I'm not that depressed!

Here I am, mouse-clicking away as I do research - yep, that's right, research - for an upcoming evening of murder and mayhem I'm planning. I'm filling in my graph, checking it twice, and notice that I don't have a time-frame for the effects of cyanide to take hold.

Well, how hard can it be to find that on the web? I type "cyanide poisoning time death" into the trusty old search engine, and presto, up pops the first of zillions of sites.

Being a simple person, I click on the first button. Hello!
Certainty: very certain
Notes: It helps to have an empty stomach (since the salts react with the stomach acids to form H.C.). A full stomach can delay death for up to four hours with the salts...

Being a bit of an idiot, it takes me a minute to realize that, yup, I'm really reading what I think I'm reading.

And it doesn't stop at cyanide. Check this one out:

Water
Dosage: 14 litres mentioned
Time: 12 hours or so?
Available: always available
Certainty: unknown
Notes: works by washing out the salts in your body, until the cells fail (osmotic balance buggered up). You need to keep drinking continually until you collapse. Unusual method. Someone suggested it would also cause cramps. The following is something from [2]: "About a year ago a local newspaper carried a story about a woman who had drunk herself to death. Apparently she had ingested something mildly poisonous, and when she called her doctor asking him what to do, he told her to drink lots of water and see him in the morning. She got to it and managed to drink no less than 14 litres of water before the osmotic balance in her body was so upset it could no longer function and she died (don't know how quickly)".

The above anecdote originally came from me, and the death described occured in Växjö, Sweden. Unfortunately I no longer remember which newspaper I saw it in.

Recently, I was told about a similar case in San Antonio. It supposedly happened a couple of years ago and was reported in the local San Antonio Express/News.

Death by drinking water. God, shoot me now. Can you imagine? After all that liquid consumption the person keels over and the muscles relax and... well, the clean underwear granny always said to wear will meet their end as well. Why do people say to wear clean underwear in case you get run over by a bus? Uh, nothing you're wearing will be very clean afterwards. The things that make you shake your head...

But getting back to the point of this rant, I just want to state publicly, for the record, that I was just doing research. If I keel over and die suddenly, it was probably the evil cat and I don't want him to get any of the insurance money. No diamond-studded collars for the little vampire.