Almanac for January 12th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 12th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-12-V7V0ZONPA

Artist Birthday: Melanie C

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4jB1IFi

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.

Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/4pE9aBc

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.

Almanac for January 11th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 11th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-11-B0B8ZOF4O

Britain’s appetite for books increases

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.

Books First Published in 1926:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9780156628709

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781400034215

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9780062986443

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781959891406

Simon the Coldheart by Georgette Heyer https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781773236346

Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781950330720

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair by Hugh Walpole https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9789361471872

French Republican Calendar Day Name (22 Nivôse): Salt

Bummer January 11

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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Almanac for January 10th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 10: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-10-O5O1ZOED8

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann https://amzn.to/4aTuPl4 (affiliate link)

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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Almanac for January 9th

Erin O'Riordan's almanac for January 9: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-9th-U6U8Z4TVA

Beatles Trivia

January 9, 1968: Look Magazine publishes Richard Avedon’s photographs of The Beatles.

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Simone de Beauvoir

Bummer January 9

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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Almanac for January 8th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-8th-O4O6Z4TL1

Today's Observance: National Man Watcher's Day

Bummer January 8th

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.

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Almanac for January 7th

Erin O'Riordan's almanac for January 7th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-7th-D1D2Z4T3M

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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Almanac for January 6th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 6: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-6th-W7W7Z4STP

Today's Observance: Twelfth Night

"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

Audiobook at Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/957288116/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.

Frank Sinatra at Aurora's Gin Joint blog: https://aurorasginjoint.com/2015/12/05/classic-sinatra-a-centennial-celebration/

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. 

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