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Friday TALES OF INTEREST
This is a thread for interesting stuff.
To get us started, I'm going to tell you about how awesome Tycho Brahe was. REALLY FUCKING SUPER AWESOME.
Tycho Brahe was a 16th-century Danish astronomer, whose life's work became the basis for the work of Johannes Kepler. Brahe has been in the news recently, as he was exhumed this year (for the second time) in order to continue investigations into his cause of death. Legend has it that he died of a burst bladder after refusing to leave the table at a banquet he was hosting in order to relieve himself, believing it to be a breach of etiquette. However, toxic levels of mercury were found in his moustache hairs, leading some to hypothesise that he could have succumbed to poisoning by his own hand (the use of mercury in treating ailments was not uncommon in those days), or at the hand of another - Kepler himself has been posited as a possible suspect.
But why, exactly, was Brahe so awesome? Well, he lost part of his nose in a duel, and fashioned a prosthetic that was said to be made of solid gold (although it is believed that it may be made of copper, or that he had a number of different ones). He had lots of parties, at which his jester would perform. His jester was a dwarf named Jepp, who sat under the table during dinner, and whom Brahe believed was clairvoyant. He also had a moose, which died after getting drunk at one of Brahe's parties and falling down some stairs.
Now it's your turn to enthral and amaze your fellow DiSpatriots with more...
TALES OF INTEREST