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.
May 24, 1964: During a football (soccer) match between the Peruvian and Argentinian national teams in the Estadio Nacional in Lima, a Uruguayan referee makes a controversial call against Peru. Fans throw trash onto the field. One man who attempts to invade the pitch is brutally beaten by the Peruvian National Police. A riot and a crowd crush ensue, since the exit doors have been sealed with corrugated steel shutters. The 328 people who die mostly die of crush asphyxia or of internal injuries.
May 23, 1926: Playwright Henrik Ibsen dies after his third stroke.
May 23, 1934: Murderous bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are driving a 1934 Ford Deluxe V-8, with Barrow at the wheel, when they notice Henry Methvin, a member of their “gang,” parked at the side of the road. Unknown to them, Methvin is working with law enforcement, who are hiding in the nearby bushes. As Barrow slows down the Ford to talk to Methvin, police open fire, firing 160 rounds into the Ford. Barrow, struck in the head, dies almost instantly. Parker is also killed at the scene; witnesses describe hearing her scream as bullets strike her.
May 23, 1990: While Scottish psychedelic/electronic band The Shamen is in the Canary Islands filming a music video for its song “Move Any Mountain,” band member Will Sinnott, who performed under the name Will Sinn, drowns off the coast of La Gomera island. Unconfirmed reports implicate psychedelic drugs in his drowning accident.
May 23, 1999: Canadian wrestler Owen Hart dies during a match in Kansas City, Missouri. As Hart is being lowered into the ring, his harness fails. Hart falls 78 feet onto the top rope, severing his aorta. Hart’s lungs fill with blood; he dies from blunt force trauma and internal bleeding at the hospital.
A Bessie Love film based on an ACD novel. Nov. 11, 1925
Bummer May 22nd
May 22, 1960: An earthquake centered near Lumaco, Chile, is one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded and causes a tsunami that devastates Hilo, Hawaii. An unknown number of people are killed by the earthquake and tsunami; estimates range between 1,000 and 6,000 people lost their lives.
May 22, 1981: Film director Boris Sagal, best known for directing the Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, dies after walking into the rotors of a helicopter on the set of the miniseries World War III. Partially decapitated, he is rushed to the hospital, where he dies a few hours later. Sagal is the father of five children, including actress Katey Sagal.
***
And now, for something completely different, an affiliate link to a Gumroad creative product you may enjoy: The Abduction audiobook
May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.
May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.
May 21, 1976: Yuba City (California) High School sends its choir students to a nearby high school for a Friendship Day event aboard a chartered bus. The bus’s air brakes fail. With no ability to brake, the bus strikes a rail, leaves the highway, and falls 21.6 feet. It lands on its roof. One adult faculty advisor and 29 students are killed. All 24 survivors, including the bus driver, are seriously injured.
May 20, 1943: Australian bacteriologist Dora Lush dies of scrub typhus. She’d accidentally pricked herself with an infected needle while trying to develop a vaccine for this disease. Lush is 32 years old.
May 20, 1989: Saturday Night Live actress Gilda Radner dies of ovarian cancer. She’s 42 years old.
May 20, 2013: Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek dies of bile duct cancer.
English school, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bummer May 19th
May 19, 1536: Henry VIII of England’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, is beheaded.
May 19, 1935: Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” dies of his wounds six days after a motorcycle crash. He is 46 years old.
May 19, 1993: SAM Colombia Flight 501 crashes into a mountain upon approach to José María Córdova International Airport in Medellín, Colombia. All 132 people aboard are killed. The crew’s navigation abilities were impaired by thunderstorms and by a malfunctioning radio beacon.
May 19, 2016: EgyptAir Flight 804, flying from Paris to Cairo, crashes into the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 66 people on board. The suspected cause of the crash is a cockpit fire, perhaps caused by a crew member smoking a cigarette (an action which was not prohibited), worsened by an oxygen leak coming from a mask inside the cockpit, that rapidly spread out of control.
May 19, 2018: A 32-year-old bicyclist is killed by a mountain lion while cycling in North Bend, Oregon.
May 18, 1927: Local school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe rigs explosives inside the Bath Township, Michigan elementary school to explode. He murders his wife and sets his house and barn on fire. Kehoe also fills his automobile with nails and explosives, detonating it and killing himself and sending shrapnel flying. The local mail carrier loses a leg when the vehicle explodes and later dies from his injuries.
As a result of the school explosion and detonation of the vehicle, 38 children and a total of five adult victims are killed. The exact reason for Kehoe’s rampage is unknown, but he may have been upset about losing a local election and his wife’s increasingly poor health.
May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington State, erupts. An estimated 57 people die as a direct result of the volcano, and over one billion dollars’ worth of property is destroyed.
May 18, 1996: 29-year-old musician Kevin Gilbert is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation at his home in California.
May 18, 2017: Musician Chris Cornell, age 52, dies of suicide by hanging.
Now let's move onto something significantly more life-affirming: My all-time (2017-2026) most-played songs on Spotify, Part II.
"Love Is Blindness" by Jack White is the only cover of a U2 song that I actually like better than a U2 song.
"Gettin' It" features into the plot of the tv series Blindspotting, an amazing musical love story starring the uber-talented Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton (the musical) fame. Her character's beloved is played by Rafael Casal and he is also great in this. He's basically playing the most ride-or-die husband in modern musical history.
"Soul Kitchen" by the Doors is playing in the Umbrella Academy episode where Klaus meets Dave, the closest thing he has to a love of his life. It's beautiful and tragic and I was more than a little obsessed.
I should watch the Bruce Springsteen movie starring the gorgeous Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame. (The Bear also had Jon Bernthal, who is about to return to playing The Punisher on Disney+. Right after the latest season of Daredevil: Born Again showed us Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as a couple, with their daughter, future Captain America Danielle Cage. I hyperventilated. JonesCage was all I ever wanted out of Marvel's The Defenders. Well, that and for [spoilers] Electra to still be alive, but we can't have everything, can we?)
(P.S. Jon Bernthal is also starring on Broadway in the theatre version of the classic Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon. And while I have mixed feelings about Jews and Italians being used interchangeably in media - don't get me started again - that's pretty fuckin' awesome. I love that guy. I just love him, period.)
I'm done listening to Nicki Minaj now that she's joined Team Maga (a.k.a. the American fascists who want to reinstate white supremacy) and how we just all know instinctively that if she was in that juke joint in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, she would have let those vampires in and fixed them a Myx Moscato to boot.
"The Future" from Batman (1989) isn't actually my 121st most-listened song, it's in fact the first song I ever listened to on Spotify on March 31, 2017. I wonder what I was thinking that day. It's true that as a 12-year-old in 1989, I was hella excited about Batman, and I saw it in the theater twice, once regular movie theater and once drive-in. Maybe I was leaning into 1980s nostalgia, as I sometimes do, with or without Murry Head. Maybe I was fantasizing about Christian Bale's Batman, as I sometimes do, with or without Cillian Murphy.
