Why do the Swiss have such great sex?

Ashley Curtis

Description

What's the risk of a Swiss tsunami? Could Swiss gold sink the Swiss navy? How many lives does a tunnel cost? You might never have thought you wanted to know what happens to a corpse in a glacier, or how much heroin costs in Switzerland, but once you dip into these 66 fascinating Q&As, you won't be able to put them down.

Sujets

• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: HELVETIQ
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9783038690597
• Langue: English

Extrait

About The Book

Get to know Switzerland‘s most beloved criminal, its real traditional foods, the stinky side of its bucolic agriculture, its true size (ironed flat), its polluted glaciers and its (four) packs of wild wolves. Check out William Hill‘s odds that Geneva will vanish in a black hole, Kim Jong-un‘s remarkable school career, and the routes that neighboring drops of Swiss rain take to distant seas. Find out who built Switzerland, and who actually rules it. Learn about the dirty secrets of Swiss chocolate, Swiss weapons, Swiss intelligence and Swiss happiness. You will soon notice that the 66 improbable questions in this book have even more improbable—and compelling—answers!
Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?

Extraordinary Answers to 66 Improbable Questions About Switzerland
Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?

Extraordinary Answers to 66 Improbable Questions About Switzerland
ASHLEY CURTIS
First edition © 2018 Bergli Books, all rights reserved © Text Ashley Curtis European Edition, ISBN 978-3-03869-047-4 : Printed in the Czech Republic International edition, ISBN 978-3-03869-058-0
Also available as an ebook. Epub ISBN 978-3-03869-059-7. Mobi ISBN 978-3-03869-060-3.
Also available in German: Warum Haben die Schweizer so grossartigen Sex? ISBN 0978-3-03869-048-1
Bergli Books received a grant from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture 2016–2018 For a list of sources, see www.bergli.ch/Why?Sources . www.bergli.ch
Table of Contents
1. Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?
2. Could a Tsunami Strike Switzerland?
3. How Many Lives Does a Tunnel Cost?
4. Could Swiss Gold Sink the Swiss Navy?
5. What Happens to a Corpse in a Crevasse?
6. What Happens to All the Cow Manure?
7. Has Switzerland Ever Had a King or Queen?
8. Who’s the Fastest Climber in the Swiss Alps?
9. Will Geneva Vanish in a Black Hole?
10. Am I More Likely to be the Victim of a Mass Shooting in Switzerland, or in the USA?
11. Did William Tell Really Shoot an Apple Off His Son’s Head?
12. What Did the Swiss Alps Look Like to the Dinosaurs?
13. Who Is Switzerland’s Worst Arsonist?
14. Why Aren’t There “No Trespassing” Signs on Privately Owned Swiss Land?
15. Did Kim Jong-un Go to School in Switzerland?
16. What Are Switzerland’s Real Traditional Foods?
17. How Much Does Heroin Cost in Switzerland?
18. Is Switzerland the Most Mountainous Country in Europe?
19. What Was Switzerland’s Major Export in the High Middle Ages?
20. What is the World’s Most Valuable Banknote?
21. Who’s Got the Safest Grave in Switzerland?
22. Was Switzerland Built by the Italians?
23. Is Cannabis Legal in Switzerland?
24. Why Can’t I Have a Pet Rat in Switzerland?
25. Does Swiss Cheese Cost More Than It Used To?
26. Could the Whole World Sleep in Switzerland?
27. Do Swiss Cows Commit Suicide?
28. What Does the Rest of the World Think of Switzerland?
29. Is Switzerland Bad for the Environment?
30. How Much Would It Cost to Buy Switzerland?
31. How Late Are Swiss Trains Every Day?
32. Were the Swiss Alps Conquered by the British?
33. How Many Toblerones Would It Take to Make a Matterhorn?
34. Why Are So Many Swiss Sheep Killed by Wolves?
35. How Large Would Switzerland Be If It Was Ironed Flat?
36. Where Can I Find Prehistoric Art in Switzerland?
37. Is Switzerland a Haven for Nasty Dictators?
38. What Happens When You Accidentally Land an Airplane on a Glacier?
39. Is it Ethically OK to Buy Swiss Chocolate?
40. What Happens If I Commit a Violent Crime in Switzerland?
41. Is Swiss Hydropower Really Clean?
42. How Dangerous Are Swiss Poisonous Snakes?
43. What Does My Country Have to Do to Buy Arms from Switzerland?
44. If You Balanced Switzerland on the Tip of a Pin, Where Would the Pin Prick?
45. How Much Vacation Do You Get If You’re Unemployed in Switzerland?
46. Who Is Switzerland’s Most Beloved Criminal?
47. If a Hostile Country Wanted to Attack Switzerland, What Would Be the Best Way to Do It?
48. What Was Switzerland Like During the Last Ice Age? Will It Ever Be That Way Again?
49. What Would Happen If a Dam Broke?
50. How Will the Swiss Ski Industry Die?
51. How Much Rubble Was Excavated Digging the World’s Longest Tunnel? And Where Is It Now?
52. Is Switzerland Homophobic?
53. Are the Swiss Alps Growing or Shrinking?
54. How Happy Are the Swiss?
55. What Is Switzerland’s Most Offensive Statue?
56. Where’s the Best Place to Spit If I Want My Spittle to Travel Far and Wide?
57. What Happens to Swiss Nuclear Waste?
58. Who Gets Swiss Trains When the Swiss Get Tired of Them?
59. If Switzerland Were a Swimming Pool, How Deep Would It Be?
60. If Switzerland Were Placed Under a Dome, Would It Survive?
61. How Often Are the Clocks in Swiss Train Stations Wrong?
62. How Much Money Would the Ice in Swiss Glaciers Be Worth If It Were Chopped Into Ice Cubes and Sold?
63. Can Swiss Currency Be Counterfeited?
64. Do You Need a PhD to Vote in Swiss Elections?
65. If You Made a Snowman with All the Snow That Falls on Switzerland in a Year, How Tall Would It Be?
66. What Is Switzerland?
1
Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?
In 2013 the market research and data analytics firm YouGov carried out a widely reported survey of sex lives in 13 European countries. YouGov is a highly respected sampler of opinions, and its CEO has an illustrious name: Shakespeare. The Guardian newspaper has dubbed Shakespeare “the pollster with the uncanny ability of getting it right.” 1
And who came out on top? Latin lovers? Liberated Dutch? The tabloid-loving Brits? None of it. Switzerland had the highest ratings both of “my sexual performance” and “the quality of my sex life,” ahead of Spain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, and, in last place, Shakespeare’s homeland. The Swiss tabloid Blick (June 24th, 2013) celebrated this astonishing victory with a splashy headline: “We are the Sex Masters!”
Two years later an article in the online journal Alternet, which was based on a whole slew of different surveys, listed the top twelve most sexually satisfied countries “in no particular order,” but with the Swiss as the first nation on the list. This led to an explosion of reports ( The Independent, The Mirror, Salon, Metro News, Elite Readers, etc.) claiming that the Swiss were the number one lovers in the world. “Switzerland is both hot and safe,” reported the online women’s magazine Bustle. The news made it all the way to India, where the Internet media and news company Scoopwhoop asked, “Is it the picturesque landscape? Is it the romantic Yash Raj movies? Is it the sex education programs they start from kindergarten itself?” 2
These excellent results from 2013 and 2015 were all the more remarkable for the vast improvement Swiss lovers had obviously made since April 18th, 2012, when the same Blick displayed the devastating headline: “What a Defeat: Swiss are Losers in Bed!” This time it was reporting on a C-Date survey that revealed Brazilian men and Italian women as the world’s best lovers, and put the Swiss unceremoniously in last place.
If Switzerland can move from last place to first in a single year, you might wonder what ups and downs it has experienced throughout the centuries. So let’s have a peek.
Six hundred years ago, in 1417, the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini—a man who fathered 14 children with his mistress and another 6 with his wife—visited the baths at Baden in Canton Aargau and filed this report:
These baths are the general resort of lovers and their mistresses, of all, in short, who are fond of pleasure. Many ladies pretend to be sick, merely with a view of being sent for cure to this watering place. You consequently see here a great number of handsome females without their husbands and not protected by any male relations, but attended by a couple of maids and a man-servant, or some elderly cousin, who is very easily given the slip . . . I believe there are no baths in the world more efficacious in promoting the propagation of the human species . . . I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure.
This must have been one of those good years—even better, perhaps, than 2013. Poggio made some more remarkable observations:
Here we meet with abbots, monks, friars, and priests, who live with greater license than the rest of the company. These ecclesiastics, forgetting the gravity of their profession, sometimes bathe with the ladies, and adorn their hair with silken ribbons.
Two centuries after Poggio’s visit, the Swiss were still living it up in Baden. Thomas Coryat, a British traveler and court jester at the time of a more famous Shakespeare than the pollster, was shocked and befuddled by the baths—suggesting, perhaps, that 1608 was another of those bad years for the Brits.
But let these Germans and Helvetians do as they list, and observe these kind of wanton customs as long as they will; for mine own part were I a married man, and meant to spend some little time here with my wife for solace and recreation sake, truly I should hardly be persuaded to suffer her to bathe herself naked in one and the self-same bath with one only bachelor or married man with her, because if she was fair, and had an attractive countenance, she might perhaps cornify [cuckold] me.
Yet Swiss sex also had its less exciting periods. In 1685 the future Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, was in Bern and noted that, “The third adultery is punished with death, which is also the punishment for the fifth act of fornication.” 3 Burnet observed the execution of a woman who “confessed herself guilty of many whoredoms,” and he found it a very tender beheading:
The Advoyer, after the sentence [was read], took the criminal very gently by the hand, and prayed for her soul; and after execution there was a sermon for the instruction of the people.
According to Burnet, however, adultery and fornication w