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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Almanac for January 5th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 5: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-5th-E1E6Z4SMT

Bummer January 5th

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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