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.
Happy 1-year book anniversary to The Deep Space Scrolls audiobook:
Bummer September 3rd
September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison.
September 3, 2009: Hulda Clark, a Canadian naturopath who claimed that all cancers are caused by infection with flatworms and sold people an electric device she claimed would “zap” the cancer out of them without the need for surgery or medicine, dies of cancer. The woman who peddled a “100% effective” quack cure to other cancer patients died of multiple myeloma.
September 2, 1666: The Great Fire of London begins. It kills 16 people and destroys 13,000 homes.
September 2, 1791: Virtuoso violinist Frantisek Kotzwara dies of apparent erotic asphyxiation after having intercourse with sex worker Susannah Hill in London. Hill, who was initially charged with Kotzwara’s murder but acquitted, testifies that Kotzwara asked her to cut off his testicles, and when she refused, settled instead for having intercourse with her while wearing a ligature tightened around his own neck with the other end fastened to the doorknob.
September 2, 1885: Chinese-American mine workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, are beaten and killed by white miners. The race riot kills 28 people and destroys dozens of buildings. Hundreds of Chinese-American workers flee the town out of fear for their lives.
September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.
September 2, 2004: A fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, destroys 12,500 irreplaceable books and damages an additional 62,000 materials, including Friedrich Schiller's death mask and 35 oil paintings of historical significance.
September 2, 2018: An air conditioner short circuits, causing a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The museum loses an estimated 92.5% of its collection.
September 1, 1859: English astronomer Richard Carrington, among other scientists, records an extraordinarily bright solar flair. Later to be identified as a coronal mass ejection (CME), the solar storm turns the night sky red. The aurora borealis can be seen as far South as Colombia. The surge of electricity washing over the Earth destroys some telegraphs in different parts of the world, sparking a few fires. Other telegraph operators find that their machines still have power even when unplugged from an electric outlet. This solar storm, the strongest in recorded history, is referred to as the Carrington Event.
That one's only a minor bummer - I don't think anyone was injured. The bigger bummer is how solar storms are events that could happen again and disrupt modern electrical systems much more than they disrupted 1859.
September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.
August 31, 1869: Mary Ward, a 42-year-old Irish scientist and author, becomes the first human being ever to be killed by a motor vehicle. She and her husband are riding in an experimental steam-powered motor vehicle invented by Ward’s cousins. On a bend in the road, Ward is thrown from the vehicle, run over by one of the wheels, and suffers a broken neck.
August 31, 1965: Herpetologist Frederick A. Shannon Jr., age 44, dies after being bitten by a rattlesnake he was trying to catch.
August 31, 1997: Princess Diana of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul are killed in a traffic accident inside a Paris underpass. The vehicle strikes a pillar head-on at 65 miles per hour. The sole survivor is Fayed’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, who suffers head and facial injuries. Paul’s blood-alcohol level is found to be three times the French legal limit.
Beatles Trivia August 29, 1966: The Beatles play their last public performance together at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
Bummer August 29th
August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina, having been upgraded from Tropical Storm Katrina the previous day, makes landfall in Southeast Louisiana, causing the mandatory evacuation of the city of New Orleans. An estimated 1,800 people die as a result of this storm.
August 28, 1943: A housekeeper enters Room 729 of the Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis and discovers the body of 28-year-old Cpl. Maoma L. Ridings of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). Partially dressed in her WAC uniform, Ridings appears to have been beaten with the half-empty whiskey bottle found in her room. The case is never solved.
August 28, 1976: Actor (Mary) Anissa Jones, who starred as the character Buffy on the sitcom Family Affair from 1966 to 1971, dies at age 18 from multiple drug intoxication. Jones is found unresponsive in bed at the home of a teenage friend with whom she’d attended a party the previous night. An autopsy finds the street drugs cocaine and PCP in her system, along with the prescription drugs Seconal and Quaalude, both sedatives.
August 28, 1988: More than 300 people are injured and 75 are killed when three aircraft collide at an air show in Ramstein, Germany.
August 28, 2003: 46-year-old pizza delivery driver Brian Wells dies in Erie, Pennsylvania, after robbing a PNC Bank branch. His cause of death is by an explosive collar around his neck rigged to explode. Four people are charged with conspiring to commit the crime; Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong receives a life sentence for being the mastermind behind the strange crime. Investigators suspect Wells may have been a willing participant in the robbery, possibly under the impression that the bomb wasn’t real, although Wells’s family disputes this accusation.
August 28, 2004: 23-year-old Francis Brohm has been drinking and watching NASCAR in a bar with his friend John Hutcherson. Hutcherson drives them home in his truck. On the ride home, Brohm feels nauseated and sticks his head out the window. His head strikes a telephone pole support wire, decapitating and killing him instantly. Hutcherson continues to drive 12 miles home and goes to bed with Brohm’s headless body in his truck.
Brohm’s death is reported to police the next morning when one of Hutcherson’s neighbors, out for a walk with his one-year-old daughter, sees it inside the truck. Police arrive at Hutcherson’s home to find him in bed, still intoxicated and apparently unaware of what’s happened the night before.
August 28, 2020: 43-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman passes away from colon cancer.
