Almanac for October 9th

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Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 9th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-9-Karen-Lee-Boren-T6T414B3C8

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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Almanac for July 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-18-My-Brothers-Wedding-I3I11HQEQX

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: William Makepeace Thackaray

Beatles Trivia
July 18, 1995, South Bend: I dropped Mom off at work. When I came home, I turned on the tv to see Yoko Ono and beautiful, 19-year-old Sean Lennon [Ono] on the Today show.

Bummer July 18th

July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

July 18, 1954: 18-year-old Dorothy Poore’s decomposing body is found stuffed inside a dresser drawer inside a room at the Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Her killer is apprehended in Missouri and brought back to Indiana, where he is convicted and serves more than 25 years before being released on parole. He claimed to have killed the teenager after failing to recruit her as a sex worker.

July 18, 1966: Rock musician Bobby Fuller, whose band The Bobby Fuller Four has recently scored a hit with “I Fought the Law,” is found dead in his car outside his apartment in Hollywood. Fuller is 23 years old. His body has no signs of injury other than some small spots (indicated broken capillaries under the skin) thought to have been caused by the summer heat. No cause of death is ever determined. Strangely, the boxes for both “accident” and “suicide” are checked on the Los Angeles deputy medical examiner’s report.

July 18, 1969: U.S. Senator Edward (“Ted”) Kennedy leaves a cocktail party in his car with a passenger, Mary Joe Kopechne. The impaired senator drives the vehicle into a lake. He manages to escape, but Kopechne drowns. Kennedy fails to report the deadly accident until the following morning. He later pleads guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

July 18, 1975: Influential graffiti-style artist Vaughn Bodē, age 33, is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.

July 18, 1984: A lone gunman kills 21 people and wounds an additional 19 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro*, California. The gunman is subsequently killed by a police sniper.

In her book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser offers the theory that the perpetrator suffered from severe heavy metal poisoning as a result of exposure to high levels of cadmium at his workplace, where he was a welder. Outbursts of violent behavior are a documented side effect of cadmium poisoning.

July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.

July 18, 1989: Actress Rebecca Schaeffer, then the star of the popular sitcom My Sister Sam, is shot in the chest at her home by a 19-year-old obsessed fan who has stalked her over the course of three years. He became enraged when she appeared in a film in which her character is seen in bed with a male character. Schaeffer dies at the hospital.

*San Ysidro, in English, is called Saint Isadore, and he's the patron saint of farmers.

Almanac for July 1st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 1st: https://ko-fi.com/Post/1st-of-July-L3L11HQ7XO

Artist Birthday: Andre Braugher
French Republican Calendar Day Name (13 Messidor): Clove

Beatles Trivia

July 1, 1968: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s collaborative art exhibit You Are Here (To Yoko from John Lennon, With Love) opens in London.

Bummer July 1st

July 1, 1955: Actor Isabel Bonner collapses and dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while performing in the play The Shrike, written by her husband, in Los Angeles.

July 1, 1976: 23-year-old West German woman Anneliese Michel dies of malnutrition at her home. Over the last year of her life, Michel has been cared for by her parents and priests from the Roman Catholic Church, who performed rites of exorcism under the belief that Michel was possessed by demons. Michel had previously been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and major depressive disorder, but was not being seen by health care professionals at the time of her death. Her parents and several members of the Catholic Church are tried and convicted for negligent homicide.

July 1, 1996: Model/actor Margaux Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, is found dead inside her home in Santa Monica, California. She has died by suicide after overdosing on the barbiturate medication Luminal.

July 1, 2002: 71 people die when passenger jet BAL Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and a DHL Cargo ship collide in midair near the border between Germany and Switzerland. The Russian passenger jet carried nine crew members and 60 passengers, many of whom were gifted children on a UNESCO cultural exchange trip to Barcelona. The DHL cargo flight carried two crew members. 

The crew of the Russian jet received contradictory instructions from TCAS automated guidance system and from Swiss air traffic control. At the time, Russian pilots didn’t have a clear set of instructions on whether TCAS should override verbal commands from air traffic control or vice versa. (Now, pilots are told to prioritize TCAS, which gathers more data at a quicker rate than a human being on the ground.) Air traffic controller Peter Nielsen, who was the only person on duty at that time and therefore had to monitor two air traffic control work stations at the same time, set the Russian jet on a course that caused it to directly collide with the cargo plane.

Margaux Hemingway in 1976. Publicity photo, unknown author, public domain.

Almanac for June 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for June 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/June-18-Paul-McCartney-Richard-Nixon-P5P31HQ6E0

Beatles Trivia

June 18, 1942: Paul McCartney and Roger Ebert are born.

June 18, 1968: London’s Old Vic theatre performs the stage adaptation of John Lennon’s first book, In His Own Write. Lennon attends with Yoko Ono, but the audience is horrible to her and shouts racist insults at her.

June 18, 1973: John Lennon-Ono and Yoko Ono-Lennon attend the Watergate court hearings and hear John Dean testify. They sit beside Nixon adviser Elvin Bell in the second row, behind Dean’s wife Maureen.

Sandy Allen was born on June 18, 1955.

Bummer June 18th

June 18, 1982: A postal clerk crossing Blackfriar’s Bridge in London finds the body of “God’s Banker” Roberto Calvi hanging underneath the bridge. Calvi has about $14,000 and five bricks in his pockets. He had recently lost his job at Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and was under indictment for embezzling the bank’s funds. The death was officially ruled a suicide, but Calvi’s family suspects murder. 

June 18, 1984: Jewish talk show host Alan Berg is gunned down by two members of a white supremacist terror group in Denver. He is 50 years old.

June 18, 2023: Five people die aboard the submersible craft Titan when the underwater vehicle’s pressure barrier fails on a voyage to see the wreck of the Titanic. The Titan’s designer, billionaire Stockton Rush, had the submersible’s hull made of carbon fiber and titanium, materials which are not typically used for deep sea submersibles. It was not subject to the safety regulations of any nation since it operated in international waters.

Rush is one of those killed when the submersible implodes. Also killed are the voyage’s guide, deep sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and three paying passengers: English billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani-English billionaire Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman.

Almanac for June 4th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for June 4th: https://ko-fi.com/post/February-19-Queenie-Z8Z41AZGDD

Beatles Trivia
June 4, 1969: The Beatles release “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in the U.S. In the U.K. it came out on May 30th. 

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: National Cognac Day

Bummer June 4th

June 4, 1923: Jockey Frank Hayes, age 22, has a sudden fatal heart attack in the middle of a horse race. His horse, Sweet Kiss, is the first to cross the finish line, still carrying Hayes’s body. Hayes’s heart attack may have been related to his crash dieting, since jockeys are required to weigh as little as possible.

June 4, 1978: A search party discovers the body of Ted Weiher, age 32, inside a remote camping shelter in Plumas National Forest in northern California. Weiher died of starvation and dehydration and has severe frostbite on both feet. He and his four close friends (all of whom had intellectual disabilities and/or mental health challenges) had last been seen by their families on February 24th of that year, when they attended a basketball game together. The bones of three of the others were discovered in the woods nearby, apparently dispersed by scavenging animals. They’re thought to have died of hypothermia. No trace of the fifth man has ever been found. 

June 4, 2004: A 52-year-old man in Granby, Colorado, goes on a spree during which he uses a steel- and concrete-reinforced bulldozer to destroy several buildings, including Granby’s mayor’s house and the town hall. The man had modified the vehicle over the course of a year and a half, plotting his revenge against the town based on a grievance stemming from a bill he owed for illegally dumping sewage from his business rather than properly connecting the business to the town’s sewage system. In the process of destroying the local hardware store, the bulldozer falls into the building’s basement and the engine stops working. The man, armed with several firearms inside of and protruding from the armored bulldozer, then dies by suicide. No one else is harmed.

Almanac for March 20th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 20th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-20-Vernal-Equinox-J3J4JN5BV

Today's Observance: First Day of Spring (Northern Hemisphere); First Day of Autumn (Southern Hemisphere)

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Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Ovid

Artist Birthdays: Maggie Estep and Henrik Ibsen

• The Chapel Hill Weekly (N.C.), February 19, 1926

Beatles Trivia
March 20, 1969: As chronicled in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono get married in the then-British territory of Gibraltar, near Spain.

Bummer March 20th

March 20, 1760: The Great Boston Fire of 1760 destroys 349 buildings, leaving 220 families homeless.

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

March 20, 1995: Hoping to overthrow the Japanese government and hasten the end of the world, doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo releases toxic gas onto three subway lines during rush hour. They sicken more than 5,000 people and kill 12.

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Almanac for February 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for February 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/February-18-Birthday-of-Three-Amazing-Women-Artis-B0B21AZFBT

Today's Observance: Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot links:

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/982040492/Ash-Wednesday

Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/ash-wednesday-25

Spotify: 

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Bloody Mary

Beatles Trivia

February 18, 1933: Yoko Ono is born.

“I saw nothing was permanent. You don’t want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.” - Yoko Ono

February 18, 1971: For her 38th birthday, John Lennon Ono gifts his wife a snow-white Steinway piano.

Bummer February 18th

February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

February 18, 1967: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who witnessed the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon near Socorro, New Mexico, dies of throat cancer. He has undergone surgery and chemotherapy, neither of which has been successful.

February 18, 2001: On the final turn of the final lap of the Daytona 500, NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart’s car makes contact with Sterling Marlin’s car. Earnhart loses control, contacting Ken Schrader’s car while trying to right himself. After crossing in front of Schrader’s vehicle, Earnhart’s car collided head-on with the retaining wall at approximately 160 miles per hour.

Although attempts were made to revive him at the hospital, Earnhart died upon impact. He suffered massive blunt force trauma injuries, including a basilar skull fracture. Basilar skull fractures aren’t necessarily fatal, but they are very often fatal in severe cases. 

February 18, 2010: 53-year-old Andrew Joseph Stack III, a software engineering consultant, deliberately flies his Piper PA-28 Cherokee light aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and IRS manager Vernon Hunter. Stack, who had filed for bankruptcy and was under investigation by the IRS for failing to report income, wrote in a suicide note that he wanted to extract his “pound of flesh” from the IRS.