doyle, earlier this year. This concludes that it was a suicide possibly disguised as a murder. Garotted using shoelaces and a wooden spoon.
The case has been extensively covered by the British press - Sherlock Holmes expert apparently murdered was irresistible to Fleet Street - and this suggestion had been brought up, but Grann is particularly thorough.
Of course, Owen Dudley Edwards on the warpath - in this instance, flinging an alleged murderer’s name about - is always gripping.
For sheer determination, there’s George Price, the evolutionary biologist, who managed to kill himself using only a pair of nail clippers.
No offense meant to Ranchoth, but that sounds a lot like someone thinking he can trust the chemistry he hears on the Simpsons.
Of course, whenever I see that episode, I reply “You get salt water?” Which would make me feel very clever, if not for the fact that I’m talking to my T.V.
The guys at Myth busters proved that this isn’t easy because your… umm… “stream” breaks up after a few feet of travel. To make it work, you would have to be just inches away. You’d have better “luck” just grabbing the rail or waiting for the next train.
Sorry, mea culpa. They were the only things that, offhand, I thought I remembered would explode if you mixed them. (My knowledge of things that’ll blow up if mixed together is shamefully low. )
A former employee at my company used a rather original method of killing himself. He used an alarm clock as a timer switch that, when set off, would send current from the outlet in his house through a pair of bare wires he’d wrapped around each arm. After setting the alarm, he took a large enough dose of sleeping pills to knock him completely out. A few hours later, the alarm rang, and he died in his sleep without feeling a thing.
and if you’re not really sure if you want to go all the way through with it, but still kinda want the attention, what better way than to jump in front of a speeding, sirens wailing, ambulance.
I have always thought the most enviable suicide method was to wait until it was really cold and the temps were 20 below or lower. Then go outside dressed in street clothes with a book on meditation, sit in a buddhist pose on the ground and freeze to death while reading it.
From what I understand, that might possibly be the most painful death you could have, even worse than dousing yourself in gasoline and lighting a match. If, however, you wore really light clothes that were dripping wet, and in addition to being 20 degrees out there were very strong, sustained winds, it might be fast enough to reduce the suffering dramatically.
Do they ever find women dead of auto-erotic asphyxiation? Why the heck is it always the guys who they find tied up with a plastic bag wrapped around their own head? I weep on behalf of my own gender.
It seems like its always the guys who die from some wierd sexual stuff- Its the man who dies mid-coitus, the man who gets killed by accident in some elaborate masturbatory episode, etc. All the women-related things (lobster dildos, broomstick impalings) wind up being urban legends.
Maybe men are more creative about suicide than women :dubious: Come on, a lot of these guys are friggin Jackson Pollocks of suicide!
)
I weep on behalf of my own gender.