Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
"The grand Yule-tide festival is opened on the eve of St. Nicholas Day, December sixth; in fact bazaars are held from the first of the month, which is really one prolonged season of merrymaking.
"In Germany, St. Nicholas has a day set apart in his honor. He was born in Palara, a city of Lycia, and but very little is known of his life except that he was made Bishop of Myra and died in the year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal in. In some places Knight Rupert takes the place of St. Nicholas in visiting the houses. But Kriss Kringle has nearly usurped the place St. Nicholas once held in awe and respect by German children.
"Because St. Nicholas Day came so near to Christmas, in some countries the Saint became associated with that celebration, although in Germany the eve of his birthday continues to be observed. Germans purchase liberally of the toys and confectionery offered at the bazaars, and nowhere are prettier toys and confectionery found than in Germany--the country which furnishes the most beautiful toys in the world."
- Yule-Tide in Many Lands by Mary Poagle Pringle and Clara A. Urann, 1916
Happy Krampusnacht to all who celebrate. Don't forget to leave your shoes out for St. Nicholas to fill with goodies tonight, if you haven't been naughty and carried away by Krampus in his sack!
I bought this for my nephews.
My Top 100 Songs of the Spotify Year*:
1. Hymn to Virgil - Hozier: Not my literary art-rock ass loving a song about Dante's Inferno.
10. Nina Cried Power - Hozier: It's not the waking, it's the rising.
11. Disease - Lady Gaga: Up from its #50 position last year, when it had barely come out before the Wrapped cutoff date came up.
12. Cold Cold Ground - Tom Waits: In September 2024,Homicide: Life on the Street actors Kyle Secor and Reed Diamond started a podcast. I re-listened to some of the songs that were on the series when it originally aired (although not used in the streaming version on the Peacock network).
13. Spirits - The Devil Makes Three: I learned this song from a playlist on Jessie Lynn McMains's Substack.
14. The Devil's Nine Questions - Carolyn Kendrick: This neo-folk recommendation came from a podcast but I forgot which one.
23. Stay - Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. These oldies are from Perry's Mix Tape for Truman.
24. Cruel Summer - Taylor Swift: My #4 song last year and probably the Taylor Swift song that brings me the purest joy. But I can only listen to it in the summer. I abandon it when autumn comes. I forgot that I started listened to it because of Good Omens.
I have to admit, the revelation that Neil Gaiman is a garbage heap of a human being really dulled my enthusiasm for Ineffable Spouses. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, it's not your fault.
25. Burn Your Village - Kiki Rockwell
26. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost, Blake X: This poem is really nicely set to a melody. And I can only listen to it in the winter. I'm a mood listener as much as I am a mood reader.
27. Poet - Bastille: My #6 song from last year, I made myself chill out on listening to it quite so much so it wouldn't completely lose its power to affect me.
38. Kill of the Night - Gin Wigmore: I know this one from the first season of The Umbrella Academy.
39. Gin House Blues - Nina Simone
40. Ava Adore - The Smashing Pumpkins
41. Aloha Lucifer - Melanie [Safka], Charming Disaster: This is a particularly cute song, in which the singer claims to have ended up at Hell's gate by confusing the mellow "hang loose" hand gesture of Hawaiian culture with the "horned hands" hand gesture of Satanists and heavy metal enthusiasts.
49. How Bad Do U Want Me - Lady Gaga: Mayhem again.
50. Take Me to Church - MILCK
51. Where Did You Sleep Last Night - Sleigh Bells
52. Saints - The Breeders
53. Peacefield - Ghost: This one is about the Russian Revolution, I'm pretty sure.
54. Danger - The Vantages
55. Yes, I'm a Witch - Yoko Ono
56. Lover Please - Melissa Etheridge: Up from its #92 spot on last year's list.
57. True Religion - Shygirl, Club Shy
58. Kiss the Go-goat - Ghost
59. Goddess - PVRIS: Honestly? I can't remember what this song sounds like or what inspired me to listen to it. It's, like, deleted from my memory banks.
60. Building a Mystery - Goodwerks: The Sarah McLachlan song with a male vocalist; it's so Dean Winchester-coded that I put it on the Destiel playlist.
67. Creep - Scala & Kolaczny Bros.: I know this cover from the Simpsons episode "The D'oh-cial Network." I know the Radiohead original from being a teenager in the '90s.
68. 1979 - The Smashing Pumpkins
69. Down Bad - Taylor Swift: This one is so brilliantly written, with its comparison of a failed love affair to an alien abduction.
70. Super Bon Bon - Soul Coughing: This one was also used on the Homicide: Life on the Street soundtrack in its original run.
83. Paparazzi - Lady Gaga: Because Alexander Skarsgard was in the music video and I remembered that when I watched Skarsgard as a self-aware robot construct on the tv series Murderbot.
Skarsgard Aside: I have to see the above-mentioned Swede in his recent film Pillion. He plays the leader of a biker gang who enters a BDSM relationship with a repressed young man. The young man is played by Harry Melling.
84. Stay ( Faraway, So Close!) - U2
85. Shallow - Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper
86. Black Parade - Beyonce
87. Gimme Shelter - Merry Clayton
88. Love Potion No. 9 - The Clovers
89. So Cruel - U2
90. I Need - Meredith Brooks
91. Wish I Knew You - The Revivalists
92. II Most Wanted - Beyonce, Miley Cyrus
93. Bodies Hit the Floor - Sofi Tukker, Drowning Pool
98. Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover - Sophie B. Hawkins
99. Low - Cracker
100. Venus - Bananarama: Yep, I love my girl groups.
*Fuck ICE. Chinga la migra. Yes, I share a Spotify subscription with my spouse. No, we do not agree with Spotify's decision to accept advertisements from the United States equivalent of the Gestapo.
"Yule-tide in France begins on St. Barbara's Day [Sainte-Barbe], December fourth, when it is customary to plant grain in little dishes of earth for this saint's use as a means of informing her devotees what manner of crops to expect during the forthcoming year. If the grain comes up and is flourishing at Christmas, the crops will be abundant. Each dish of fresh, green grain is used for a centerpiece on the dinner table."
- Yule-Tide in Many Lands by Mary Poagle Pringle and Clara A. Urann, 1916
December 2, 1984: Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, is so poorly maintained it causes the largest industrial disaster in history. The accidental release of methyl isocyanate causes the immediate suffocation deaths of more than 2,000 people, injuries in more than 50,000 people, and an additional gas-related death toll of perhaps another 8,000 people. Although the Indian government charged Union Carbide executives with homicide, the company claimed it was not under Indian jurisdiction and these officials did not appear in court to face these charges.
December 3, 1935: Linguist Milman Parry, 33, an assistant professor at Harvard University whose work introduced the serious study of oral storytelling tradition to academia, travels to Los Angeles with his wife Marian. Marian’s mother, who lived in California, had been the victim of some financial abuses. The Parrys came to help her; Milman packed a revolver in his suitcase, as he’d done on earlier trips to then-Yugoslavia, where he’d collected recordings of Bosnian oral poetry. This time, when the Parrys went to change for dinner in their room in the Palms Hotel, the revolver became entangled in a shirt inside Milman’s suitcase. Its safety catch was not engaged. As Milman reached into the suitcase, the revolver discharged, shooting him through the heart and killing him.
December 4, 1987: Children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel dies of AIDS-related cardiac arrest. He is 54 years old.
December 5, 1931: Poet Vachel Lindsay dies by suicide after intentionally drinking a bottle of lye. His last words are reportedly, “They tried to get me; I got them first!”
December 5, 2016: A 28-year-old man from North Carolina arrives at Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant armed with a rifle and two additional firearms. The man, who had been reading completely falsified conspiracy theories that the restaurant served as a front for child abuse by D.C. elites, threatened staff with the weapons and fired the rifle in the restaurant’s kitchen, apparently a “warning shot” not directed at anyone. He is arrested before anyone inside the pizza place is hurt. In March 2017, the man pleads guilty to federal weapons charges and judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (not yet an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) sentences him to four years in prison. He is released from prison in 2020.
December 7, 1941: A surprise attack on U.S. territory by the Japanese military at 8 a.m. on this Sunday morning kills 2,403 Americans (2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians) and wounds 1,143. The attack on the U.S. naval base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu was intended to incapacitate the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy, even though the U.S. was officially neutral in World War II at this time.
Among the wounded was my paternal grandfather Bill, 17 years old at the time. He was blown off his ship (the USS West Virginia) and knocked, unconscious, into the water, awakening in the base hospital with a shoulder injury. He recovered and was reassigned from pharmacist’s assistant to EMT so he could help care for the more seriously wounded sailors.
December 7, 2010: Kim Tinkham, age 36, dies of what was most likely metastatic breast cancer. Tinkham had appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008 to talk about the then-popular book The Secret. Tinkham claimed her Stage 3 breast cancer had been successfully treated with alternative medicine. The doctor who appeared with Tinkham on that show and backed up her claim, Robert Oldham Young, was arrested in 2014 and convicted in 2016 for theft and practicing medicine without a license.
Young’s claim was that cancers are caused by an imbalance of the body’s pH and that an “alkaline diet” can treat and prevent cancer. Little to no scientific research supports this claim.
December 8, 1980: John Lennon is murdered by handgun outside his apartment building in New York City.
December 9, 1977: In the NBA, the L.A. Lakers play the Houston Rockets. At the beginning of the second half of the game, Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Rocket Kevin Kunnert scuffle over a rebound. In the scuffle, Kunnert elbows Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate Kermit Washington. Washington punches Kunnert in the head.
Kunnert’s teammate Rudy Tomjanovich runs over, intending to help break up the fight. Washington takes a swing at Tomjanovich, striking him in just such a way that fractures his skull. Tomjanovich falls to the court, unconscious and bleeding, although he quickly recovers and, apparently due to a rush of adrenaline, walks around the court in a seemingly aggressive manner. Tomjanovich doesn’t know it yet, but in addition to a broken jaw and nose, he has a fracture near the base of his skull leaking cerebrospinal fluid. He has to be rushed to the emergency room and given emergency surgery, since this is a life-threatening skull fracture. Tomjanovich requires five months of physical recovery before he can play again.
December 9, 1995: American author Toni Cade Bambara dies of colorectal cancer at the age of 56.
December 10, 1816: The body of Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the estranged wife of Percy Shelley and the mother of his son and daughter, is discovered in the Serpentine River. She is pregnant and has apparently died by suicide. She is only 21 years old.
December 10, 1929: Poet, publisher, and World War I veteran Harry Crosby kills his mistress, Josephine Noyes Rotch, and himself inside a friend’s apartment. Crosby’s wife Caresse becomes worried about her husband’s whereabouts when he fails to show up for a dinner party with the poet Hart Crane. Crane will also die by suicide two years later.
December 11, 2021: Anne Rice dies at the age of 80 of complications from a stroke.
December 12, 1999: Satirical novelist Joseph Heller dies of a heart attack at the age of 76.
December 13, 2011: Gianluca Casseri, a far-right author, Germanic neo-Pagan, devotee of American fascist Ezra Pound, and historian of J.R.R. Tolkien goes on an anti-immigrant shooting spree in Piazza Dalmazia, Florence, Italy. He shoots five street vendors who are all immigrants from Senegal, wounding three and killing two. Casseri then kills himself.
December 14, 1920: George “The Gipper” Gipp, legendary Notre Dame football player, dies of strep throat and pneumonia in St. Joseph Hospital (then in South Bend, now located in Mishawaka). He is 25 years old.
George Gipp is buried in his native Michigan, but an often-told legend around the Notre Dame campus is that Gipp's ghost haunts the old theater building, Washington Hall. According to the legend, when Gipp missed curfew and got locked out of his dorm building, he would sleep outside Washington Hall.
December 14, 1944: Golden Age of Hollywood actress Lupe Vélez dies by suicide, taking 75 barbiturate pills with a glass of brandy. Her secretary found her body lying in Vélez’s bed and not, as urban legend has it, drowned in her toilet.
December 14, 1995: 28-year-old professional skydiver Rob Harris dies while filming a Mountain Dew commercial. The commercial, a James Bond spoof in which a Bond-like figure snowboards out of an exploding plane, is aired featuring previous takes, but none of the footage from Harris’s final jump, contrary to urban legend. Harris’s fatal fall is triggered by tangled lines and a backup chute that fails to deploy in time.
December 16, 1913: Ambrose Bierce writes to his literary secretary, “I am going to Mexico with a pretty definite purpose which is not at present discloseable. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!” Neither Bierce’s literary secretary nor any of his other acquaintances ever hear from him again after this letter. He’s presumed to have died in Mexico, perhaps in an early example of “suicide by cop,” or in this case, suicide by revolutionary.
December 16, 1988: Disco singer Sylvester James dies at his home in San Francisco from AIDS-related illness. He’s 41 years old.
December 17, 2021: Visual artist, classic album cover designer, and novelist Eve Babitz dies at age 78 from Huntington’s disease, the same hereditary neurodegenerative disease that killed Woody Guthrie.
December 18, 1966: Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness stout fortune, dies in the hospital one day after crashing his Lotus Elan sports car into a parked truck. Browne had been driving at over 100 miles per hour through London and sped through a red traffic light before crashing. Browne’s passenger, model Suki Potier, was not injured in the accident.
In popular cultural, Browne is remembered as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.” Browne and Paul McCartney and John Lennon were acquaintances.
December 18, 2015: A fire at Mzuzu University Library in Mzuzu, Malawi, destroys an estimated 45,000 pieces of media.
December 19, 1848: 30-year-old Emily Brontë dies of tuberculosis.
December 19, 1991: Musician Henry Rollins and roadie Dennis Cole return home from a Hole concert at the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub when they are held up by a pair of men with guns. The men demand money, and when they discover that Rollins and Cole only have $50 of cash between them, the men order Rollins to go inside the home (which Rollins and Cole share) to get more. Rollins escapes and calls the police. Cole is shot in the face by the robbers and dies. The assailants have never been identified or arrested.
December 20, 1882: Swiss Romantic poet Alice de Chambrier dies at age 21 from complications of diabetes.
December 21, 1940: Heavy-drinking author F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack, leaving his novel The Last Tycoon unfinished.
December 22, 1940: The day after F. Scott Fitzgerald dies, author Nathanael West runs a stop sign while driving home to Los Angeles from a trip to Mexico. He and his wife Eileen McKenney are both killed.
December 22, 1995: Retired dancer and Gone With the Wind actor Butterfly McQueen, then 84 years old, dies at the hospital from burn wounds she suffers when she attempts to heat her home using a kerosene heater that malfunctions.
December 23, 1888: Vincent Van Gogh, suffering from a severe bout of depression, cuts off a piece of his own left ear with a razor.
December 24, 1851: A fire at the U.S. Library of Congress destroys 55,000 books, or approximately two-thirds of its collection at the time, including most of the books donated by Thomas Jefferson that made up the library’s original collection.
December 24, 1936: Stage and early silent film actress Irene Fenwick dies at age 49 due to complications of an eating disorder. Her husband Lionel Barrymore (great-uncle of Drew Barrymore), who famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio every Christmas, is forced to turn the role over his brother John (great-grandfather of Drew Barrymore).
December 26, 2002: Photographer Herb Ritts dies of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 50.
December 27, 1974: Ned Maddrell dies at the age of 97. He was the last fluent speaker of Manx, a Celtic language of the Isle of Man.
December 27, 2016: Actress and author Carrie Fisher dies during her fourth day in the intensive care unit of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She has suffered from respiratory failure while aboard a flight on December 23rd. Her exact cause of death could not be determined, but artery disease, sleep apnea, and use of cocaine and opiates are all thought to be contributing factors. Fisher is 60 years old.
December 29, 1170: Knights loyal to King Henry II assassinate Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, inside Becket’s cathedral.
December 29, 2003: Maria Sergina, the last fluent native speaker of the Akkala Sámi language, dies and the language goes extinct. Akkala Sámi was spoken by the indigenous Sámi people of the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
December 30, 1903: The Iroquois Theatre in Chicago hosts a performance of Mr. Blue Beard before an audience filled with women and children out making a day of after-Christmas shopping. A faulty arc light causes the background scenery to catch fire. A number of inadequate fire safety precautions, including too few exits, lead to a disastrous fire that kills more than 600 people.
December 30, 1999: Former Beatle George Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their son Dhani are asleep in their home, Friar Park, outside London at around 3 a.m. local time. George and Olivia hear glass breaking. George goes downstairs to investigate, only to find a 33-year-old man screaming. The stranger had broken into the home by breaking a window with a bit of lawn statuary. The man has a knife and stabs George repeatedly in the chest until Olivia comes down and hits the man with a fireplace poker. The intruder then tries to strangle Olivia with the cord of a lamp. Olivia manages to fight off the attacker.
George survives but has to have part of a lung removed. The attacker, who is experiencing serious mental illness, is found to be not criminally liable for his actions because of his mental state and is admitted to a secured mental health hospital, where he stays until after George’s death in 2001 from cancer.
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, if that's a holiday you celebrate. Now, please enjoy these affiliate links to some excellent book deals. Remember that books make wonderful gifts for the winter holidays.
These are all Amazon affiliate links, but I will have you know that I recently also became an affiliate of its rival company, Bookshop.org, which sells only books and not potato peelers, and also shares its proceeds with independent bookstores. If you'd like to support this blog through Bookshop.org, please visit https://bookshop.org/shop/aeess.
A new book in the All Souls series by Deborah Harkness? Sign me up immediately. The book description talks about Diana and her twins but doesn't say anything about Matthew Clairmont, making me worry that something has happened to that vampire I want to marry, but still, I need to hold this book in my hands and learn its secrets.
I always used to say that if I had a personal theme song, it would be "Human Nature" by Madonna Louise Ciccone.
Remember ReciteThis? From the internet of 12 years ago?
Today, Friday, November 28th, 2025, Madonna has released a remix album titled Bedtime Stories: The Untold Chapter.
In our time, when a global shift toward reactionary politics has led to a resurgence of Puritanical censorship culture, Ms. Ciccone was wise to release a new remix of "Human Nature." Express yourself, don't repress yourself. That's still good and necessary advice about the nature of creating art.
The above and below images are from a Cody, Wyoming newspaper.
What is this Piggly Wiggly ad calling me? Just kidding, I know they're probably spelling "thoughts" in a playful, colloquial way.
By 1925, Thanksgiving Day in the United States was already married to watching American football.
Don't worry, people from the 1920s. I'm sure your habit of buying things on credit won't cause any kind of financial panics by the autumn of 1929. I'm sure the Roaring '20s will lead smoothly into the Roaring '30s, when there definitely won't be The Great anything.
Happy birthday, Tina Turner. I hope you've been reincarnated as someone happy.
I found out in August that the Swedish band Ghost, in addition to covering Shakespears Sister's iconic "Stay," also covered "We Don't Need Another Hero."
According to Tina's official site, Good Hearted Woman was "the album started Tina’s solo career in 1974, predating the recording of Tina Turns The Country On!"
Who was this woman? I read this Associated Press item at the Library of Congress newspaper archive yesterday, but when I went to discover her place in the Russian royal family, I turned up nothing. I looked at all of Emperor Alexander III's legitimate descendants and this woman wasn't any of them. Did "princess" mean something different to Russians 100 years ago? Was something lost in translation?
This is the text of the video; I wrote it yesterday:
Here’s a mystery from November 17, 1925. An Associated Press article relates the unfortunate death by household accident of a person called “Princess Ghika” in Grosswardein, Hungary, which is the German name for what, in 2025, is the Romanian town of Oradea. This princess was said to have caught fire and burned to death whilst cleaning a pair of gloves with benzene. But did this really happen, and was she a real person?
Here’s the thing: The article also names the woman as “formerly the Russian princess Rowowa.” It says she was 23 years old. This means she would have been born in 1901 or 1902, but the only Russian quote-unquote princess born in those years was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Yes, the Anastasia you’re thinking of, the one murdered at age seventeen.
The Russian monarchy, of course, had been abolished by the Russian Revolution in 1918, so there weren’t strictly speaking, any Russian royals in the year 1925, although there were a few Europeans claiming to be the rightful heirs to the abolished Russian throne around and about seven years later. None of them were named Rowowa or even Rowena or anything similar.
So if this woman was related to the crowned heads of Europe, she doesn’t seem to have been Russian by birth or a very close relation to the family that included Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and England’s Queen Victoria and her descendants. In fact, the deceased woman’s husband was said to be the adjutant of, quote, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. An adjutant is a military administrator equivalent to an human resources manager in a civilian organization. I put King Ferdinand in quotes because technically, Ferdinand of Bulgaria’s title was Czar.
The Bulgarian monarchy had also been abolished by 1925, so the former czar of Bulgaria lived in exile from the throne, although he’s been allowed to return to Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia. So this short item is sad, if true, but very confusing. Maybe a minor Russian royal named Rowowa died tragically in front of her minor military figure husband in 1925, but unless I’m missing an important clue, this doesn’t stand up to fact checking.
Now, there was a European royal who died tragically from an accidental fire. In 1867, Archduchess Matilda of Austria, age 18, was smoking a cigarette. Her father, Archduke Albert [or Albrecht], hated smoking. When he entered the room, Matilda swiftly hid her cigarette behind her back, but in doing so, she set her dress on fire. Since the family had intended to visit the theater later that day, Matilda’s fancy dress was made of gauze, which is highly flammable. Then, thirty years later, the terrible Bazar de la Charite fire in Paris killed an appalling total of 126 souls, including Princess Sophia Charlotte of Bavaria.
Those things happened. A woman in Europe in 1925 probably did tragically end her own life unintentionally by using a flammable cleaning solution too near to the family hearth. Her royal status, though, remains a mystery.
For more 100-year-old news, be sure to follow Aeess - YouTube. Learn how to get one free audiobook download.
***
And now for something completely different, something we haven't had on Pagan Spirits in a while:
Ember Snow Takes the Stage at Capital Cabaret in Raleigh November 14-15
(Los Angeles, CA / November 5, 2025) – Ember Snow is set to headline Capital Cabaret in Raleigh, North Carolina November 14-15, joining the club’s special live-podcast series as their final featured dancer.
The onscreen star will sit down with the venue’s management team for an on-site podcast conversation before hitting the stage for her first show Friday night, closing out the series in standout fashion. Fans can expect high-energy performances across both nights, plus the chance to catch Ember in an intimate interview format before she brings her unmistakable allure to the main stage.
“I love the real fan energy at club dates, and getting to kick things off with a live podcast just makes it even more fun,” said Snow. “Raleigh has always shown me a lot of love, and being the last guest in this series feels like the perfect way to kick off my first appearance there. I’m ready for a really unforgettable weekend.”
For table reservations and event details, contact Capital Cabaret at CapitalCabaret.com.
To learn more about Ember Snow, visit AllMyLinks.com/embersnowxxx
To book her for adult content work, please visit The Bakery Talent Agency at info [at] thebakerytalent.com
continentalagency.com/ember-snow or contact Derek Hay or Tony Lee at Derek [at] theleenetwork.com and Tony [at] theleenetwork.com
ABOUT EMBER SNOW:
Model, adult film star and content creator Ember Snow grew up finding escape in screens long before she stepped in front of one. Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and immigrating to the United States at nine, she was raised in a conservative home where the internet and video games became her window to the world - and the place she first felt free to explore who she wanted to become.
Curious, introverted and creative, Ember originally set her sights on mainstream entertainment and began acting and modeling before entering the adult industry in 2017. Of Filipino descent and standing 4’11”, she first made her mark as a girl-girl performer before expanding into high-end productions for Wicked Pictures, Team Skeet and Evil Angel, among others.
With her growing creative ambitions, Ember plans to step behind the camera in the future to produce and direct her own mainstream projects. A passionate movie and TV fan and lifelong gamer at heart, she looks forward to balancing her work with exploring the world one destination at a time. To learn more, visit AllMyLinks.com/embersnowxxx.
# # #
MEDIA CONTACT: Brian S. Gross | BSG PR | 818.340.4422 | brian [at] bsgpr.com | [at] bsgpr
November 2, 2004: Vincent Van Gogh’s 47-year-old great-grand-nephew Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker, is shot and then has his throat slit while riding his bicycle on the east side of Amsterdam. His killer is a 26-year-old man, Mohammed Bouyeri, who has ties to Egyptian terrorist group Jama'at al-Muslimin, a radical Islamist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Van Gogh was a vocal critic of some Islamic practices, especially those associated with fundamentalist Islam.
November 3, 1793: Playwright and early feminist Olympe de Gouges is executed by guillotine by the French Revolution’s Revolutionary Tribunal. Although convicted of “seditious behavior” and attempting to reinstate the monarchy, of which de Gouges is not guilty, her real “crime” is criticizing the Revolution and wondering in writing if it had gone too far.
November 4, 1918: One week before the Armistice that will end the war, the poet Wilfred Owens is killed in the First World War.
November 4, 1982: The family of Dominique Dunne takes 22-year-old Dominique off life support after medical tests reveal that she has no brain activity. The young actress has been in this state since she was attacked and strangled by her estranged boyfriend on October 30th.
Her killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to only six years in prison. Dunne’s parents, Dominick and Lenny Dunne, became advocates for crime victims after the outrage of their daughter’s killer’s light sentence.
November 5, 1605: Guy Fawkes attempts to blow up the English Parliament, an act known as the Gunpowder Plot. The plot is foiled, Guy Fawkes is convicted and hanged, and burning an effigy of Fawkes becomes an English tradition.
November 7, 1837: Anti-slavery newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy is shot to death by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, which is near Illinois’ border with “slave state” Missouri.
November 7, 1908: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are killed in a shootout with police in Bolivia.
November 7, 1980: Actor Steve McQueen dies in his sleep following surgery in Juárez, Mexico. He’d been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, which metastasized and caused large tumors in his neck, chest, and abdomen.
Between February and October 1980, McQueen had attempted to treat his disease with alternative therapy directed by William Donald Kelley, who called his quack treatment regimen “non-specific metabolic therapy.” In McQueen’s case, the treatments didn’t distract him from seeking conventional medicine; his doctors had already told him his cancer was inoperable and terminal. The quack “alternative medicine” did, however, cost him thousands of dollars while having no effect whatsoever on his disease. Kelley also falsely claimed in the media that his treatment of McQueen was successful, and this false claim may have cost other cancer patients their lives if they chose not to seek conventional treatment. Kelley, who died in 2005, did not have a license to practice medicine.
November 8, 1965: 52-year-old journalist Dorothy Kilgallen dies at home of an apparently accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates.
November 8, 2020: Beloved Canadian-American game show host Alex Trebek dies of pancreatic cancer.
November 11, 1995: Kenule (Ken) Beeson Saro-Wiwa, who belonged to the Ogoni people of Nigeria, became a well-known playwright and environmental activist in response to the degraded environment of his native Ogoniland region caused by irresponsible petroleum waste disposal. He is assassinated by hanging under the false charge that he’d been involved in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. Eight other activists are similarly falsely accused and executed by Nigeria’s military dictatorship.
November 12, 1981: Popular 1950s actor William Holden dies after slipping on a rug in his bedroom, striking his forehead on the bedside table, and bleeding to death while apparently too intoxicated to help himself in Santa Monica, California.
Suzanne Vega reads the account of Holden’s death in the newspaper while sitting in a diner and memorializes this diner trip in her song “Tom’s Diner.” She was a frequent patron at Tom’s Restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and 112th St. in New York, while she attended Barnard College.
Vega performs the song “Tom’s Diner” a capella on her 1987 album Solitude Standing. In 1990, English music producers Nick Batt and Neal Slateford, working under the artist name DNA, add an instrumental background to Vega’s track. The collaborative version was certified gold in the U.S. and was a #1 hit in four European countries.
The lyrics include:
“I open
Up the paper
There's a story
Of an actor
Who had died
While he was drinking
It was no one
I had heard of
And I'm turning
To the horoscope
And looking
For the funnies”
The day Vega describes must have been Nov. 18, 1981, when the New York Post carried the story about the discovery of Holden’s body. We know Vega read the story in the Post because it was the only one of New York’s then-daily newspapers that had “funnies,” or comic strips.
November 13, 1974: 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. shoots to death the other members of his Amityville, Long Island family: his father Ronald DeFeo Sr., mother Louise, sisters Dawn and Allison, and brothers Marc and John. John, the youngest, was nine years old. The house in which the familicide occurs will later become infamous as the focus of the Amityville Horror book and films.
November 14, 1928: Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky, the inventor of radium dial paint used to make wristwatches that glow in the dark, dies of aplastic anemia caused by his exposure to radium. His death helps make the legal case for the so-called “radium girls,” workers in the watch factories who became sick and often died from the same exposure to radioactivity, who sued their employer for the unsafe conditions in the factories.
November 14, 1916: Masterful British short story writer H.H. Munro, who published under the pen name Saki, is killed by a German sniper while serving in the First World War. His last words are reportedly, “Put that bloody cigarette out!”
November 15, 1959: Herb and Bonnie Clutter and two of their four children, Nancy and Kenyon, are murdered by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in Holcomb, Kansas. The murders form the basis of Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. All four were shot, and Herb is also stabbed.
November 16, 1960: 59-year-old actor Clark Gable, who has had a heart attack on November 6th, seems to be recovering when he suffers a second, fatal heart attack.
November 20, 1934: Poet, printmaker, and adventurer Everett Ruess is seen for the last time when he sets out to explore the Escalante River Basin in the Utah desert. Ruess’s two donkeys are discovered in February or early March 1935 in a corral he’s made for them. No other sign of Ruess is ever found.
November 22, 1963: C.S. Lewis dies in Oxford of kidney failure. Approximately seven hours later, Aldous Huxley dies of laryngeal cancer in Los Angeles. This news is overshadowed by the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on the same day.
November 23, 1958: Despite valiant efforts to revive him, comedian Harry Einstein dies of a heart attack he has suffered during a Friars Club roast of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Einstein collapses onto fellow comedian Milton Berle. Berle asks the audience, “Is there a doctor in the house?” This is initially taken by the audience to be a joke. When it became clear that Einstein needs medical attention, two physicians in the audience try to treat him. He is pronounced dead in the early hours of the 23rd.
Comedian Bob Einstein is 16 years old when his father dies; his brother, who performs under the stage name Albert Brooks, is 11.
November 24, 1991: Freddie Mercury dies of complications of AIDS in London.
November 25, 1990: Race car driver William (Billy) John Vukovich III is killed during racing practice in Bakersfield, California when the throttle on his car got stuck and the vehicle crashed into a wall. Vukovich’s grandfather had been killed during the 1955 Indianapolis 500.
November 27, 2019: Taiwanese-Canadian actor and model Godfrey Gao (born Tsao Chih-hsiang), age 35, collapses while filming the reality show Chase Me. Gao is taken to a nearby hospital, where medical personnel attempted to resuscitate him, but is pronounced dead due to cardiac arrest a few hours after collapsing.
American audiences may remember Gao best from the movie adaptation of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.
November 28, 1694: Matsuo Bashō dies. A wandering poet and teacher who owned almost no worldly possessions, Bashō is considered Japan’s greatest writer of haiku.
November 29, 2001: Musician George Harrison dies at age 58 of lung cancer that has spread to his brain in a Los Angeles home belonging to his friend and former bandmate Paul McCartney.
November 30, 1882: Actress Annie Von Behren is accidentally shot and killed during a performance of Clifton W. Tayleure's play Si Slocum in Cincinnati, Ohio. Von Behren’s co-star Frank Frayne is supposed to shoot an apple off Von Behren’s head. The gun misfires and the bullet strikes Von Behren just above the eye; she dies less than 15 minutes later.
November 30, 1900: 46-year-old Irish writer Oscar Wilde dies of meningitis. His health has been in decline since he was imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor after being convicted of “gross indecency.” His crime was being in a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father did not like Wilde.
November 30, 1923: Vaudeville and early film actress Martha Mansfield dies of severe burns in the hospital. The previous day she had been dressed in a Civil War-era costume on the set of the film The Warrens of Virginia when a crew member lit a cigarette, then carelessly tossed the match. The match ignited Mansfield’s costume, which was difficult to remove due to its hoop skirt and many layers. The film was finished and released after Mansfield’s death, but is now considered lost.
November 30, 1958: Welsh actor Gareth Jones, performing in a television play broadcast live, dies of a massive heart attack during a break in between two scenes in which his character was to appear. Jones’ character was scripted to die from a heart attack during the teleplay.
November 30, 2013: Beloved Fast and Furious actor Paul William Walker IV leaves a Santa Clarita, California charity event as the passenger in his Porsche Carrera GT. The driver, Roger Rodas, reaches speeds of up to 93 mph in a 45 mph zone. He apparently loses control of the vehicle. It crashes into a lamp post and two trees, catching fire and killing them both. Rodas was 38; Walker was 40.
