The Irish Sports Page...

...more commonly known as the obituaries. Properly done, obituaries can be hugely entertaining, especially for those of us with a morbid turn of mind or a gallows sense of humor.

The Daily Telegraph's obituaries are excellent, to the point where 'best of collections' have been published, and rightly so. Folks from all walks of life appear in death in the Telegraph obits. You can read them online - you have to register for a password first, but I found the entertainment value made the registration worthwhile. Where else can you read about Harold von Braunhat, the inventor of Sea
Monkeys and find this little gem of dry understatement?

But Sea Monkeys were always less a toy than a test of childhood faith. The creatures may have lived dazzlingly heroic or romantic lives in the minds of their owners, but the physical evidence was always a bit disappointing. The biggest Artemia nyos ever grows is a tenth of an inch and the most interesting thing it does is follow a beam of light up and down its tank. Mostly it does nothing at all.

Or take the strange case of Lord Jenkins of Putney:

In 1945 he was sent to Burma to run the Forces Radio Service in Rangoon. There he identified himself so passionately with the Burmese people that he took to wearing native dress and calling himself Uyan Kin. This did not commend him to his superiors, and he was dispatched home.

You can learn about the behind-the-lines escapades of Sigmund Freud's grandson:

At the meeting the next day attended by all the local army and Nazi officials of the district, it was decided to escort Freud to Linz to see General Rendulic to confirm the takeover of the airport. The high point of the meeting for him was the fact that fully half the attendees asked for a private word in order to stress their personal love for Jews.

And if you think you've problems with love and romance, consider the very complicated relationships of one Jennifer Ross:

In 1942 Jennifer, already pregnant, married Robert Heber-Percy and entered a most unusual ménage. Heber-Percy had been living at Faringdon for a decade as the boyfriend of Lord Berners, the composer and eccentric known for his waspish sense of humour and his exotic way of life: guests were summoned to dinner by a music box in the hall; the doves that flew about were dyed many and various colours (inadvertently making them vulnerable to predators), and the whole set-up was gently parodied by Nancy Mitford, who drew on Lord Berners for the fictional Lord Merlin.

Heber-Percy himself was a wild figure, known as "the Mad Boy" in Berners's circle. He had done more than enough to earn the sobriquet; even if Berners's fondness for exaggeration is taken into account, there is substance in many of the stories. He once nearly killed a woman in Salzburg by throwing a tankard from a restaurant, attempted to commit suicide and had to be removed heavily tranquilised. When he arrived in Florence he was "carried into the hotel in a semi-conscious state still dressed in his Tyrolean costume and with his hair hanging all over his face". At Amalfi he hit Berners over the head with a button-hook when Berners, wary of being spotted at the table with a young man sporting a bright red shirt, refused to accompany him to breakfast on the terrace.

The Heber-Percy marriage took everyone by surprise, not least Lord Berners, who was not at all sure how to react.

Jesus that last sentence absolutely kills me.