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.
Today's Observance: All Saints Day Artist Birthday: Laura La Plante
Sadly, I lost the Dangerous Innocence audiobook when my laptop crashed earlier this year.
The Watauga (NC) Democrat, April 8, 1926
Beatles Trivia: November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.
Public domain in the United States
Bummer November 1st
November 1, 1755: The city of Lisbon, Portugal, is devastated by an earthquake, subsequent fires, and a tsunami. Lisbon is Europe's 4th-largest city at the time. It’s estimated that between 12,000 and 50,000 people die as a result. Among the priceless artifacts destroyed in the disaster were navigator Vasco da Gama's records and original paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Titian.
October 31, 1871: Emily and Mary Wilde, the older half-sisters of Oscar Wilde, attend a Halloween party at Drumacon House near Ulster, Ireland. During the last dance of the evening, Mary gets too close to a candlestick and catches her dress on fire. Emily, too, catches her dress on fire as she rushes to help her sister. Party host Andrew Reid leads the women outside in the hope that the snow would help them extinguish the flames, but both sisters die of their injuries, Mary (age 22) on November 9th and Emily (age 24) on November 21st.
October 31, 1926: Harry Houdini dies of peritonitis due to a ruptured appendix. Houdini had visited Canada’s McGill University on October 22, when a student asked to punch Houdini in the stomach (which Houdini was famously able to withstand, when properly prepared), but then did so before the magician was ready.
October 31, 1963: Spectators gather to watch a Holiday on Ice performance at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. A natural gas explosion starts in a storage area that food vendors use to store pre-popped popcorn. The explosion kills 81 people and injures an additional 400.
October 31, 1974: Ronald Clark O’Bryan gives Pixy Stix candy straws laced with cyanide to his two children, two neighbor children, and a fifth child he knew from church. Only one of the children, O’Bryan’s 8-year-old son Timothy, ate the poisoned candy. After Timothy died, police confiscated the other contaminated Pixy Stix, which O’Bryan claimed he had gotten from a neighbor. O’Bryan was convicted of the murder, which he appears to have planned to collect insurance money, and was executed by the state of Texas in 1984.
October 31, 1990: Magician Joseph “Amazing Joe” Burrus, age 32, attempts a Halloween night stunt at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California. He’ll attempt to escape from a coffin made of plastic and glass and buried under mud and wet cement. The weight of the cement and mud crushes the coffin, burying Burrus alive. Although he is quickly dug out of the grave, he can’t be revived.
October 31, 1993: 23-year-old actor River Phoenix is pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, after collapsing from an overdose of cocaine and morphine.
October 31, 2002: A 21-year-old man named Chris Jenkins leaves a costume party at the Lone Tree Bar in Minneapolis. He's never seen again until his body is discovered near a dam in February 2003. Although police at first ruled his death an accidental drowning, it's now believed Jenkins was murdered by being thrown from a bridge.
October 31, 2006: 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras dies immediately upon impact when the Porsche belonging to her parents, which the teenager is driving without permission, strikes a toll booth at over 100 miles per hour. The accident is terrible enough, but Catsouras’ family suffered further when gruesome crash scene photos taken by the California Highway Patrol were leaked on the Internet.
October 31, 2016: Natalie Babbitt, the author of Tuck Everlasting, dies of lung cancer.
On the same day in Bemidji, Minnesota, a 17-year-old student named Jeremy Jourdain goes missing and hasn't been seen since.
And here is a screenshot that my cat Jerry took by putting his little paws on my phone.
October 30, 2015: A fire inside the Colectiv night club in Bucharest, Romania kills 64 people, including four members of the band Goodbye to Gravity, whose pyrotechnics display had initiated the blaze. Guitarists Mihai Alexandru and Vlad Telea die at the scene; drummer Bogdan Enache and bassist Alex Pascu die in the hospital. Lead singer Andrei Gălu is badly burned but survives. Many of those who die in the hospital do so from infections, possibly because of inadequate disinfectant measures used in Romanian hospitals.
On the same day in the United States, 20-year-old Richard Pananian of Burbank, California, is driving southbound on the 5 Freeway in Los Angeles, near Griffith Park, in his Ford Fiesta at approximately 7 p.m. According to other drivers, he's driving erratically and using the shoulder of the road when the Fiesta strikes a pickup truck occupied by a 45-year-old driver and two passengers. No one in the pickup is seriously hurt, but Pananian's Fiesta loses control, veers up the embankment, and ejects Pananian from the driver's seat. It's unclear whether Pananian dies of traumatic injuries due to the vehicle collision or from the ejection, but his body lands on the metal ledge of the road sign reading "Colorado St. 3/4 Mile."
In the morning rush hour traffic, it's difficult for Los Angeles rescue workers and accident investigators to reach Pananian's body. His body, covered in a white sheet, lies on that ledge above the freeway for more than two hours. Since it's the day before Halloween, some witnesses reported thinking the accident victim's body is a prank or a Halloween decoration.
October 30, 2022: In the early hours of the morning, a Lyft driver drops off 23-year-old Bryce Broca and his friends near an apartment building in Eagan, Minnesota. Broca walks away from the group but continues a video chat with them until his phone goes dead. After that chat, Broca is never seen again.
The same day in Morbi in Gujarat, India, a pedestrian footbridge with a capacity of 125 people collapses when more than 500 people try to cross the bridge at once. 141 people die, most of them women, elderly men, and children. The youngest victim was an 18-month-old baby.
October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley, is executed by electrocution.
October 29, 1994: Francisco Martin Duran of New Mexico stood outside the fence surrounding the White House and fired 29 rounds from an SKS rifle at a group of men on the grounds. None of the men were injured, and Duran was tackled by three civilians.
Duran is eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President William J. Clinton. Clinton is inside the White House watching a football (American football) game when the incident occurs.
October 29, 1998: An arson fire at a Halloween disco celebration in Gothenburg, Sweden. Four teenagers were found guilty of starting the fire, allegedly because they hadn’t been allowed to enter the disco for free. The fire killed 63 people, many of them also teenagers.
October 29, 2003: A dust explosion at the Hayes Lemmerz aluminum wheel manufacturing plant in Huntington, Indiana, injures three workers, one of whom subsequently dies from his severe burns.
October 28, 1905: Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) student Stuart Lathrop Pierson is hit by an unscheduled train and killed during a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity initiation.
October 28, 1991: The commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail is lost amid the so-called Perfect Storm weather event that began with Hurricane Grace, formed on October 26th. The boat sinks with six crew members aboard near Sable Island, Canada. Their bodies are never recovered. In all, the Perfect Storm claims 13 lives.
October 28, 1995: During the evening rush hour on the Metro subway system in Baku, Azerbaijan, passengers aboard a subway car smell smoke. An electrical fault has sparked a fire. The train stops short of the station. Its tunnel quickly fills with smoke and carbon monoxide. Passengers aboard one car are forced to climb into another car to escape when the doors become stuck. A crowd crush follows, resulting in almost 300 injuries and the deaths of 286 passengers and three rescue workers.
October 27, 1899: Cornell University student Edward Fairchild Berkeley is sent by the Kappa Alpha Society on an errand intended to keep him busy while the fraternity prepared for his formal initiation. Told to pin a particular piece of paper to either a tree or a bridge (accounts vary), Berkeley fell into a canal and drowned.
October 27, 2013: Lou Reed dies of liver disease after having received a liver transplant in May 2013.
October 27, 2019: The 56-year-old mother of a father-to-be in Knoxville, Iowa, is struck and killed by a fragment of metal at a “gender reveal” party for her son and his pregnant partner. The family had filled a metal umbrella stand with gunpowder with the intention that it would stream pink sparks like a firework, revealing that the unborn child is a girl. Instead, the gunpowder caused the umbrella stand to explode.
The October 26, 1926 Cordele (GA) Dispatch. 100 years ago, children in Chicago found it a merry Halloween prank to steal their neighbors' gates off the hinges. Notice the typo, "movies are houses cooperating" rather than "movie houses are cooperating."
Bummer October 26th
October 26, 1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to sing on the radio in the U.S. and the first African-American to win an Academy Award for acting, dies of breast cancer in Los Angeles. She’s 59 years old.
October 26, 1990: 15-year-old William Anthony Odom, setting up a gallows scene for a Halloween tableau in North Carolina, accidentally hangs himself when the rope he’s using tightens on him.
October 26, 2001: 25-year-old nursing assistant Chante Jawan Mallard of Fort Worth, Texas, is driving, allegedly under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy. She strikes 37-year-old Gregory Glenn Biggs, a homeless construction worker. The force of the collision propels Biggs through Mallard’s windshield, where his body becomes lodged. Rather than seeking aid for Biggs, Mallard continues driving home, parks her car in her garage, and leaves the injured man inside her garage. Biggs dies of his injuries some time between when Mallard arrived home and October 28th. At this time, Mallard and a male friend left Biggs’s remains in a park and attempted to burn the car in order to destroy evidence.
Police arrested Mallard after witnesses heard her at a party talking about “hitting a white man.” The medical examiner testified in court that Biggs’s injuries were survivable if he had been taken to a hospital in time. Mallard was convicted of murder and tampering with evidence. The male friend and a cousin who helped him move the body are convicted and imprisoned for evidence tampering.
October 26, 2018: A bomb addressed to then-Senator Kamala Harris is intercepted by authorities in Sacramento, California. Cesar Altieri Sayoc, Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threat.
October 26, 2022: Food writer Julie Powell dies of cardiac arrest at age 49 after battling a COVID-19 infection.
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What was Diane Meyer grateful for on October 26, 2024?
acknowledging things that used to scare me breakfast with friends minding my own damn business sunshine the sweet old lady Uber driver apple picking fall air leaving changing color thinking about why I'm feeling the way I do finishing my book oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips new opportunities proud of myself today
October 25, 1958: Six days after his vehicle crashes and catches on fire during the Moroccan Grand Prix, English Formula One racing driver Stuart Lewis-Evans succumbs to his burn injuries.
October 25, 1993: Actor Vincent Price dies of lung cancer.
October 25, 1999: A Learjet flying from Orlando, Florida, to Texas fails to pressurize during flight. As a result, the two crew members and four passengers are all incapacitated by the lack of oxygen. The jet cruises on autopilot until it runs out of fuel, then crashes near Aberdeen, South Dakota. Among the six dead are professional golfer Payne Stewart.
October 24, 1975: Apple Records releases Shaved Fish, a compilation album by John Lennon with the Plastic Ono Band, in the U.S.
Bummer October 24th
October 24, 1960: The Soviet Union tests its R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Scientists and technicians worked on pre-launch testing and, due to scheduling pressures, began launch preparations at the same time. A short circuit causes the missile’s second-stage engine to fire prematurely, igniting the first-stage fuel tanks, resulting in a tremendously powerful explosion.
The Soviet Union would not permit any information about the disaster to reach the public until 1989. The number of people killed and injured in the accident is estimated to be between 54 and 300 people. Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, the head of the USSR’s R-16 program, was among those killed.
October 24, 1963: 30-year-old actor Beverly Wills, smoking in bed, accidentally sets her home on fire, killing herself, her grandmother, and her 4- and 7-year-old sons.
October 24, 2010: Pan Jin-yu dies at the age of 96 in Taiwan. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Pazeh language.
October 24, 2013: 20-year-old Brooke Greenberg dies of bronchomalacia, a condition of weakened cartilage in the bronchial tubes usually seen in newborn babies. Although Brooke is 20 years old, she appears to be a toddler due to an extremely rare condition, now called neotenic complex syndrome. Her body had ceased to grow after age five, she still had her baby teeth, couldn’t speak, and she is estimated to have a mental age of nine months to one year old.
October 24, 2018: The Secret Service intercepts an explosive device mailed to the home of former U.S. President Barack Obama. On the same day, two suspicious packages are mailed to U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat who is African-American like the former president. One package is intercepted by the Capitol Police; the other causes the evacuation of a Los Angeles postal center. Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threats.
October 23, 1731: Fire breaks out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, England. The house holds the Cotton Library, a collection of books and historical documents gifted to the British Crown by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, a Member of Parliament who died in 1631. The fire destroys 13 manuscripts and damages 200 others. The Nowell Codex, the single manuscript on which the Epic of Beowulf is recorded, is among those damaged.
October 23, 1951: 34-year-old Filipino actor and film director Fernando Poe Sr. dies of rabies. He had let a puppy lick his wound, due to a folk belief that doing so would allow the wound to heal faster, apparently without knowing that the dog was infected with rabies.
October 23, 1983: During the Lebanese Civil War, a truck bomb kills 241 U.S. military personnel; a similar bombing kills 58 French Army troops.
The Producers News (Plentywood, Montana), Oct. 22, 1926. Notice how they're using "Halloween Night" to mean the night before Halloween, after sundown on the 30th.
French Republican Calendar day name (1 Brumaire) - Apple
Deborah Griscom Passmore, 1840-1911, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bummer October 22nd
October 22, 1877: At least 207 miners are killed by an explosion at the Blantyre Colliery. The youngest victim is an 11-year-old boy. The flammable chemicals in the mine are probably ignited by an open flame, possibly by one of the workers lighting a tobacco pipe.
October 22, 1953: Milligan College (Tennessee) student Calvin Dougherty dies of internal injuries sustained as part of a class hazing. Ordered to race by upperclass students, Dougherty inadvertently runs into the cable of a tennis net, rupturing his pancreas and injuring his spleen.
October 22, 1986: Musician, comedian, and traffic reporter Jane Dornacker dies in an ambulance a short time after the helicopter from which she has been delivering a traffic report for WNBC radio crashes into New York City’s Hudson River. The pilot survives.
October 22, 2005: Bellview Airlines Flight 210 crashes shortly after takeoff from Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria. All six crew members and 111 passengers are killed. The cause of the crash is unknown, although weather and excessive wear on the aircraft have been posited as possible factors. Sadly, the high speed of the crash and looting in the aftermath made it difficult for authorities to identify the victims.
October 22, 2009: The county government of Zhenyuan, Gansu province, China, announces on social media that it has burned 65 “illegal publications” outside of a local library. It describes the books as either “religious” or displaying “leanings,” presumably leanings that tend to disagree with the Chinese government.
On the same day, in the United States, novelist/blogger Mac Tonnies dies at age 34 of a cardiac arrhythmia.
October 21, 1966: “[On this date] a massive coal-tip slid down a mountainside and engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 persons, mostly school children. In response to an appeal the following week in a national newspaper, an English psychiatrist, J. Barker, obtained a large number of reports from respondents who felt they may have received paranormal information concerning this tragedy. After all claims were carefully checked out, thirty-five cases remained which Dr. Barker considered worthy of confidence. In twenty-four cases, the respondents had related the information to someone else before the landslide occurred. Dreams figures in twenty-five of these accounts. In one, the dreamer saw, spelled out in large, brilliant letters, the word ABERFAN, In another, a telephone operator from Brighton talked helplessly to a child, who walked toward her, followed by a billowing cloud of black dust or smoke.”
- Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle
October 21, 1969: Jack Kerouac dies of internal abdominal hemorrhage caused by his heavy alcohol use. He is 47 years old.
October 21, 2021: Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is accidentally shot and killed by actor Alec Baldwin on the film set where the two are working. The Pietta .45 Colt revolver Baldwin was using as a prop shouldn’t have been loaded with live ammunition.
October 20, 1728: The Copenhagen Fire of 1728 begins and burns through October 23rd. It destroys nearly a third of the city’s buildings, leaving approximately 20% of Copenhagen’s population homeless. The University of Copenhagen library loses approximately 35,000 texts.
October 20, 1977: Cassie Gaines, her brother Steve Gaines, Ronnie Van Zant, road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and pilots William Gray and Walter McCreary die when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s chartered plane runs out of fuel and crashes in the woods outside Gillsburg, Mississippi. Drummer Artimus Pyle, guitarist Gary Rossington, and keyboardist Billy Powell all survive with serious injuries.
October 20, 1990: Stunt performer Brian Jewell, portraying a hanged man at a New Jersey “haunted hayride” attraction, accidentally hangs himself in earnest.
October 19, 1950: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, age 58, dies after apparently suffering a heart attack and falling down the stairs of her home.
October 19, 1977: A small fire breaks out aboard the charter plane used by members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. No one is hurt, but the fire makes Cassie Gaines hesitant to board the plane the next day.
October 18, 1984: 26-year-old actor Jon-Erik Hexum dies six days after an accident on the set of a TV show called Cover-Up. He accidentally shoots himself in the head with a gun filled with blanks, and the wadding of one of the blanks severely injures him.
October 18, 2015: Death metal bass player Frank Watkins, who played in the bands Obituary and Gorgoroth, dies at age 47 of cancer.
October 17, 1586: Sir Philip Sidney dies of an infection from a thigh wound he’d suffered at the Battle of Zutphen that September, when Sidney loaned his armor to a soldier who’d forgotten his own. Sidney is 32 years old.
October 17, 1814: Eight people die as a result of the a 22-foot-tall vat of fermenting porter bursting and causing a chain reaction of bursting beer barrels in London. Victims either drowned in the resulting flood or died of sudden, acute alcohol poisoning from inhaling the vapors.
October 17, 1873: Cornell University student Mortimer N. Leggett dies during a Kappa Alpha Society hazing ritual that involved walking in the woods blindfolded. Leggett and three others fell into a gorge; the others survived.
October 17, 1955: Wealthy race car driver/playboy Joel Thorne is flying a private plane in North Hollywood, California, when he flies into an apartment building, killing himself and three residents of the building. The youngest victim is two months old.
October 16, 1793: Queen Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne of France is executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.
October 16, 1991: A 35-year-old man drove his pickup truck through the window of a restaurant called Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. From inside the truck, he begins firing one Glock 17 pistol and one Ruger P89 pistol at the approximately 150 people eating lunch inside the restaurant. He then exited the truck, shouted a misogynistic rant about his distrust of women, and began selectively shooting people.
When police arrived, the man engaged in a firefight with them. He was shot by police three times, stated that he would not surrender, and then killed himself by shooting himself in the head. The rampage killed 23 people and wounded 27 others.
October 15, 1917: Dutch exotic dancer Margaretha Zelle, who performs under the stage name Mata Hari (a Malay expression for “the sun”), is executed by a French firing squad, having been accused of spying for Germany in the Great War. Modern biographers believe she was innocent of spying and was scapegoated.
October 15, 2020: 26-year-old South African adult film star and aspiring social media influencer Karissa Rajpaul dies following a cosmetic procedure in Encino, Los Angeles, California. The mother and daughter who performed the “butt lift” procedure, which involved injected silicone into the buttocks, had no formal medical training in this procedure.
In 2025, both women were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, sentenced to 3-4 years in prison, and then released when it was determined their time had been served.
October 14, 1925: English entomologist Harold Maxwell-Lefroy dies of poison gas inhalation while experimenting with gases in the attempt to find a gas that kills house fly larvae.
October 14, 1912: Theodore Roosevelt is shot and slightly wounded while giving a speech in Milwaukee. The then-former president finishes his speech before seeking medical treatment to have the bullet removed.
October 14, 1913: The Senghenydd colliery disaster kills 439 coal miners in Wales. Vapors collectively known as coal damp ignite, causing an explosion.
October 14, 1980: Richard Meeker Jr., the only child of actor Mary Tyler Moore and her first husband, dies of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He had been holding a small .410 shotgun, the model of which was later removed from production because its trigger could be too easily pulled accidentally. Meeker is 24 years old.
October 14, 1994: In an event that foreshadows the 2022 attack on Salman Rushdie, two religious extremists stab and wound Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz outside his home in Cairo. The extremist objected to Mahfouz's novel Children of the Alley, an allegorical story about the three Abrahamic religions.
October 13, 1972: Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, with 40 passengers and five crew members on board, crashes in the Andes Mountains. Survivors of the crash, many of them members of a rugby team, are forced to eat parts of the deceased since no other food is available. By the time the survivors are rescued on December 23rd, only 16 of them remain.
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I've posted my Columbus Day spiel on this blog before, but it bears repeating during Trump 2.0, when white supremacists are out, about, and showing their asses every day in this damned country.
October 12: Indigenous Peoples Day. According to Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen:
•"When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded food, gold, spun cotton--whatever the Indians had that they wanted, including sex with their women. To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose."
•Quoting a biography written by Columbus' son Ferdinand on the quashing of a rebellion against the Spanish by the Arawak people: "The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike..."
•"Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food."
•"Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history."
•"Columbus not only sent the first [American Indian] slaves across Atlantic, he probably send more slaves--about five thousand--than any other individual." When large numbers of American Indian slaves died of starvation, overwork, suicide and disease, the Spanish simply looked to African slaves to replace them.
•"A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape. On Haiti, sex slaves were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, 'A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.'"
There you have it, in Columbus's own words even. He literally believed that he had the right to do whatever he pleased to people who were non-Catholic. Their refusal to accept the Spaniards' "faith" justified everything, according to the cultural ethos of the time. The sex trafficking of 9- and 10-year-old children didn't bother Columbus. Dismemberment didn't bother him. Murder didn't bother him. Genocide didn't bother him.
So, fuck Christopher Columbus.
October 12, 1943: Poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, best known as Robert Lowell or Robert Lowell, Jr., is sentenced to a year in prison for draft evasion for being a conscientious objector to service in World War II.
October 12, 1971: Early rock ‘n roll musician Gene Vincent dies at the age of 36 from seizures and a ruptured stomach ulcer brought about by Vincent’s heavy use of alcohol.
October 12, 1997: American singer John Denver dies when his self-piloted experimental aircraft crashes.
October 12, 2002: While attempting to set a new freediving record, 28-year-old French diver Audrey Mestre drowns in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Dominican Republic. She dives to a then-record depth of 171 meters. Her lift bag, once inflated, should have brought her back to the surface in less than three minutes. It malfunctions and more than eight minutes pass before Mestre’s dive team brings her body to the surface. She is pronounced dead at the hospital.
October 12, 2012: Myriam Ducre-Lemay, age 20, kisses her new boyfriend as they get ready for bed after a party. He has eaten a peanut butter sandwich for a late-night snack and, since they are still a fairly new couple, isn’t aware that Ducre-Lemay has a severe peanut allergy. She asks him to call for paramedics, which he does, but by the time they arrive, her throat has constricted so severely that paramedics are unable to insert a breathing tube. She dies of anaphylaxis that evening when her family removes life support.
October 11, 1984: Aeroflot Flight 3352 crashes into airport maintenance vehicles while attempting to land at Omsk Airport (now Tsentralny Airport). Poor visibility and an air traffic controller who fell asleep on duty contribute to the crash, which kills 174 people on the plane and four people on the ground. Five people survive.
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October 10, 1901: 23-year-old David Park Barnit, a poet of the Decadent school of poetry, dies suddenly of what newspapers describe as “an enlarged heart.” Some suspect this may be a cover story and that the young poet may have taken his own life.
October 10, 1963: 47-year-old French cabaret singer Édith Piaf dies of liver failure from liver cancer and cirrhosis after years of alcohol and drug addiction.
October 10, 1984: One employee and three customers are killed when a fire breaks out at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena, California. The youngest victim is two years old. The fire is determined to be arson by investigators who include John Leonard Orr. In 1992, Orr will be convicted of this and several other arson fires in the Los Angeles area.
The series Smoke was wild because it was a fictionalized version of Joseph Wambaugh's book about John Orr with the serial numbers filed off. But it had Jurnee Smollett and I loved her as a child in the movie Eve's Bayou and then again when she popped up on True Blood.
Beatles Trivia: October 9, 1940: John Winston Lennon is born in Liverpool, England, U.K. at Liverpool Maternity Hospital.
October 9, 1971: On her husband’s 31st birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon’s solo art exhibition This Is Not Here opens in New York City. Among the guests who attend opening night is Allen Ginsberg.
Bummer October 9th
October 9, 1740: More than 10,000 civilians of Chinese ethnicity are murdered by the Dutch East Indies Company and its Javanese collaborators in what was then called the city of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). The massacre was a retaliation for a revolt of Chinese sugar mill workers who burned mills and killed 50 Dutch soldiers.
On the 9th of October, Dutch troops entered a Chinese neighborhood and began burning houses. Some people died in their burning houses; others were shot as they fled the fire. If they reached the Besar River, they were shot down by Dutch troops waiting on boats. The killing continued until October 22nd.
October 9, 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's half sister, Fanny Imlay, dies by suicide via an overdose of laudanam.
October 9, 1967: Baylor University student John Clifton dies of cardiac arrest after drinking a mixture of laxatives and garlic while running in place as part of a Baylor Chamber of Commerce hazing ritual. Clifton aspirates the mixture, has difficulty breathing, and collapses. He has a hemorrhage in his lungs before his heart stops.
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October 8, 1871: The Great Chicago Fire begins; over the next two days it kills approximately 300 people and destroys most of the city, which consists of mostly wooden buildings.
October 8, 2009: Motivational speaker James Arthur Ray hosts a meditation retreat near Sedona, Arizona. The retreat is held inside a purpose-built “sweat lodge” (although not built according to any traditional Native American practices) with approximately 50 participants. The temperature inside the lodge soon becomes dangerously high. Two men faint from heat exhaustion and are carried outside, where they both pass away from heat stroke. Others have to be treated at the hospital, and on October 17th, a 49-year-old woman who participated in the retreat also dies of heat-related injuries. Ray is subsequently convicted of negligent homicide.
October 8, 2014: Thomas Eric Duncan dies, becoming the first person in the U.S. to die of infection with the Ebola virus. Duncan was from Monrovia, Liberia, where he rode in a taxi with his landlords’ daughter, who subsequently died of Ebola virus disease. Four days later, Duncan visits his girlfriend in Dallas.
On the fourth day of his visit, Duncan arrives at the emergency department of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. He is misdiagnosed with a sinus infection, given antibiotics, and sent home. By the time he returns to the hospital, Duncan’s condition is critical. He dies in the intensive care unit.
Two of Duncan’s nurses contract the virus through caring for him. Both of them recover. They are the first two people known to have contracted Ebola virus disease inside the U.S.
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