"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:
Posted by David 
