Almanac for March 27th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 27th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-27-Where-the-Streets-Have-No-Name-K3K61CMH37

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Paella

Bummer March 27th

March 27, 1977: The single deadliest aviation accident (as of this writing) occurs on the Spanish island of Tenerife when two jets collide on the runway. Both KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736 had been diverted to Los Rodeos Airport (as Tenerife North Airport was known at the time) from Gran Canaria Airport. A terrorist group fighting for the Canary Islands’ independence from Spain had set off a bomb at Gran Canaria, injuring eight people and causing all airline traffic to be rerouted.

As the Pan Am jet sat on the runway, the Dutch plane, unaware that the Pan Am was directly in its path, began its takeoff run. Conditions on the ground were foggy and it seems that the Dutch plane didn’t correctly identify the runway its crew was being asked to use. A lack of standardized language in the communication between the Dutch pilots and air traffic control may have caused the pilots to think they had been cleared for takeoff when they should have waited.

Both crews made valiant last-minute efforts to avoid collision, but it was too late. Everyone on the Dutch jet, 248 people, were killed, as were 335 people on the Pan Am jet. Of the 61 survivors on the Pan Am jet, almost all were in the nose section of the plane, including the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. The full fuel tanks on both aircraft contributed to fires that made rescue efforts more difficult. 

On the bright side, the commercial aviation industry as a whole added regulations to standardize communications so that miscommunication of this type would be much less likely from then on.

March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. 

In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

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Almanac for March 26th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 26th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-26-Stone-Feast-W7W11CMF64

Bummer March 26th

March 26, 1664: Samuel Pepys celebrates his Stone Feast, commemorating the day he had a kidney stone removed by the horrific, pre-anesthesia 17th century surgical method. He writes in his famous diary:

“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone, it being now, blessed be God! this day six years since the time; and I bless God I do in all respects find myself free from that disease or any signs of it, more than that upon the least cold I continue to have pain in making water, by gathering of wind and growing costive, till which be removed I am at no ease, but without that I am very well.”

March 26, 1923: French actor Sarah Bernhardt dies of uremia, from which she has been suffering since 1916.

March 26, 1931: Five children and their bus driver die near Towner, Colorado when their bus is caught in a sudden spring blizzard. The unheated bus had two missing windows that were only covered by cardboard, so the bus offered no real protection from the elements. The driver left the bus to try to get help and apparently became lost in the snow and died, apparently of exposure. Three children died on the bus and an additional two children died that night.

March 26, 1995: Rapper Eric “Eazy-E” Wright dies of complications of HIV/AIDS at the age of 30.

March 26, 2018: California residents Jennifer Hart and her wife Sarah Hart drug their six adopted children (ages ranging from 12 to 19) with antihistamine, load them into a minivan with the mothers, and drive the van off a cliff in Mendocino County, California. All eight members of the family are presumed to have been killed when the van landed on its roof on a beach below the cliff, although as of 2022, only seven of the bodies had been found.

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Almanac for March 25th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 25th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-25-Click-Clack-Moo-D1D21CMEKW

Artist Birthday: Melanie Blatt of All Saints
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Aretha Franklin

Bummer March 25th

March 25, 1911: A fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, New York City, kills 146 factory workers, most of them young women from Italian and Jewish immigrant families.

March 25, 1990: In the early hours of the morning, young people gather at the Happy Land social club, an unlicensed club, in The Bronx, New York City. They’re celebrating Carnival. Many of them are from Honduran immigrant families, and often of the Garifuna community (people of indigenous Caribbean and African descent). The club has no fire exits, sprinkler system, or alarms. 

Coat check worker Lydia Feliciano, working at the club that morning, is visited by her boyfriend, Julio González. They argue and Feliciano tells González she doesn’t want to see him anymore. González is thrown out of the club. He returns and sets fire to the club with gasoline, which he disperses at the bottom of the stairs below the club’s only exit. The fire kills 87 people. 

Lydia Feliciano survives the fire, one of only six survivors. Julio González is arrested, confesses to the arson, and is sentenced to life in prison. He dies in prison in 2016. 

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Almanac for March 24th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 24th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-24-Houdini-P5P21CM9DN

Artist Birthday: Steve McQueen

French Republican Calendar Day Name (4 Germinal): Tulip

From the March 21, 1926 Washington, D.C. Evening Star

Bummer March 24th

March 24, 1918: Scottish-American stage magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who pretended to be Chinese and performed under the stage name Chung Ling Soo, dies of a bullet wound to his lung, the result of a failed bullet catch trick he’d performed the night before. Ellsworth pretended not to speak English as part of his act, but when the bullet struck him, the audience heard him say, "Oh my God. Something's happened. Lower the curtain."

March 24, 1999: A transport truck carrying margarine and flour enters the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Italy. The truck driver notices white smoke coming from the cabin of his truck and exits the vehicle to extinguish the fire. The fire explodes out of control, and he exits the tunnel. Two minutes later, authorities are called to fight the fire.

Drivers who had entered on the French side of the tunnel weren’t able to turn around their vehicles to exit the tunnel and were forced to wait in their vehicles for rescue. By the time firefighting vehicles arrived, the wiring for the lighting inside the tunnel had melted, so the tunnel was not only completely dark but also filling with toxic smoke. The margarine inside the truck acted as fuel for the fire. Nine people died while attempting to escape on foot; 29 people died inside their vehicles. 

March 24, 2015: Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashes Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps, killing himself, five other crew members, and all 144 passengers aboard the flight. Lubitz had locked the other pilot out of the cockpit when the other pilot got up to use the restroom. 

March 24, 2019: The Dar-ul-Arqam mosque in Escondido, California, is set on fire in an Islamophobic arson attack. Although seven people are inside the mosque when it’s set on fire, no one is injured.

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Almanac for March 23rd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 23rd: https://ko-fi.com/Post/March-23-Where-the-Wild-Things-Are-J3J01CDGAR

Bummer March 23rd

March 23, 1964: Character actor Peter Lorre, age 59, dies of a stroke after years of struggling with chronic pain and morphine addiction.

March 23, 1969: Assia Wevill, an advertising copywriter and poetry translator who escaped the Nazis as a young woman, drinks a glass of water laced with sleeping pills, drinks a glass of whisky, and turns on the gas in her apartment. She lies down on a mattress with her 4-year-old daughter Alexandria (nicknamed Shura) and they both die of asphyxiation. Shura’s father was English poet Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Wevill (married to a Canadian poet) allegedly began their affair before Plath’s suicide.

March 23, 1993: Cleveland Indians pitcher Tim Crews, intoxicated, drives his boat at a high rate of speed into a dock on his property in Little Lake Nellie in Clermont, Florida. Crews kills himself and teammate Steve Olin and seriously injures teammate Bob Ojeda.

March 23, 2021: Worldwide shipping is disrupted when the container ship Ever Given runs aground in the Suez Canal, blocking passage for six days. 

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Almanac for March 22nd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 22nd: https://ko-fi.com/Post/March-22-Send-In-the-Clowns-R5R01CDD2N

March 16, 1926 Washington D.C. Evening Star

Bummer March 22nd

March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.

Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.

March 22, 1978: German high wire artist Karl Wallenda, founder of the Flying Wallendas, dies from a fall while performing his act in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Wallenda falls while walking a tight rope suspended between two hotels.

March 22, 2002: I live in the United States of America, so my life has been affected by a mass shooting. This was the worst day my dad ever had at work as a South Bend police officer. A former employee of Bertrand Products Inc. at 2323 Foundation Drive showed up at the factory with a gun and shot six people, killing four of them. 

Dad was the first one to enter the building. At that time, he didn’t know whether the shooter was in the building or not, but it didn’t matter. He was determined to triage the wounded and save lives if he could. He did rescue breathing on one woman who was shot in the chest, but as he told Tit and I, he knew it wasn’t going to help because as he was breathing into her, he could see bloody bubbles coming out of her chest wound. At the same time, other first responders tried desperately to save another man who passed away after telling them his last words: “I’m retiring today.”

Subsequently, the perpetrator fled in his van, was pursued by police, and got into a shootout with both South Bend police officers and, after crossing the state line, Michigan state police. Two officers received minor wounds from a broken vehicle window and a third received a non-life-threatening gunshot wound. The perpetrator then shot himself. He doesn’t deserve the dignity of being named here. 

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Almanac for March 21st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 21st: https://ko-fi.com/Post/March-21-Dinosaur-Eggs-N4N21CDCZL

Bummer March 21st

March 21, 1947: A patrol officer is called to the Harlem, upper Manhattan, New York City home of Homer and Langley Collyer, brothers in their 60s who were well-known in their neighborhood for being extremely reclusive, rarely leaving the home, which had no electricity or other utility services. The officer has difficulty entering the residence, which is crammed with newspapers, cardboard, and other cast-off belongings and has iron bars on many of its windows. The officer is finally able to enter through a second-story window. Inside, he finds the dead body of the elder brother, Homer, in the entryway. 

The medical examiner determines that Homer has died of heart disease and starvation within the past ten hours. Authorities suspect that the phone call alerting them to Homer’s body was made by Langley and that Langley has since fled the home. The police search for Langley to inform him that his brother has died. In the meantime, they remove more than 100 tons of hoarded belongings from the home, much of it retained from the medical practice of the brothers’ father Herman, a gynecologist who passed away in 1923.

On April 8, 1947, while the trash removal process is still ongoing, police discover Langley’s decomposing body. He had apparently been crushed by falling trash as he attempted to pass through a narrow passageway while bringing food to Homer. The medical examiner determined that Langley had died of asphyxiation around the 9th of March.

March 21, 1974: Stage and film actor Candy Darling dies of lymphoma. She’s 29 years old.

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March 21, 1991: Conor Clapton, the 4-year-old son of English guitarist Eric Clapton and Italian fashion model Lory Del Santo, dies after falling from the window of a 53rd story apartment in Manhattan.

March 21, 2015: 35-year-old Pedro Aguayo Ramírez, who wrestled under the name El Hijo del Perro Aguayo (since he was the son of wrestler Perro Aguayo) dies of injuries he sustained in the wrestling ring the previous day. Ramírez was drop-kicked by an opponent, causing a whiplash effect that broke three vertebrae in Ramírez’s cervical spine, resulting in cervical stroke and cardiac arrest. This was a freak accident that resulted from a common, typically safe wrestling move, and Ramírez’s family does not blame the opponent.

March 21, 2022: China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 crashes over Wuzhou, killing all nine crew members and 123 passengers. Since the plane was in good flying order and didn’t give any signs of being in distress, it is unknown why the flight deviated from its altitude plan, took a steep dive, and crashed into hilly terrain used by a Wuzhou mining company. 

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