Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for June 28, 2014

Enrico Caruso also burst a blood vessel in his throat while performing an opera, though he didn’t die of it. He died of injuries received a few days earlier when part of a set fell on him during a different opera.

I think I’d be super-duper nauseous on the Dodonpa. As for Signore Sbigoli, I guess he choked on his own blood.

So that’s where the myth came from. When I was a kid, everyone said that if you scream too long and too loudly, you’d die of a heart attack. Now it seems that it’s not of the heart attack, but from a burst carotid/jugular.

Okay, so that’s another roller coaster on my list of “Never gonna try,” right after that one on top of the Las Vegas skyscraper and the one on the Santa Monica Pier (not that the last one is a problem – it’s just on top of Santa Monica Bay, and you run the risk of falling into the oil and whatever it is we call the Bay…)

Manned rocket launches are no particular great shakes in terms of initial acceleration because the rockets are carrying such a heavy weight of fuel at the start. Their acceleration increases as tons of fuel are burned. But the big thing is that they keep on accelerating for over six minutes, at which point they are travelling at 18,000 miles per hour or five miles per second in low-earth orbit!

Imagine of Signor Sbigoli had been singing the final aria From I Pagliacci at the time; everyone would have thought it was just part of the performance

“Puccini”