"Better off dead"

This whole Ukraine/World War III is really getting me down. I responded the only way I know how:

"Selfie deaths: 259 people reported dead seeking the perfect picture"

From the BBC:

News reports... were analysed to compile the study.

They found that selfie-related deaths are most common in India, Russia, the United States and Pakistan and 72.5% of those reported are men.

That last sentence is hardly surprising.

It contains three of the world's five most populous countries. We don't know whether the Chinese and Indonesians are more sensible or whether suicide-by-selfie is simply under-reported.

That leaves Russia, which is only ninth by population but third most suicidal (most suicidal if ranked by male suicides). If you multiply those numbers up, there are probably more suicides in Russia than in any other country.

And most of the suicides-by-selfie are by men. Well duh, men are more reckless and like showing off how brave they are.

Complete lack of self-awareness.

From The Metro:

THE father of a Team GB snowboarder who died on her 18th birthday has said missing a flight to a training camp tipped her ‘over the edge’. Tony Soutter said Ellie had battled mental health problems and struggled with the pressure of top-level sport.

He said: "Unfortunately it all came about from missing a flight, which meant she didn’t go training with the GB squad. She felt she had let them down, she felt she had let me down. And tragically it just takes one silly little thing like that to tip somebody over the edge because there’s a lot of pressure on children...

"That was a lot to do with the fact that she wasn’t able to compete last season and do what she would have loved to have done through a total lack of funding. I have lost my best friend. She was my rock. I’ve done nothing but live for her for 18 years. Now I’ve got to start all over again really. If I didn’t she’d be mortified."

The Times channels The Daily Mail

Emailed in by MBK from The Times:

A millionaire lawyer who jumped in front of a tube train was racked by guilt that she “hadn’t been a good enough mother”, an inquest heard.

Sarah Johnson, who lived in a £12.5 million mansion in an exclusive area of London with her husband, a banker, and three young children, died in April this year.

Daily Mail on top form

They don't even make you skim read the article to find out what the flat was worth:

Wealthy British expat arrested after his 'secret' 15-year-old daughter plunged to her death from £7.5m Hong Kong flat

“It is horrific and very sad..."

From The Evening Standard:

A man who fell 60ft from the window of a penthouse flat in one of London’s most exclusive squares died after being impaled by metal railings below...

The £3million split-level flat is next door to a property once owned by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr where John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix all stayed in the 1960s.

A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said: “It is horrific and very sad. My cleaners were here and saw the man’s body. They were traumatised."

"Cleaner", singular, I could understand, I know plenty of people who have a nice East European lady pop in once a week, but "cleaners" plural???

Sometimes, the post titles write themselves...

Shop 'til you drop

Daily Mail back on top form

From here

A doctor killed herself in the bath at home after being arrested on suspicion of fraud and writing a suicide note protesting her innocence, an inquest heard.

June Shazeela Allim was arrested in September last year and accused of fiddling the books at the GP surgery where she worked with her husband Henry White.

Two weeks later, she took some over-the-counter medicine and was found dead in the bath by Dr White at the couple's £1 million home in the Warwickshire village of Norton Lindsey.

It all reminds me of that Jewish joke about the mother running panic stricken along the sea front shouting "Help, help! My son the doctor is drowning!"

Ah... only in The Daily Mail

From The Daily Mail:

The mother of a gifted young ballerina who threw herself under a train demanded action yesterday against the ‘toxic digital world’ of the internet that glamorises suicide and self-harm.

Tallulah Wilson, 15, had been hooked on photo-sharing websites, where users encouraged her to harm herself...

Tragic, tragic. And what's The Mail's special angle on this..?

Tallulah, the youngest of three girls whose parents are divorced, lived with her family in a £1million house in West Hampstead, North-West London...

Hat tip, Anorak

Surprising if true.

From the BBC:

More British soldiers and veterans took their own lives in 2012 than died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan over the same period.

BBC Panorama learned that 21 serving soldiers killed themselves last year, along with 29 veterans. The Afghanistan death toll was 44, of whom 40 died in action...

The MoD said that rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the serving military were lower than comparative rates in the civilian population.*

Ho hum, those figures don't appear to be adjusted for relative numbers, i.e. there are far more ex-soldiers than serving soldiers, and far more civilians than both groups added together, but let's run with it.

We also happen to know that the most dangerous lines of work are agriculture, mining and construction (I'm not sure in what order - is there a separate category for cow-related deaths?), with a higher risk of being killed than among serving soldiers.

So let's rank those in order starting with most dangerous:

Agriculture - industrial accident
Civilian population - suicide
Serving and ex-soldiers - suicide
Serving soldiers - killed on active service**

Somehow that doesn't look right to me, but maybe it is. The other point being that we just do not look after our ex-soldiers properly - they just get turfed out in the prime of life and told to fend for themselves.

* That's their story and they are sticking to it.

** Allegedly, one-third of those deaths are accidental, however that's defined.

"Paramedics called to the semi-detatched property were unable to help the young family"

The Daily Mail lets itself down a bit in this crime report:

Paramedics called to the semi-detatched property were unable to help the young family and immediately called in the police at 6.40pm yesterday... A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said that a couple lived in the semi-detatched property with the two girls....

We're told that they lived in Ruislip, West London, but nowhere in the article do they mention what the house is worth, although the photos show that it is pebble-dashed, so applying Richard Allan's logic, the cause of death was probably Hydrogen Sulfide. Even more bizarrely, they mis-spell "semi-detached".

Suicide By Bull?

Emailed in by Robert H, from The Malvern Gazette:

A farmer was found dead in a field after he was killed by his own cattle, an inquest was told. Colin Collins’ body was discovered by farm labourer Gary Roberts at Quarry Pitts Farm, Worcester Road, Inkberrow, on August 2...

Mr Collins had worked with cattle all his life and was a competent farmer. The inquest was also told there had been a rift in the family and Mr Collins was under financial pressures. Philip Collins, the middle of Mr Collins’ three sons, said the family had concerns about his state of mind after documents were found, including a eulogy, and speculated that Mr Collins may have deliberately antagonised the bull.

Mr Smith and Mr Roberts, who had both known Mr Collins, of Worcester Road, Inkberrow, for more than 30 years, said he had never given any indication that he was depressed or himself. A jury of nine men and women recorded a verdict of accidental death.

Life Copies Satire

The Onion, 19 August 1997:

At the group's annual convention Sunday, members of the National Education Association called for the formation of a nationwide coalition of parents, teachers and political leaders to address a rapidly growing problem: the alarmingly low quality of teenage suicide notes across the U.S.

In the convention's keynote address, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley said America must renew its commitment to grammar, spelling and writing skills, calling the marked improvement of teen suicide prose "the nation's number one educational priority."

"Not three days ago I met with the parents of a young man who chose to take his own life," Riley said. "I was shocked by what I saw: a note that read simply, 'Im gonna blo my head of.' This sort of syntax is understandable coming from a first- or second-grader, but from a 17-year-old it is downright appalling," Riley said. "What do you tell the parents in a situation like that? By all outward appearances, this seemed like a normal child. The poor parents had no idea their son's writing skills were that poor."

Daily Mail, 21 June 2012:

A school has apologised after a teenage boy was asked to produce a handwritten note in a writing class which his parents thought was a suicide letter.

Wesley Walker, 14, was told by teachers to imagine he only had a few days to live through terminal illness, and to write a letter which he should then take home to his parents.

But when the schoolboy produced the handwritten note which said he wanted to 'say goodbye' before disappearing to his bedroom, his mother thought he had become suicidal.

"Apart from that, Mrs Przybyl, how was the press conference?"

"I think he shot himself in the foot. And missed badly."

Fun Online Polls: Suicide by train and Dave's veto

With a good turnout, the result in last week's Fun Online Poll was as follows:

Are people who commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train particularly inconsiderate?

Yes - 89%
No - 11%

So that's that settled, and Jeremy Clarkson vindicated. Thanks to everybody who took part.
----------------------------
And lo, to The Big Topic of the weekend, Dave breaking with tradition of all previous British Prime Ministers* and exercising his/our veto. As Allister Heath concludes in today's City AM:

One argument that has been making the rounds is that the City is only attractive to global banks because of the UK’s membership of the EU. But then why does non-EU Switzerland have such a large financial and business sector, and why does everybody agree that non-EU Singapore, Dubai, New York and Hong Kong are London’s biggest rivals?

So far the prime minister has emerged as an accidental Eurosceptic; his dramatic shift in UK policy came about almost by chance and partly as a result of incompetent civil servants. But that doesn’t matter. History only remembers great decisions – it never asks why they were taken.

Correct. It is better to be right for the wrong reasons as it is to be wrong for the right reasons. What this whole Euro-bail out treaty is really all about is bailing out French and German banks (as The Guardian pointed out), and what seems to have been the deciding factor for Dave was the fact that Merkozy intended to part-finance this by clobbering UK banks with a Financial Transaction Tax.

In other words, the proposed EU Treaty changes have nothing to do with 'European solidarity' and will not solve the problems in the Euro-zone, this was just our Dave and Merkozy going in to battle on behalf of their respective banks, but hey.

Nonetheless, I am pleasantly surprised by all this, and I had I been in Dave's position, I would have done exactly the same. But how about you? Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

* I'm probably wrong on this point, but given the ensuing hoo-ha, it certainly feels like it.

"Passenger taken ill!"

Somebody once told me that when London Underground announce that Tube trains are delayed because of a "passenger taken ill", this is code for "somebody has thrown him or herself under a train".

I have no idea whether this is true or not, but this was inspiration for a song that I co-wrote eleven years ago:

Even if he'd scored top marks for "take-off" and "flight"...

... he'd have scored zero for "entry".

No wonder the NHS is in a mess

It might be because they teach them nothing at medical school. From The Daily Mail:

Smoking in your car is more damaging to health than breathing in exhaust fumes, a leading doctor has claimed. Douglas Noble, a British Medical Association public health expert, made the claim as his colleagues called for tougher tobacco and alcohol controls...

London-based Dr Noble said: "In cars, particle concentrations are 27 times higher than in a smoker's home and 20 times higher than in a pub, in the days when you could smoke in public places. (1) It would be safer to have your exhaust pipe on the inside of your car than smoke cigarettes (2) in terms of fine particular matter released. A ban would protect pregnant women and children."

1) AFAIAA, there is no general ban on 'smoking in public places', just in enclosed public spaces, although the Buckinghamshire Bansturbulary is working on that one as well.

2) Ahem.

Apart from that, the wedding went as planned...

From The Daily Mail:

A bridegroom gunned down his wife and best man at his wedding reception after announcing to horrified guests that he had a 'surprise' for them.

Rogerio Damascena, 29, then committed suicide at the event in Camaragibe, outside the city of Recife, in north-east Brazil, on Saturday. Renata Alexandre Costa Coelho, a 25-year-old lawyer, and best man Marcelo Guimaraes both died at the scene.

Comedy Death Of The Month

Kristian Digby (who he? A "host of BBC1’s daytime property show To Buy Or Not To Buy", apparently) has joined the hallowed ranks of Steven Milligan, Michael Hutchence and David Carradine.