Almanac for September 11

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for September 11th: https://ko-fi.com/post/September-11th-D1D212SP42

Today's Observance: Rosh Hashanah (at sundown)

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Magical Mystery Tour

Artist Birthday: Taraji P. Henson (don't go in the Taraji tag unless you're willing to read spoilers for the Person of Interest tv series!)

Bummer September 11th

September 11, 1943: Aviation enthusiast and one of the heirs to the DuPont chemical fortune Richard Chichester du Pont dies at the age of 32 while attempting to parachute from an experimental glider. He dies when his parachute fails.

September 11, 1963: 15-year-old Michael Murphy is killed in a hazing ritual performed by members of the Charleston (West Virginia) High School marching band. Band members repeatedly strike Murphy in the abdomen, trying to give him a “pink belly.”

September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.

September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target (possibly intended to be the White House) are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Three planes hit their targets, destroying both towers of the World Trade Center and significantly damaging the Pentagon building. The fourth plane is retaken by passengers and crashes into a field in Pennsylvania at over 500 mph. Nearly 3,000 people are killed, including all of the passengers aboard all four planes.

More than 3,000 workers who responded to the tragedy and helped in the cleanup and recovery effort have subsequently died of health issues directly stemming from breathing toxic air during that effort. The Donald Trump-Elon Musk "DOGE" scam cut funding to their health care fund. 

As soon as Trump leaves office, he needs to be indicted for enriching himself and his scummy family at the expense of the best, bravest, and most innocent Americans. And, as a reminder, George W. Bush is still a war criminal responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people in Iraq. Don't let the media woobify him just because he's elderly now. 

September 11, 2014: A 65-year-old Thai women visits Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm in Bangkok. She takes off her shoes, neatly sets them aside, then intentionally jumps into the crocodile enclosure. She is killed by several adult crocodiles, an apparent suicide. The woman is known to have had depression.

Sept. 11, 2015: Muslims are preparing for the Hajj pilgrimage at Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, when a construction crane collapses. A combination of high winds from a sand storm and human error contribute to the disaster, which injures almost 400 and kills 111.

September 11, 2018: 55-year-old hiker Diane Bober is killed by a mountain lion at Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon.

And now, for something completely different, an affiliate link to a Gumroad creative product you may enjoy: The Olive Conspiracy - fantasy romance

If my words are not being censored by the Trump Regime, you may find my books here on Gumroad.

Remembrance of September 11, 2001

If everything has gone as planned, I'll be started a new job today, September 11, 2023. I'll be going into the office rather than working from home, something I haven't done since before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While I'm embarking on the next step in my career, please consider these books for commemorating the awfulness those of us who were around went through on September 11, 2001. (I shared my diary entry from that date here, on the 10th anniversary.)

https://amzn.to/3ElQr8o

https://amzn.to/3L0tnQb

https://amzn.to/3Pkz264

Bummer Summer Part II: Awful Things That Happened in September

Content Warning: Accidents, natural disasters, death, guns, mass death.

This is a second sneak peek at a very tentative, very early-stage work in progress I call Erin O’Riordan’s Almanac of Bad Days. Part I dropped on August 3, 2022. 

September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.

September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.

September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison. 

September 4, 2006: Wildlife expert, zookeeper, and filmmaker Steve Irwin is filming a dive in shallow water near the Great Barrier Reef. He is struck in the chest by a stingray’s tale. The barb of the tale pierces his heart, killing him.

September 5, 1983: Canadian stunt performer Ken Carter is killed when the rocket car he’s using to jump over an Ontario pond overshoots the landing ramp, flips, and lands on its roof. 

September 6, 1951: Joan Vollmer is shot and killed in an American-owned bar in Mexico City by her husband, William S. Burroughs. Both were intoxicated. Vollmer is alleged to have placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs was supposedly trying to shoot the glass off her head with a pistol. Instead he shot Vollmer in the head and killed her instantly.

This is portrayed in the film Beat (2000). Vollmer is played by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland. 

Courtney Love attending Life Ball in Vienna, Austria, May 31, 2014. Public domain image.

September 7, 2018: Rapper Mac Miller, aged 26, dies of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine, and fentanyl. 

September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.

September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.

September 13, 1996: Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur dies from gunshot wounds in Las Vegas.

September 14, 1899: Real estate developer Henry H. Bliss becomes the first person killed in the U.S. from a motor vehicle collision. The previous day, he had stepped off a trolley car and been struck by an electric taxi cab, knocking him to the ground and crushing his chest. 

September 14, 1927: Dancer Isadora Duncan is killed in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle of the car she’s riding in, breaking her neck.

September 16, 1977: T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who never learned to drive, is the passenger in a Mini 1275GT automobile when it crashes into a fence post and then a tree, killing Bolan instantly.

September 16, 1985: Aerobatic pilot Arthur “Art” Scholl crashes his plane and is killed while filming spin footage for the movie Top Gun. He crashes into the Pacific Ocean; his aircraft is never recovered.

September 18, 1970: 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix dies of asphyxiation at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He appears to have aspirated vomit after taking an overdose of barbiturates, presumably his girlfriend’s sleeping pills.

September 19, 1902: One hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!” 

September 20, 1997: Musician Nick Traina, the son of author Danielle Steel, passes away from an overdose of the prescription medication lithium. He is 19 years old.

Link80fan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

September 22, 1978: Stunt performer A.J. Bakunas dies from his injuries after a failed stunt fall from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kincaid Towers the previous day. Bakunas lands on the air bag as planned, which splits, allowing his body to hit the ground at approximately 115 miles per hour.

September 27, 1986: Metallica bassist Clifford (Cliff) Burton dies in a tour bus accident in Sweden. The bus skids off the road while members of the band are sleeping in their bunks. Burton is thrown out of his bunk and through the window; the bus falls on top of him. 

September 30, 1997: Post-modern writer Kathy Acker, age 50, dies of breast cancer while undergoing alternative treatment in Tijuana, Mexico.

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Bummer Summer Part I: Awful Things That Happened in August

Content Warning: Accidents, natural disasters, death, child death, mass death.

As I mentioned back in June, I've been working on a time-based project. A sort of almanac, if you will. That project was well underway as I sat in the Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie the other day, watching Jordan Peele's Nope. 

I'm not going to spoil anything major about the movie, but here's a minor spoiler that occurs in the first few minutes: Weird things fall out of the sky. 

This reminded me of a particular genre of reading I enjoyed as a young adult: Collections of short, weird, allegedly true paranormal happenings. These books would collect ghost stories beside tales of strange happenings like alleged cases of spontaneous human combustion, reincarnation, and rains of weird things such as frogs. 

It occurred to me that part of Jordan Peele's writing process was collecting bits of news, little ripples of anxiety that run through our American culture, and weaving them together into a story. This reminded me of my almanac project, which isn't specifically focused on cultural anxieties or weird happenings, but does mention some of them incidentally. For example, I was alive on September 11, 2001, and I've written about it; some of that writing made its way into my first almanac draft/work-in-progress.

I don't want the entire almanac to be a bummer. But this gave me an idea: What if I wrote a separate document, a companion almanac, a slimmer volume that was focused on the bummer parts of history and American culture?

This is the first little peek at what I'm tentatively--very tentatively--calling Erin O’Riordan’s Almanac of Bad Days. I'm me, so it's still a bit literary-focused.

August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.

August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.

August 7, 2016: 10-year-old son Caleb Schwab is killed while riding the Verrückt water raft ride at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City, Kansas. The tallest such ride in the world at the time, the ride had a screen over the top, held in place with a series of metal support rings, to keep guests from accidentally flying off the ride in the event that the raft should become airborn. Caleb, who was riding on the front of a raft with two unrelated women riding on the back, struck the metal support ring and was decapitated when his raft became airborne. 

August 10, 1978: Three teenage girls, all members of the Ulrich family, are killed in an automobile accident while riding in a Ford Pinto. The state of Indiana charges the Ford Motor Company with homicide, claiming that the company was aware of manufacturing defects that made the vehicle more likely to cause death in the event of certain types of accidents. Ford is found not guilty.

August 12, 1964: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dies.

No Time to Die

August 12, 1982: Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashes into a mountain after the pilots lose the ability to steer the plane. Of the 509 passengers and 15 crew members, only three passengers and one crew member survive. Rescue operations are delayed due to darkness and mountainous terrain, which means many people who may have initially had non-fatal injuries died of exposure, blood loss, and other conditions. 

August 13, 1521: Hernán Cortés and his small army of Spanish conquistadores conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán after an extended siege that began in 1519. 

August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr. 

August 17, 1966: English race car driver Ken Miles is killed when the Ford Mk IV he is test-driving crashes at over 200 miles per hour.

August 21, 1986: A naturally-occurring limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon releases poisonous carbon dioxide into the air, killing 1,746 people. 

August 25, 1984: Truman Capote dies of liver disease.

August 26, 2001: Tit and I got out of bed this morning and turned on the news to hear that the singer/dancer/actor Aaliyah had perished in a plane crash in the Bahamas. Born in 1979, she was only 22 years old.

August 27, 1883: Mount Krakatau (Anglicized as Krakatoa), which had begun to erupt on the 20th of May, intensifies in seismic activity with an eruption that destroys more than two-thirds of its island. The eruption is one of the loudest sounds ever heard by human ears, with the explosion being heard 4,800 miles away from the Indonesian site of the volcano. Pyroclastic flows, ash expelled into the atmosphere, and resulting tsunamis are estimated to have killed more than 36,400 people. Only the 1815 Mount Tambora explosion is thought to have been deadlier.

August 28, 2020: 43-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman passes away from colon cancer.

'Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11' by Mitchell Zuckoff

Forget the conspiracy theories that have cropped up in the past 18 years. If you want to know what happened on September 11, 2001, stick to factual, journalistic reports like this one. Zuckoff cites extensive notes in his sources, including firsthand interviews with survivors, so this isn't just some person with a YouTube channel talking out of their...imagination.

This is a hard read. It was an awful, brutal, cruel act of terrorism, and this narrative pulls no punches when it comes to graphic descriptions. Content warning for descriptions of violence and bodily injury; sensitive readers may not be able to handle some of the more vivid chapters. (One of the really graphic ones relating to the Shanksville, Pennsylvania plane crash was mentioned in the Washington Post review of this book. If you could handle that review, you'll probably be okay.)

This book does two important things. One, it personalizes the unthinkable tragedy, bringing it back down to human scale. Two, it ends on a hopeful note, reminding us that survivors continue to survive and thrive despite their horrific losses and injuries.

I don't know why I'm drawn to reading such sad things. I guess it's a "hope for the best but prepare for the worst" thing. But I do know that an American is more likely to be killed by a bee sting than by a terrorist. The reality is that we're actually safer than we've ever been. So read this history, but don't get depressed.

I borrowed this audio book from my local library using the Libby app. I wasn't obligated to review it in any way.

September 11, 2001 Remembered

The following is my unabridged, uncensored journal entry from September 11, 2001.

Today will always be known as a black day in American history. I know that I will never forget it.

It began ordinarily enough. I had awakened at four thirty to pee, and found that I'd started my period. I went back to bed and woke up around 7. [Tit Elingtin] wanted to go for a walk, but I was feeling too lazy. Then we started fooling around, and he got up to take a shower. While he was in the shower, I was thinking about what I'd read of Susie Bright last night. I was thinking of making a list of some of the sex scenes I've read in books.

I turned on NBC, as usual.

But the news was not usual, not at all.

It started with a picture of a plane crash. They - the Today show anchors, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer - reported that a small private plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Sad, I thought. Weird. I remarked jokingly, "At least we know it wasn't Aaliyah this time." An accident, it seemed.

That impression was shattered a moment later. I heard terror in the reporter's voice as there was a second impact. A second plane had hit the World Trade Center, striking the other tower. This was a deliberate act, a suicide mission. Later in the morning, both towers of the World Trader Center would collapse onto the streets of New York City, crushing rescue workers who went in after the first victims.

Soon we would learn that both planes were commercial airliners, full of passengers. They had been hijacked. And that was not the end of the terror.

Two more planes had been hijacked. Within the hour, one crashed directly into the south side of the Pentagon, killing perhaps hundreds of office workers as well as the plane's passengers. The fourth place was perhaps headed for the White House, but ended up crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. I heard that perhaps the military was forced to shoot it down. After the second plane hit, all commercial and private planes were grounded. Every airport in the country was closed, and only the military was allowed to be in the air.

No one knows yet how many died today. Many hundreds were wounded; New York's hospitals were so full they were using cafeterias as emergency rooms. Worse, no one has claimed responsibility for the horrible actions. Unlike after Pearl Harbor, we don't have anyone to declare war against.

The chief suspect, though, is Osama bin Laden, a known terrorist who is supported by the government of Afghanistan. He is thought responsible for the horrible bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the destruction of the U.S.S. Cole.

[Tit Elingtin] and I sat, stunned, watching the news coverage. But we also managed to keep our 9:20 appointment to take Kitty to the vet. She had to get a checkup, some blood work to check for diseases, and a round of yearly vaccinations. She also had to have one of her anal glands cleaned out because it was blocked.

On our way home, we listened to the awful news as well as Kitty's meows. We were hungry, so we went to McDonald's. As we left Mickey D's, we saw Mikel [a friend] walking along, so we offered him a ride. He was worried about his uncle, who works in an office building near the now-destroyed World Trade Center.

We went home and ate. I had a fruit and yogurt parfait. I was really hungry, and it was pretty good: vanilla yogurt, crunchy granola with a hint of cinnamon, blueberries and delicious strawberries. I felt guilty to be enjoying it while so much horror was happening on the East Coast.

I went to work at 11:30, but I didn't stay as long as usual. The schools let out a little bit early, and most of our 3-5 and 3-7 kids got bussed home instead of bussed to [the mental health facility where I worked]. A few showed up, either because their parents weren't home or because of a miscommunication between school and bus driver. But we all went home at 5 instead of staying until 7 or 8.

When I got home, [Tit] was home too, watching news coverage. We decided we wanted to tape some of it, so we went to Osco to buy videotape and some mothballs. Our apartment was all infested with moths, and not the pretty moths that look like butterflies, either. We walked home from Osco and spent the rest of the night camped in front of TV, hearing about hijacking, plane crashes and fallen skyscrapers. We heard the agonizing news that New York City believed it lost over 200 firefighters and police officers. It was a truly sad, frightening, horrific day.

Image attribution: World Trade Center in March 2001 photo by Jeffmock, Creative Commons license. I took the other photo, of the actual notebook from which I took this entry.

Welcome Back to WIP Wednesday

It's Wednesday, so here at Pagan Spirits it's WIP Wednesday. My guest authors and I will share a bit about our current works in progress (WIPs). If you're an author of any genre and would like to participate in the next WIP Wednesday, simply shoot an e-mail to erinoriordan (at) sbcglobal (dot) net.

Erin O'Riordan: Some of what I've been working on this week: future blog posts. As we all know, we are less than one month away from the 10th anniversary of a tragic, tragic day in American history. I wanted to do something small, simple and thoughtful on Sept. 11, 2011. I decided to share my diary entry, uncensored, from that day ten years ago. It's not any kind of definitive record. It's one woman's limited observations from the safety of the Lake Michigan region.

On a much lighter note, I wrote another September blog post that's a throwback to the 1990s and a literary tribute to a male I would almost certainly throw into my harem if I could. He's not Christian Bale, but he is an immigrant from Europe, and he's been mentioned in this blog before. Picture a red uniform.

Marni Graff (M.K. Graff): Right now I'm revising THE GREEN REMAINS, set in Cumbria, and the followup to the first Nora Tierney mystery, THE BLUE VIRGIN (Bridle Path Press, 2010). Nora is an American writer living in the UK who cleared her best friend of a murder charge when she was still living in Oxford. Now that she's moved to the Lake District to work on her children's book series, she finds herself proving her series illustrator couldn't possibly have poisoned a wealthy landowner, despite his studio being one of only two places the plant in question is found. Did I mention she's also 8 mos. preggers with her dead fiance's child? The book should be in print by early December in time for holiday shopping.

I also write a weekly book review blog, and am co-author with my writing group, Screw Iowa, of a book on our unique workshop method and critique method, WRITING IN A CHANGING WORLD.

Marni Graff
www.bridlepathpress.com (You can read about Screw Iowa here!)
www.auntiemwrites.wordpress.com

Sally Carpenter: Sally Carpenter just published The Baffled Beatlemaniac Caper, the first book in the Sandy Fairfax Teen Idol mystery series. My WIP is the next series book.

Sandy Fairfax, a 38-year-old former ‘70s teen idol and star of the hit TV show, Buddy Brave, Boy Sleuth, is now a recovering alcoholic, desperate for a comeback. As he restarts his career and makes amends with his estranged family, bodies turn up and Sandy finds himself living his boy detective persona for real.

In “The Sinister Sitcom Caper,” Sandy lands a guest role on the lowest-rated fall TV comedy, Off Kelter. When an actor drops dead at his feet, he starts deducing with the aid of a dwarf and Scruffy, an animal actor. And could romance be in the air?

Sally’s a member of Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles chapter and lives in Moorpark, Calif. Contact her at scwriter@earthlink.net. To order Beatlemaniac, go to http://oaktreebooks.com/dark_oak_mysteries.htm.

Photo of Cumbria by Mark Fosh; Creative Commons License