"Great. We just gave them an excuse for a crappy AMADEUS remake."
Here’s some urgent news ripped from today’s headlines:
MOZART DIED OF STREP INFECTION
And by “urgent” I mean, “would have been somewhat helpful to know 220 years ago.” And by “news” I mean, “News-ish, on a slow news day in 2009.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a history lover. It’s important to study history because history repeats itself. I read that somewhere. Actually, I think I read it twice.
But here’s the thing: I think we need a statute of limitations for studying unsolved deaths.
U.S. President Zachary Taylor died of arsenic poisoning in 1850. Mozart died of Strep in 1791. Both these pressing mysteries took a century or two to resolve. So basically, at the rate we’re going, we should have a definitive answer as to why Lincoln suddenly stopped breathing by 2011.
Look, the problem here is lack of resources. The way I see it there are only about 3,000 really brilliant people in the world. Unfortunately, most of them aren’t working on the cure for cancer or ways to improve water purification in Africa. We can’t afford to waste any more good brains on stuff like this Mozart nonsense. Too many of finest minds have already been sidetracked by endeavors that are either incredibly trivial or easily profitable or plain ol’totally useless.
I took an unofficial survey as to what the world’s smartest people are working on these days. And the results, frankly, were a little depressing:
15%: Being paid to find a cure for hiccups.
25% working on faster ways to stream internet porn
11% working for Hostess, looking to invent the next “Ho Ho”
7% hard at work on cracking the McKinley Assassination
6% still exhausted from inventing seedless watermelon, Funions, and Puggles
13% are kinda like that guy from Beautiful Mind: not really working on anything — they just see lots of weird numbers floating around and an imaginary dude that looks like Ed Harris.
So let’s focus, smart people! There’s a lot of pressing matters to tend to. Didn’t anyone read about those killer asteroids?
I don’t have a witty comment to leave (what?me? Not witty? Is that even possible?) but how SAD! Mozart died of stupid, run of the mill strep throat (though didn’t that used to be called Scarlet Fever?) I had that two years ago, and a shot in the bum with penicillin and Bob was, and is, my uncle (look in a UK translation dictionary). Poor Mozart went and died of it and was carried off to his pauper’s grave
Imagine what he would have written if he had stayed alive. I don’t know what my point is, but this made me sad! So maybe those clever peeps SHOULD be finding out how 350-yr-old corpses died. How the HECK would they know anyway???? ****end of pointless diatribe****
I guess they dug up Wolfgang and swabbed his boney throat? Don’t know. Wouldnt it be just fitting if the guy in charge of that got strep throat from Mozart’s corpse? That’s a story to tell your grandkids.
P.S. I enjoyed your diatribe. Especially the pointless parts.