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.
January 21, 1793: Convicted of treason by the French National Convention, Louis XVI is executed by guillotine.
January 21, 1984: American R&B singer Jackie Wilson dies of complications of pneumonia at age 49. He has been semi-comatose since collapsing on stage while performing in New Jersey on September 29, 1975.
January 21, 2023: A 30-year-old man in Kansas was shot by his own gun as it sat in the rear seat of his pickup truck after the man’s dog stepped on the firearm and inadvertently pulled the trigger.
January 20, 1985: Czech-Canadian stunt performer Karel Souček dies from the injuries he sustained in a failed stunt the previous day. Souček, sealed inside a barrel, attempted to drop 180 feet into a tank of water inside the Houston Astrodome. The barrel is released prematurely, spins, and hits the rim of the tank. Souček is cut free of the barrel but is severely injured and dies in the hospital.
January 20, 2020: Former NBA player Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, basketball coach Christina Mauser, pilot Ara Zobayan, and five others are killed when their helicopter crashes in poor weather in Calabasas, California.
Today's Observance (United States): Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Beatles Trivia
January 19 January 19, 1971: During Charles Manson’s murder trial, Manson’s defense attorneys introduce the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” into evidence. According to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, one of Manson’s delusion beliefs was that the song, written by Paul McCartney, referred to a coming race war.
In reality, the lyrics refer to the literal meaning of a helter skelter, an English amusement ride consisting of a tower with a slide curling around it.
Bummer January 19
January 19, 1729: Restoration-era playwright William Congreve dies of complications from internal injuries he suffered in a September 1728 carriage accident.
January 19, 1903: Newspaper publisher and political powerbroker Narciso Gener Gonzales dies of a gunshot wound inflicted by James H. Tillman, the lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Gonzales was critical of Tillman’s uncle Ben Tillman, a U.S. senator. Tillman was a strict segregationist who favored harsh repression of African-American voting rights in South Carolina. Gonzales, although himself a segregationist, was also an anti-lynching activist who abhorred Tillman’s support for violence.
January 19, 1991: 20-year-old Austrian ski racer Gernot Reinstadler, competing in a qualifying race in Wengen, Switzerland, veers slightly to the right during the course of the downhill race. This slight deviation causes one of the tips of his skis to become tangled in the side netting while Reinstadler is still moving at a high speed. Reinstadler suffers a severe injure that essentially threatens to split his body in two from the pelvis upward. Although flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital and given multiple blood transfusions, the young man dies from the injury.
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Pooh Day (birthday of A.A. Milne)
The extremely specific Simpsons meme that goes with that almanac entry:
Bummer January 18th
January 18, 2019: A gasoline pipeline explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico, kills 137 people and injures an unknown number of people. The Mexican government compensates the families of the victims approximately $800 each.
January 18, 2024: Sanjay Shah, the 55-year-old CEO of Chicago-based software company Vistex, attends an event in honor of the company’s 25th anniversary in Hyderabad, India. As part of a presentation on a film set, Shah and company president Raju Datla are lowered onto the stage in an apparatus made to look like a hot air balloon. A cable supporting the apparatus snaps, sending Shah and Datla plummeting onto the stage below. Shah dies shortly afterward. Datla dies at a Chicago hospital on July 19, 2024.
January 17, 1893: An alliance of U.S. and European business interests lead a coup d’etat that overthrows the sovereign government of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Queen Liliʻuokalani is forced to surrender, fearing that her kingdom won’t withstand a war with the United States.
January 17, 1995: More than 6,000 people die when a 6.9 magnitude earthquake centered on the city of Kobe strikes Japan.
January 16, 1862: A coal mining accident in Northumberland, England, kills 204 workers, some of them children as young as ten, and the pit pony. Most of them die of asphyxiation when the ventilation system breaks down, allowing the mine to fill with carbon monoxide.
January 16, 1942: TWA Flight 3 crashes into Potosi Mountain, Nevada, due to pilot error, killing all 22 people on board, including the actress Carole Lombard.
January 16, 1979: Ted Cassidy, the 6'9", deep-voiced actor who played Lurch on The Addams Family tv series, dies at age 46 from complications of surgery to remove a tumor from his heart. The tumor is a symptom of his acromegaly, the health condition responsible for his unusual height.
pesto pasta new books packages French press coffee saying what I want to say hugs motivation how far I've come bagels with cream cheese birthday cake banana bread being proud of others short stories making plans -- keep making them! Life is too short to want to see people and not follow through.
January 15, 1890: 26-year-old circus performer Lucía Zárate, who was born with Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II that gave her an extremely small stature, is traveling on a circus train with her fellow performers when the train breaks down in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Zárate, who weighed only 4.7 pounds (2.1 kg) at age 17, dies of hypothermia while the train is stranded.
January 15, 1919: More than two million gallons of molasses spill from a tank that bursts in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, flooding the streets. Over 150 people are injured; 21 people and an unknown number of horses die.
January 15, 1947: Betty Bersinger takes her 3-year-old daughter for a walk in their South Los Angeles neighborhood. Bersinger spots what she initially thinks is a mannequin lying in an empty lot. To her horror, she soon realizes the naked, bisected figure is a woman’s corpse. Bersinger phones the police from a nearby home.
The victim of this hideous crime is Elizabeth Short, 22 years old, last seen alive on the 9th of January. The murderer of the Boston native has never been arrested.
Some family members of Dr. George H. Hodel suspect their relative was involved in the crime; Hodel died in 1999 and this cannot be proven.
As of 2026, Michael Connelly, the journalist-novelist known for the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer novels series, hosts a podcast called Killer In the Code. It looks into a theory that the killer of Elizabeth Short and the self-named Zodiac Killer are the same person.
January 15, 1951: Mount Lamington on the island of Papua begins to erupt, spouting tall plumes of smoke. Its eruptions will continue until July 1956, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people. Many of them are residents of the village of Sangara, and most of their deaths come about either by burns from the dense pyroclastic flow or by inhaling and breathing superheated gases and toxic materials.
January 15, 2008: 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro dies of an accidental heroin overdose.
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 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.
Lewis Carroll, photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in 1863. Public domain.
January 14, 1957: Actor Humphrey Bogart dies of esophageal cancer after unsuccessful surgery that removed his esophagus, two lymph nodes, and a rib. He receives chemotherapy, but lapses into a coma. At the time of his death his weight is reduced to around 85 pounds.
January 14, 1986: Actress Donna Reed dies of pancreatic cancer. She’s been diagnosed with the disease only three months earlier.
January 14, 1990: A 31-year-old man from the Chicago suburb of Roselle suffered an apparent medical condition that caused him to behave impulsively while on vacation in Trinidad and Tobago. A friend who’d been staying in a Trinidad hotel with the man said he, the friend, was awakened that morning by the man trying to strangle him. They struggled and the man ran off, nude. After this, the man apparently scaled a barbed wire fence, entered the airport, struggled with security guards, and stole a vehicle. He drove the vehicle directly into a British Airways jet with its engines running, then jumped into an engine, killing himself immediately.
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 13, 1985: Actor Carol Wayne, perhaps best remembered by American tv viewers as the Matinee Lady on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, dies of an apparently accidental drowning after walking by herself along the beach. Wayne is visiting Manzanillo, Mexico, with a companion. The two argue and Wayne goes for a walk by herself. Her body is found by a fisherman three days later.
Beatles Trivia January 12, 1963: The Beatles release their second single, “Please Please Me,” which goes on to be their first #1 single in the U.K. My Baby Boomer parents are each 10 years old on this date.
Bummer January 12
January 12, 1888: The so-called Schoolhouse Blizzard strikes the Great Plains of the United States. The unexpected severe weather on what had been a relatively warm day in the morning catches many by surprise, resulting in 235 deaths. Most of these people died of hypothermia or from frostbite and complications of frostbite.
January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.
January 12, 2000: Bobby Phills, a professional basketball players for the Charlotte Hornets, drives his Porsche at over a hundred miles per hour, following teammate David Wesley (who is driving at a similar speed). Phills loses control of his car, crosses the center line, and hits a car head-on, causing that car to be rear-ended by a minivan. The drivers of the other car and the minivan are injured, but recover; Phills is killed at the scene of the accident.
January 12, 2007: 28-year-old Jennifer Strange dies of acute water intoxication in her Rancho Cordova, California, home. Strange had taken part in the “Hold Your Wee of a Wii” competition hosted by radio station KDND 107.9, which offered a Nintendo Wii video game system as its prize. Participants were encouraged to drink as much water as they could without going to the bathroom. Hours after the contest, Strange went to work, but told coworkers she had a headache and went home.
The amount of water she’d ingested is unknown, but in general, drinking more than one liter of water per hour can cause water intoxication, in which the body loses more electrolytes than it needs to sustain bodily functions. KDND’s parent company was ultimately ordered to pay $16,577,118 to Strange’s family for failing to inform her of the dangers of drinking too much water.
January 12, 2010: The second-deadliest earthquake in recorded history (as of 2022) occurs near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An estimated 316,000 die as a result of building collapses and lack of access to basic necessities. A cholera outbreak in October 2010 among survivors contributes to the death toll.
In unrelated and less tragic news (we'll talk about how he died later), it's Tim Horton's birthday.
London, January 11th, 1926, A.P. The average Briton’s appetite for reading has grown remarkably, or authors have been putting in some overtime. More books were printed during 1925 than in any previous year in the history of British book production. The total published was thirteen thousand, two hundred eight, or four hundred ninety-six more than in 1924.
Fiction apparently holds first place in public taste, for two thousand, seven hundred sixty-nine volumes of it were published last year. Religious books came second.
January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.
January 11, 1979: Louisiana State University student Bruce Wiseman is struck by a car and killed while being guided, blindfolded, across a street by members of the Theta Xi fraternity as part of a hazing ritual. To their credit, the fraternity members did attempt to get Wiseman out of harm’s way in time. Two others suffer broken bones.
January 11, 2020: Officials in Wuhan, China, announce the first recorded human death from the COVID-19 virus.
January 11, 2024: Ballet dancer Órla Baxendale, age 25, dies of a severe allergic reaction. Baxendale eats a vanilla Florentine cookie made by the Cookies United company and sold at a Stew Leonard’s grocery store. The box the cookies came in didn’t list peanuts as an ingredient. Baxendale was allergic to nuts and carried an Epipen in case of allergic reaction. Sadly, in this case, even though she receives the epinephrine injection in time, her body’s reaction is too severe for this to work.
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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann https://amzn.to/4aTuPl4 (affiliate link)
January 17, 1926
Bummer January 10th
January 10, 1860: Pemberton Mill, a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, collapses. An unknown number of factory workers, many of them young women, are killed in the tragedy. Their number is estimated to be between 88 and 145 people.
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January 9, 1927: A crowd of about 250 people, many of them unaccompanied children, watches an afternoon comedy at the Laurier Palace movie theater in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A discarded cigarette sparks a fire. In the ensuing fire and stampede to exit the theater, 78 children are killed.
January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).
Countee Cullen
January 9, 1953: Marguerite Pitre is executed by hanging, the last woman in Canada to be subjected to the death penalty. She’s been convicted of conspiring to blow up an airplane with dynamite, resulting in 23 fatalities.
January 9, 2015: About 230 attendees at a funeral in Tete Province, Mozambique, drink home-brewed pombe beer, a traditional beer variety brewed with Schizosaccharomyces pombe yeast, from a drink stand. They become ill and 75 of them die, including the woman who owns the drink stand. The beer has accidentally been contaminated with Burkholderia gladioli bacteria, which produces deadly bongkrekic acid in the beer batch.
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January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.
January 8, 2020: Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 is shot down by the Iranian armed forces. Five days previously, the U.S. had assassinated Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani and Iran had retaliated by launching missiles at U.S. forces stationed in Iraq. The Iranian military apparently believe the Ukrainian civilian airliner is an incoming missile launched by the U.S. military. The missile strike kills 176 people, with no survivors.
Today's Observance: Eastern Orthodox Christmas Artist Birthday: Zora Neale Hurston
Bummer January 7th
January 7, 1943: Inventor Nikola Tesla dies alone, of a heart attack, at the Hotel New Yorker.
January 7, 1948: 25-year-old Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell crashes his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky. Prior to the crash, Mantell told Godman Army Airfield that he had sighted an unidentified aerial object (which officials speculate may have been an unpiloted balloon collecting atmospheric data). In pursuit of the unknown object, Mantell banked sharply upward; the lack of oxygen at the higher altitude may have contributed to his loss of control of the aircraft.
January 7, 2012: Eleven people are killed when a hot air balloon over Carterton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), catches fire while attempting to land.
January 7, 2015: Two Islamist extremists target the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people are killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.
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"The latter festival [Epiphany] is derived from the Roman Saturnalia, the main feature of the celebration being lawlessness and wild fun. Many of the features of former times are no longer in vogue [in France], but the Twelfth-Night supper still continues in favor, when songs, toasts, and a general good time finishes the holiday season." - Yule-Tide in Many Lands
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Athena (goddess/Greek mythology)
Bummer January 6th
January 6, 1925: University of Utah at Salt Lake City student Reginald Stringfellow dies of a class hazing ritual called “tubbing,” in which Stringfellow’s head was held underwater repeatedly.
January 6, 1939: 23-year-old developmentally disabled man Joe Arridy is executed by gas chamber in Colorado. Convicted of the sexual assault and murder of a 15-year-old teenager, Arridy lacked the capacity to understand his trial or the process of execution and was likely coerced into a false confession by police. He is pardoned posthumously in 2011.
January 6, 1960: Mid-flight between New York City and Miami, National Airlines Flight 2511 explodes, killing all 29 passengers and five crew members. Authorities never determine who carried out the apparent bombing.
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 6, 2021: In Washington, D.C., a mob of Americans tried to disrupt the Constitutional process of the certification of a free and fair election. A mob of Donald Trump supporters, many of them allied with white supremacist extremists/domestic terrorists, apparently became enraged that the American people chose a Black and South Asian-American woman as our Vice President. They stormed the U.S. Capitol, breaking into the building.
At that time, both houses of Congress were in session to certify the Electoral College votes that made Joseph Biden the president-elect. This is merely a formality and a ceremonial gesture. Some Republican senators objected to the certification, but they were merely being assholes, trying to make political hay with delusional Trump supporters under the verifiably false impression that the election was somehow “stolen” from Trump.
In fact, more Americans had voted for Biden than had ever voted for any other U.S. presidential candidate. Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral vote in landslides.
Despite this, groups of white supremacists and their enablers who were outraged that Republican attempts to gerrymander their districts and suppress the votes of urban people (and especially urban people of color) didn’t work, attempted a coup. They not only broke into the Capitol Building but destroyed property, stole things, and threatened the staff and members of Congress. Some of them were armed with guns, Molotov cocktails, and pipe bombs.
No members of Congress were harmed. They either sheltered in place in their offices or evacuated through tunnels that run under the building. The Capitol Police did shoot and kill one woman who forced her way into the building. In all, 5-7 deaths are attributed to this riot.
January 5, 1971: Geraldine Liston, the wife of professional boxer Sonny Liston, arrives at the couple’s home in Las Vegas upon returning from a 2-week trip. She finds her husband’s dead body upstairs in their bedroom beside a broken bench, slumped over the bed. She initially believes he may have tripped on the bench and fallen, giving himself a fatal a head wound. However, his official cause of death is listed as lung congestion and heart failure. Liston was known to have complained of chest pains in December 1970. Yet the Las Vegas publicly stated that Liston’s death was from heroin overdose.
A small amount of heroin is found in the house, but no needles or other drug paraphernalia indicate that Liston used heroin before his death. The death remains somewhat mysterious due to the police comments and the fact that Liston is thought to have died approximately six days before his body is discovered, leaving the body too decomposed to do much conclusive testing.
January 5, 1988: Retired NBA player “Pistol Pete” Maravich collapses and dies at the age of 40 after playing in a church pickup basketball game in Pasadena, California, where the other players include Evangelical Christian author/Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. Maravich’s autopsy reveals a rare congenital heart defect that had gone undetected until his sudden death.
January 5, 1998: Former musician and then-politician Sonny Bono dies following an accident in which he skies into a tree.
January 5, 2002: 15-year-old high school student Charles J. Bishop steals a Cessna 172 while his flight instruction is performing a routine inspection on the exterior of the aircraft. Bishop flies the plane into a 42-story Bank of America building without any apparent attempt to stop. Bishop is killed; no one else is injured.
January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.
January 5, 2022: 29-year-old Thomas Anthony Mansfield dies after mis-measuring and consuming caffeine powder equivalent to the caffeine in 200 cups of coffee. He calls paramedics because of an irregular heartbeat, but they’re unable to save him.
Dante Alighieri's portrait by Sandro Botticelli. Public domain.
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French Republican Calendar Day Name (15 Nivôse): Rabbit (Note: I'm using the year 1794, or Year II on the Republican Calendar, for conversions from the Republican to Julian Calendar. Year II was the first Revolutionary year that had a January in it.)
Bummer January 4th
January 4, 1904: Thomas Edison has Topsy the elephant electrocuted in an attempt to convince the public that his alternating current electricity is safer than Nikola Tesla’s direct current electricity. The film of this event may be the first death ever recorded on film. Topsy had killed a trainer who, in her defense, had burned her with cigarettes.
January 4, 1998: 35 Americans die as a result of an ice storm that strikes the northeastern United States.
Thomas Edison with an early phonograph, 1888, public domain.
January 3, 1967: Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby dies in prison at age 55. Ruby, suffering from lung cancer, dies of a pulmonary embolism.
Jack Ruby. Image is in the public domain.
January 3, 1984: 48-year-old Dolly Young is decapitated by the Matterhorn Bobsled ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Her seatbelt is unbuckled (either deliberately or due to a malfunction), she is thrown from the ride, and she is then struck by another bobsled.
January 3, 2014: Islamist extremists burn the Christian books of Al-Saʼe Library in Tripoli, Lebanon.
January 2, 2001: 30-year-old Frances Frost is attacked and killed by a mountain lion while skiing in Banff National Forest in Alberta, Canada.
January 2, 2006: Thirteen miners are trapped underground by a methane gas explosion at Sago Mine in Sago, West Virginia. When the miners are reached on January 4th, only 26-year-old Randal L. McCloy, Jr. has survived. McCloy suffers from severe carbon monoxide poisoning and physical trauma and requires months of physical therapy before he can talk and feed himself. He suffers permanent eyesight and hearing damage.
What was Diane Meyer grateful for on January 2, 2024?
Hope. cousins old memories long conversations listening peace of mind laughter, even in grief Christmas lights (still up) in January genuine love happy childhood New Year's resolutions forgiveness...*
Today's Observance: New Year's Day Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: J. Edgar Hoover
And Now: The collection is complete! Now you can go back and read the entire updated, revised, and consolidated "Bummer" collection of history posts for each month of the year.
Happy new year! I hope your 2026 isn't a bummer. And now, because I still haven't published this in book form and you won't find these anywhere else online, here are my sources.
Physical Books
1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
Our Dreaming Mind: A Sweeping Exploration of the Role That Dreams Have Played in Politics, Art, Religion, and Psychology, from Ancient Civilizations to the Present Day by Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D., Ballantine Books, 1994.
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