Enjoy your meal

You have one chance in 4404 of dying by choking on food.

Rematch, anyone?

The largest number of game-ending injuries in a football (and by football we mean soccer) match occurred in 1998 during Bena Tshadi-Basanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, when a lightning bolt struck the pitch and killed all the 11 players of Bena Tshadi. The other team left the field unscathed, and heavily accused of witchcraft.

The Near Death gamble.

Studies showed that the content of the majority of Near Death Experiences don’t vary much by cultures: generally, they have some common elements (sense of peace, separation from the body, light at the end of the tunnel…).
The element of variance is the identity of the figures that are sometimes “seen” in such occasions, like Jesus for Christians or Yamaraja for Hindus, and so on.
Of course though, NDE are not necessarily positive: 20% of the people who had one described it as hellish and very distressing, often with a black void instead of the light, and a demonic figure taunting the subject. Religion does not affect the chances of having a bad NDE, and children are apparently “immune” to them.

A deep issue.

If you get buried alive by accident, you should be able to free yourself (depending on the type of coffin) only if the grave is about two feet deep. Of course, if you are really dead, at that depth your corpse will be likely to end up eaten by animals.

I actually thought more

So far (and with still two books to go), 281 named characters have been killed off by writer G.R.R Martin in the five published books of the series “A Song Of Ice And Fire”, on which is based HBO TV series “Game of Thrones”.

Oh, the irony!

In 1989, a guy called Michael Anderson Godwin was waiting in his death row cell for an execution day, as he was supposed to be sent to the electric chair.

One day, his TV broke and the guy decided to try to fix it playing around with the cables, or more specifically, chewing on them while he was on the toilet. The Universe at that point must have decided that the Criminal Justice system was a bit slow, because with the metal toilet as a conductor, Godwin died by electrocution. Oh well, it was going to be a matter of time anyway.

(Please get the Tywin Lannister reference).

The deadly lottery

You know what they say about lottery: you have more chances of dying on your way to get a ticket that actually winning it. But is it actually true?

Well, it’s plausible, and it all depends on how far you have to go to get your lottery ticket, the demographic and your method of transportation.

So, let’s take as an example the main lottery of the country I live in, England: the odds of winning the UK National Lottery are 1 in 13,983,815, and if we consider that – according to the 2011 annual report – car accidents in Great Britain cause one fatality every 393 million miles, we can conclude that the claim is true only if you drive more than 28 miles in order to purchase your lottery ticket.

Just play online, you’ll be fine (although probably £2 poorer).

Ashes to ashes, wax to wax

There is a chance that, after you die, your body will end up covered in wax. That happens only if the body come in contacts with cold water or soil, which makes it develop a waxy material called adipocere – formed from the bacteria breaking down the tissue – that functions as a natural preservative.

Mythbusting, Disney edition.

Those of you who are fan of Walt Disney might have stumbled across articles or biographies that state that he had his head (or body) cryonicallly frozen, and that it has been stolen.
That’s one of the several myths revolving around his person: sure Disney was an eccentric (and very wealthy) individual, but he was actually cremated whole, and his ashes are buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The first cryonic freezing happened a month after the death of Walt Disney, too late for him to make such a decision.

Not im-pressed

The inventor of the web-rotary printing press died in an accident caused by his own invention. During the installation of a new machine in Philadelphia his foot got crushed, and he didn’t make it through the amputation.