Friday, January 20, 2006
Hearts, Hearts, Glorious Hearts
Jose Gonzales releases Heartbeat this week - don't bother rushing out to buy it, it's an experience akin to freezing your hand and slowly waiting for life to return to your fingers - which got us thinking: the average human heartbeat is 72 beats per minute but popstars, of course, aren't average humans; they're celebrities, which means that they're at least 10 times better than us ordinary mortals, but does this mean that their heart rate is 10 times faster as well? Probably not as it would lead to a short, but painful death, but to find out for definite we've spent this week pestering popstars and wiring them up to our portable heart monitor to find out. Here are the results:-
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- Paul Hardcastle - 19bpm. This is remarkably low, but this result needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as the reading was stuttering when we did his.
- Gareth Gates - 83bpm. What his heart wants to say, but again, this result needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as... oh, never mind.
- Madonna - 0bpm. Creatively dead.
- Elvis Presley - 0bpm. Actually dead.
- Pete Burns - n/a. When attatched to the measuring device, his heart went bang! so instead we got him to the doctor. Something similar happened when we attempted to get a reading for Helen Love, although her heart went Boom!, rather than Bang! It's probably best not to recount exactly what happened when Lulu got wired up to the monitor. Or when we got in a cab and tried to get a reading from Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne
- The Connels - 74/75bpm. The reading fluctuated.
- Neil Tennant - 36bpm. When measured his heart started skipping a beat. Every time.
- Tony Bennet - n/a. Unable to get a reading as he'd left his heart in San Francisco.
- Vanilla Ice - 56bpm. Chilled.
- Moby - 1000bpm, which shattered records, unlike Debbie Harry's reading, which just shattered.
- Steps - 71bpm. Only a heartbeat away.
- Feargal Sharkey - 72bpm. The only reading which matched the average, but then a good heart these days is hard to find.
- Celine Dion - n/a. No result yet, it's still going on.
- Will Young - n/a. Unfortunately while attempting to calculate Will's heart rate, our machine broke down and, despite our best efforts, refused to start up again. This made us quite frustrated and Will's constant chants of "Switch it on! Switch it on!" really didn't help matters.
- Kylie Minogue - 81bpm. Though this reading is slightly inaccurate thanks to the aforementioned equipment breakdown, so we had to put our hand on her heart to take it.
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