Sometimes i want to get away from it all. No responsibilities. No worries. No pain.
In the cartoon series The Simpsons, Homer Simpson faked his death by tossing a dummy of himself over a waterfall.
In 1865, a man living in Wagga Wagga, Australia, came forward claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a large estate who perished at sea 11 years previously. The real Tichborne had been small, dark, sharp-featured and well educated; “the Claimant”, as he became known, was freckled, semi-literate and fantastically fat. In reality, he was Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping who had jumped ship in Chile and wound up in Australia.
Tichborne’s elderly mother, however, insisted this vast imposter was her son. The public adored the Claimant, espousing his cause as a way of annoying the Victorian Establishment. After a dramatic trial, Orton was exposed and jailed for ten years, eventually dying in poverty and obscurity. But he still insisted on being buried under the name “Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne”, a dedication to his own hoax that is hard not to admire.
Quotation from The Attraction of Pseudocide (Times Online)
