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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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 March 19th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 19th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-19-Lithograph-E1E7JJJ9I

Artist Birthday: William Allingham

The March 19, 1926 Milwaukee Leader

Bummer March 19th

March 19, 1958: A fire at the Monarch Underwear Company in Manhattan, New York City, kills 24 people and injures 15. The garment factory did not have fire sprinklers or fireproof partitions, and workers did not practice fire drills.

March 19, 1965: Chicago Cubs radio play-by-play sportscaster Jack Quinlan, age 38, is killed in a car accident on his way home from a golf game.

March 19, 1982: In a stunning act of bad judgment, Ozzy Osbourne’s tour bus driver Andrew Aycock borrows a private plane without permission. He takes guitarist Randy Rhoads and makeup artist Rachel Youngblood aboard; Rhoads wants to take some aerial photos for his mother. 

Unwisely, Aycock attempts to “buzz” the tour bus with the small plane. The plane’s wing clips the top of the bus and snaps in two, causing Aycock to lose control of the plane. The heads of Rhoads and Youngblood are forced through the plane’s windshield. The plane crashes into a pine tree and then into the garage of a nearby home, killing all three people aboard.

March 19, 1990: 24-year-old Andrew Wood, an independent rock musician whose sound was formative to the Seattle grunge scene, is taken off life support and dies in the hospital. He’s been found unresponsive on March 16th after an apparently accidental heroin overdose.

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Almanac for March 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-18-Sense-and-Sensibility-and-Sea-Monsters-R6R8JJI8A

Bummer March 18th

March 18, 1937: The accidental ignition of natural gas used for heating causes the New London elementary school in New London, Texas, to explode. Approximately 300 teachers and students are killed. An equal number suffer non-fatal injuries.

March 18, 1996: Fire breaks out inside the Ozone Disco club in Quezon City, Philippines, which is filled to over-capacity with many young people celebrating the end of the school year. 95 people are injured and 162 people die. The emergency exit is blocked by the newly-built building next door to the club. 

March 18, 2009: Actor Natasha Richardson dies of injuries she has sustained in a fall while taking a beginner ski lesson in Quebec. She is 45 years old.

March 18, 2018: The first human being to be killed by a self-driving car, Elaine Herzberg, is struck by a self-driving car with a human safety monitor sitting in the passenger seat. Herzberg had been walking her bicycle across the street when the car struck her. The safety monitor was charged with negligent homicide since she was not looking at the road until seconds before the collision and did not have her hands near the steering wheel ready to take control. 

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Almanac for March 17th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 17th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/March-17-St-Patricks-Day-P5P51C8INM

Today's Observance: St. Patrick's Day

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Harps
Vintage St. Paddy's Day at Aurora's Gin Joint blog: https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/03/17/friday-foto-follies-vintage-st-paddys-day/

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Bummer March 17th

March 17, 1997: Musician Jermaine Stewart, who had a top 10 pop hit in the U.S. with “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” dies at the age of 39 from AIDS-related liver cancer.

March 17, 2010: Musician Alex Chilton dies of a heart attack. He has been feeling unwell for about two weeks, but decides not to seek medical attention since he doesn’t have health insurance. He’s 59 years old. 

March 17, 2018: 38-year-old aerialist Yann Arnaud falls to his death while performing in a Cirque de Soleil show. His approximately 20-foot fall is witnessed by the audience.

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