Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   5

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122
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
left behind a few brilliant, cel-
ebrated poems, most famously 
“Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ke-
ats’s last will and testament 
also  seems  to  have  been  his 
last, and shortest, poem. His 
will was a single line of perfect 
iambic pentameter: “My chest 
of books divide amongst my 
friends.”
✖  ✖  ✖
Del Close, who founded Chi-
cago’s ImprovOlympic the-
ater  and  taught  dozens  of 
Saturday Night Live
 cast mem-
bers, died of cancer in 1999. 
He willed his skull to Chica-
go’s Goodman Th
 eatre,  in 
hopes that after his death he 
might be able to play Yorick 
in 
Hamlet.
 Awfully brilliant—
but we can’t help but think 
that  he  might  also  have 
starred in a theatrical 
Th
 e 
Wizard of Oz:
 At the end, the 
Scarecrow could get Close’s 
brain and the Tin Man his 
heart. Speaking of hearts . . .
How to Win 
Friends and 
Infl uence People 
(Postmortem)
If you’ve always wanted to be 
remembered but your chances 
of achieving fame in life look 
bleak, take a lesson from Ca-
nadian Charles Vance Millar. 
Although a very successful 
lawyer, Millar didn’t achieve 
notoriety until 1926, when he 
died. He bequeathed much of 
his estate to whichever wom-
an in Canada had the most 
children in the 10 years fol-
lowing his death. The will 
 survived  
several attempts to 
annul it, and four Toronto 
women—each  of  whom  had 
nine  babies during what came 
to be called the “Great Stork 
Derby”—eventually inherited 
shares of his $750,000 es-
tate.

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123
06
  Your Beatin’ Heart
After Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned while sailing in 1822 
(see p. 208), his body was cremated on the beach with fellow 
Romantic poet Lord Byron looking on. Shelley’s heart, how-
ever, refused to burn—at least according to Lord Byron, who 
admittedly was the Pinocchio of British Romantic poetry. So 
while Shelley’s cremains* were buried in the Protestant cem-
etery in Rome, his heart was given to his wife, Mary (of 
Fran-
kenstein
 fame), who wrapped it in a copy of a poem Shelley 
had written—and promptly stuck it in a drawer. Th
 at’s pretty 
unsentimental on the one hand, but on the other: What are 
you going to do with your dead husband’s unburnable heart 
anyway? Take it out and pet it? Wrap it in a new poem every 
year? So basically it remained in storage until Mary Shelley’s 
death almost 30 years later. Eventually, however, it was bur-
ied in Dorset, England.
✖  ✖  ✖
Lance Armstrong’s resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute 
is pretty impressive, but Lance’s heart is hardly the slowest 
beating on earth. Th
  at distinction goes to the happiest of 
clams, which have a resting heart rate of about 2 bpm.
✖  ✖  ✖
Worth bearing in mind if you’re stocking a fallout shelter: 
NECCO’s classic Valentine’s Day candy hearts stay edible for 
about fi ve years. (Which, incidentally, makes them a far bet-
ter choice than Twinkies. Despite what you may have heard, 
Twinkies get rotten and moldy within a couple months.) If 
you’re like us, you’ve always thought that all NECCO hearts 
*  Note: We have been waiting our entire lives to use 
cremains
 in a 
sentence.