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Friday, March 1, 2024

More Unfortunate, Mostly Literary, Happenings of Past Marches

Read last year's Bummer March post here.


March 2, 1978: Two thieves steal the coffin containing the body of actor Charlie Chaplin, which was interred in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. They hope to gain $600,000 in ransom, but Chaplin’s widow Oona (the daughter of American playwright Eugene O’Neill) refused to pay. The two men, auto mechanisms from Poland and Bulgaria, were instead forced to show police the corn field in which they’d reburied the coffin. Chaplin’s family took the precaution of burying the coffin in concrete when it was returned to the cemetery. The English actor had died at age 88 on December 25, 1977.


March 11, 1918:
Private Albert Gitchell, stationed in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, is discovered to have the first-recorded case of influenza in what becomes the influenza pandemic of 1918. An estimated 50 million to 100 million people die of influenza during the pandemic worldwide.

In the Disaster Area Podcast episode on the Bazar de la Charite fire of May 4, 1897 in Paris, Jennifer Matarese loosely outlines how that tragic fire that killed 126 people indirectly related to the events that started World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. To wit:

- The fire kills Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon.

- Sophie's sister, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is inconsolable at the death of her favorite sister. Empress Elisabeth was already having a pretty rough time.

- Elisabeth's only son (of her four children), Crown Prince Rudolph, had died in an apparent murder-suicide, killing his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera and himself, in 1889. Crown Prince Rudolph, who was to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dies without leaving a legitimate male heir.

- In 1898, Empress Elisabeth is assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, who stabs her with a thin needle-file as she walks between her hotel and a steamship.

- When Empress Elisabeth is assassinated with no son or male grandson to inherit the throne, rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passes to Elisabeth's husband's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig.

- Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria dies of natural causes (typhoid) in 1896, passing the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

- Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated by a Serbian anarchist on June 28, 1914, leading directly to the Great War when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

- Fort Riley is one of the major training grounds for the American Expeditionary Forces who will fight in the Western Front of the Great War. As American troops are moved into Europe, they are among those who spread the H1N1 influenza A virus. 

- The virus kills an estimated 25 million to 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, with some estimates going as high as 100 million people.


March 20, 1964: Poet, novelist, and folk hero Brendan Behan, considered one of the all-time greatest Irish literary talents, dies at the age of 41 after collapsing into a diabetic coma in the street.


March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.

Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Lady Gaga/CJ Holland "Luv U Sum" Lyrics - Dramatic Reading - Two Edits

I made two more very short YouTube clips for tracks I created in BandLab. In each, I'm reading the lyrics of "Luv U Sum," a rare track written by C.J. Holland and Lady Gaga. 


The lyrics are:

"Got your sugar right over here,

Not saccharin or fake my dear.

No-nonsense diet baby I’m,

Your sugarcane, on your mind.

It’s nothin’ you can’t handle babe,

Domino, not Splenda made.

So lick your lips and brace your tongue,

Get over here, you love you some."


The first edit is an upbeat pop music edit, with additional vocals by BAER. (You, too, can use the BAER sample pack in BandLab.) 


The second edit uses elements of horror movie soundtracks.


Which edit do you like better?


If you want to collaborate in BandLab, you can find me at https://www.bandlab.com/erinrainbowlicks

Sunday, February 18, 2024

I Read Poetry With BandLab (YouTube Clips)

In these three short YouTube clips, I read three poems. The first is by Sappho, the second is a found poem with text from a 1990s sociology textbook, and the third is by Aphra Behn. I recorded all of these clips in BandLab

I've been playing around with BandLab for the past week. I saw a post on Tumblr about how anyone can make music, without knowing how to play an instrument or even owning an instrument, using some of the websites in the post. (Some of them are broken.) 

First, Sappho's "Now to please my little friend." This English translation is in the public domain; I found it in Project Gutenberg.


Next, a found poem from an outdated sociology textbook.


Finally, a poem by Aphra Behn (1640-1689), one of the first women in English history to earn her living solely by her writing. She was a poet and playwright. In fact, she was the second-most performed playwright in her time, second only to England's poet laureate, John Dryden. John Dryden was so famous and beloved in the 17th century that he was buried in Westminster Abbey right next to Geoffrey Chaucer.

All of Aphra Behn's poems are in the public domain. She lived a really long time ago.


Thursday, February 1, 2024

More Unfortunate, Mostly Literary, Happenings of Past Februaries

Read about The Day the Music Died and other February tragedies in last year's post here.

Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: More Unfortunate Literary Happenings of Past Januaries

A few updates:

February 2, 2022: A pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, holds a burning of books he deems “demonic.” According to his loosely-organized, conspiratorial beliefs, a book counted as “demonic” if it was “anything tied to the Masonic Lodge.” It’s unclear whether these actions were influenced more by religious fanaticism or by mental illness.

February 6, 1998: Austrian “Rock Me Amadeus” rocker Falco (Johann Hölzel) dies in a traffic accident while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He is 40 years old.

February 9, 1963: In a racially-charged incident captured in song by Bob Dylan, 51-year-old Hattie Carroll is working as a bar server at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. The hotel is hosting an event called the Spinster’s Ball. One of the guests, Billy Zantzinger, who is white, is excessively drunk and physically and verbally abusing both his wife Jane and the African-American wait staff at the event.

Zantziger hurls racial slurs and other verbal abuse at Carroll, then strikes her in the neck/upper shoulder region with his cane. Carroll immediate begins feeling numbness in her arm, and her co-workers notice her speech is slurred. She’s taken to the hospital, where Carroll dies of a brain hemorrhage. Zantziger is convicted of manslaughter for Carroll’s death, but his sentence is a paltry six months in prison and a $500 fine, plus a fine of $125 for assaulting the other wait staff.

Portrait of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Swedish Nationalmuseum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

February 24, 1809: London’s Drury Lane Theatre burns down. No one is injured, but the loss of the building is a financial disaster for its owner, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

February 28, 1909: Actor Irene Muza (a stage name) dies when her hairdresser accidentally sets her on fire. According to a Perth, Australia, newspaper account published March 30, 1909, “Before taking part in a charitable performance on Tuesday she sent for her hairdresser to come and dress her hair. The hairdresser had applied a petrol lotion, when a few drops of it fell upon the kitchen stove. The stuff, ignited in an instant, and the flames caught the actress's hair and her dressing-gown and the clothing of the hairdresser. [...] In a moment she was a mass of flame. A friend who was in an adjoining room tried to save her by tearing away the burning gown, but before this could be accomplished she had sustained terrible injuries. She was conveyed to the hospital, where she expired. Her hairdresser, who was also badly injured, lies in a precarious condition.”

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Audible.com Book Deals Thru January 31, 2024

Get these Audible.com book deals through the end of January 2024.

This book is an amazing primer on intersectional feminism. I'd recommend it to anybody. Tressie McMillan Cottom is brilliant. 
46% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/47VDSwy

This special edition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is read by Claire Danes. It's disturbingly relevant now that Americans have lost our Constitutional right to privacy and states can tell us what we can and can't do with our own pregnancies. (Vote for people who will pick good Supreme Court justices, my fellow Americans. Don't stop there, but please do start there. I have no patience for non-voters in the year of our lord Carly Rae Jepsen 2024.)

73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ucBy6F

Thick and Other Essays is, of course, a wonderful choice to read during February, Black History Month. Or at any time of any other year. So is Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X, read here by the legendary Laurence Fishburne.
73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3w0c2Sx

Not to turn this books post into All My Criticisms of the United States, but I'm still angry that I was taught in school that Malcolm X was some kind of "dangerous radical." That was only racism, Islamophobia, and an attempt to revisionist history. Almost all of the things Malcolm X said were factually accurate. He was right about so much

I'm also angry that September 11, 2001 was 23 years ago and if you're a white American, you can still get away with so much public Islamophobia. It's sickening. It literally costs you zero dollars and zero cents to treat people who practice Islam as your fellow human beings who are each an individual person.

I want Benjamin Netanyahu imprisoned at the Hague, next to Donald J. Trump, both of them awaiting their trials for crimes against humanity. This is a non-controversial statement: It's bad to starve your neighbors to death. That is an objectively bad thing. Every single Palestinian person is, objectively, entitled to eat food, drink water, and receive medical care. 

I've been told in the recent past that voting for President Joseph R. Biden is the same thing as supporting the genocide of Arabs in Gaza. I explicitly reject that notion.

But that's me up on my soapbox again. Now back to books.

Everybody likes music, right? You know her, you love her, you heard her song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" while you were shopping in December.


73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Szlsxc

This one looks interesting.
61% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/47QVAl6

I own this one in paperback. I haven't finished it yet, but the first chapter or so that I read seemed intriguing. I'll finish it one of these days.
71% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4bibIz1

If Mariah Carey isn't to your musical taste, maybe you're rather read about Stevie Nicks.
Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/49aLk8h

And lastly, this one is just for fun.
56% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ukIui5

Saturday, January 27, 2024

A Spoken Word and Music Playlist for Lewis Carroll's Birthday

192 years ago today, on January 27, 1832, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pen name: Lewis Carroll) is born. Here's a Spotify playlist I made combining some spoken word tracks with music inspired by Carroll's best-known work, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Artists include Lady Gaga, Franz Ferdinand, Danny Elfman, P!nk, Taylor Swift, Jewel, and Clive Owen. Happy listening!

Saturday, January 6, 2024

More Unfortunate Literary Happenings of Past Januaries

Read last year's post "Bummer New Year: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Januaries."

Here are only a few more updates I've added over the past year:


January 6, 1977: Natalina Maria Vittoria “Dolly” Sinatra, age 79, the mother of singer/actor Frank Sinatra, dies when the private Learjet she’s taking to visit her famous son in Las Vegas crashes into the San Gorgonio Wilderness in southern California. Mrs. Sinatra’s friend Mrs. Anthony Carboni is also killed, along with the jet’s two pilots.


January 13, 1908: One hundred seventy-one people die as a result of a fire that started during the intermission of a stage play at Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. The audience was in its seats to watch a Magic Lantern show. A Magic Lantern machine was a technology somewhat in between a slide show and a movie projector, with slide-like images that gradually faded into the next image.

The gases used to run the Magic Lantern caught fire after someone knocked over one of the kerosene lamps being used to light the stage. The dead include 170 audience members and one firefighter killed while responding. This tragedy spurs the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a variety of safety laws governing indoor public spaces.

Incidentally, the playwright of the drama being performed was Harriet Earhart Monroe. Mrs. Monroe was not present, but her sister Della Earhart Meyers was on stage as the narrator or chorus of the drama. Della Earhart Myers was among those who perished. Harriet and Della were the sisters of Samuel Stanton Earhart, who was the father of aviator Amelia Earhart.


January 14, 1986: Actress Donna Reed dies of pancreatic cancer. She’s been diagnosed with the disease only three months earlier.


January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O’Riordan dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with Champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.


January 26, 2010: Boa Sr, an approximately 65-year-old woman of the Bo people on her mother’s side and the Jeru people on her father’s side, dies. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Aka-Bo language of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of India.


January 28, 1856: Robert and Margaret (called Peggy) Garner and their four children, an enslaved family running for their freedom along the Underground Railroad, shelter at the home of free person of color Joseph Kite on the west side of Cincinnati, Ohio. U.S. Marshalls, required by the cruel Fugitive Slave Act to track down escaping enslaved persons, surround Mr. Kite’s home and demand the surrender of the Garner party. 

To their horror, Peggy has attempted to kill her two sons and two daughters rather than seeing them returned to slavery in Kentucky. She’s succeeded in killing her second-youngest child, her 2-year-old daughter Mary. She’d intended to kill her children and then herself; the other three children were wounded but survived. After a trial, the surviving Garners were forced back into enslavement. Peggy Garner’s story became the basis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.


January 31, 1957: A Douglas DC-7B aircraft takes off from Santa Monica Airport on a test flight, accompanied by two U.S. Air Force Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jets. The role of the jets is to test the DC-7B’s radar capabilities. At 11:18 a.m. local time, one of the Scorpions collides with the DC-7B. The pilot of the Scorpion is killed in the crash; the radar operator ejects from the jet, and despite severe burns and a broken leg, survives. 

All four crew members aboard the DC-7B are killed when the craft crashes, partially into the grounds of Pacoima Congregational Church and partially into the grounds of Pacoima Junior High School, where a boys’ gym class is taking place outdoors. Three students are killed, and approximately 75 students are injured by falling debris. 

Among the witnesses of the mid-air collision is musician Ritchie Valens, 15 years old at the time. Valens himself will die in a plane crash two years and three days later.