Almanac for August 3rd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 3rd: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-3rd-Diane-Wakoski-U7U3106X14

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: LaBrea Tar Pits

Bummer August 3rd

August 3, 1924: Author Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack at age 66. 

August 3, 1959: More than 50 dock workers on strike are killed by police in the small African country of Guinea-Bissau. At the time, Guinea-Bissau is a colony of Portugal, and the dock workers’ strike threatens Portuguese political officials, who regard it as a sign of rebellion against Portuguese rule. Guinea-Bissau won’t win its independence from the European colonial power until 1973.

August 3, 1966: 40-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead of an apparently accidental morphine overdose.

August 3, 1983: Bruce Wayne Campbell, the glam rocker who performed under the stage name Jobriath, dies at the age of 36 of AIDS-related illness.

Almanac for August 2

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 2nd: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-2nd-Swimming-in-the-Afternoon-L3L1106W7N

Heavy-Duty Bookends Affiliate Link

Bummer August 2nd

August 2, 1923: The 29th U.S. president, Warren G. Harding, becomes the 3rd U.S. president to die in office from natural causes when he suffers a deadly heart attack in San Francisco. Following the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, he is the 6th U.S. president to die in office of all causes.

August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.

August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.

Almanac for August 1st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 1st: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-1st-Lughnasa-A0A4106VQF

Today's Observance: Lammas/Lughnasadh

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Lughnasadh

Bummer August 1st

August 1, 1966: Marine Corps veteran Charles Whitman, who has killed his mother and wife the night before, takes a sawed-off shotgun, a Magnum .357 revolver, and several rifles with him to the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. He took them, loaded onto a hand-truck, in the elevator and up a set of stairs to the observation deck of the university’s Main Building. He encounters receptionist Edna Townsley, whom he kills by striking her with the butt of a rifle. 

Over the course of 96 minutes, he shoots 44 people on the ground. The first person he shoots is Claire Wilson, who is pregnant. Wilson is injured and lives, but loses her pregnancy. Thirteen other people die of their bullet wounds. Houston police officers Ramiro "Ray" Martinez and Houston McCoy work together to kill Whitman, ending the murder spree. 

August 1, 1994: An electrical fault sparks a fire at Norwich Central Library in Norwich, England, that destroys an estimated 100,000 books and historical papers.

August 1, 2004: 394 people die when a fire breaks out inside the Ycuá Bolaño supermarket building in Asunción, Paraguay. An poorly installed barbeque chimney causes the blaze. The death toll is worsened when two of the owners decide to lock some of the exits to prevent customers from fleeing the fire with unpaid merchandise. These owners and a security guard are later convicted of negligent homicide for this heartless act.

August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette.

Almanac for July 31st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 31st: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-31st-Lammas-Eve-X8X5106UVZ

Today's Observance: Lammas Eve
Artist Birthday: Annie Parisse

Bummer July 31st 

July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe is locked in a pillory as a punishment after being found guilty of seditious libel. He has criticized church officials in a pamphlet.

July 31, 1964: Country musician “Gentleman” Jim Reeves takes his Beechcraft Debonair aircraft and his manager Dean Manuel on a flight from Arkansas to Nashville, Tennessee, so that they can negotiate a real estate deal. The aircraft encounters a severe thunderstorm. Reeves, who is flying the plane, is thought to experience spatial disorientation. The aircraft crash-lands nose-first into the ground in a wooded area near Nashville International Airport. The wreckage is discovered two days later with the bodies of Reeves and Manuel inside.

July 31, 1988: A passenger at the Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal in Malaysia collapses, killing 32 people and injuring 1,600 others. The passengers had arrived in Butterworth, Penang state, to celebrate the Kuan Yin Goddess Festival. The platform hadn’t been built to accommodate such a large number of people.

Title page of the original edition of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. Published in 1722 by E. Nutt. Public domain.

Almanac for July 30th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 30th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-30th-T6T3106UJ3

Bummer July 30th

July 30, 1866: A racist mob of white people in New Orleans kills 38 African-American politicians and their supporters and wounds an additional 46 people. The New Orleans police department joins the violence on the side of the racists. Almost all of those killed or injured were African-American.

July 30, 1918: American author Joyce Kilmer is killed in action, shot by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne in the First World War.

July 30, 1945: The heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis is torpedoed by the Japanese Navy after departing from the Philippines. Of the 1,195 sailors on board, about 300 go down with the ship when it sinks 12 minutes after the torpedo hits. Of the 890 who manage to abandon ship, only 316 survive. The others fall prey to shark attacks, salt water poisoning, dehydration, and exposure.

July 30, 1997: A landslide in Thredbo Alpine Village, New South Wales, Australia destroys two ski lodges and kills 18 people. The sole survivor of the landslide is Stuart Diver, who is freed from the wreckage on August 2nd. Diver had been trapped inside the collapsed building in which his wife, Sally, had drowned after becoming trapped in an area that had slowly filled with water.

Almanac for July 29th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 29th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-29th-D1D7104UUT

Bummer July 29th

July 29, 1903: Polish Jewish immigrant Abraham Surasky is murdered with a gun and ax by two men near Aiken, rural South Carolina, in what is suspected to be an anti-Semitic hate crime. One of the murderers, Lee Green, is tried and acquitted, although he is convicted years later for another murder.

July 29, 1974: Musician Cass Elliot dies of a heart attack. Years of heroin abuse and cycles of rapidly gaining and losing weight have weakened her body. Cruelly, urban legend will afterwards contend that she died by choking to death on a ham sandwich. 

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Almanac for July 28th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 28th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-28th-Beatrix-Potter-S6S2103SLQ

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: "Over the Rainbow"

Affiliate Link

This is one of my all-time favorite songs.

Bummer July 28th

July 28, 1841: Either the police or a pair of fisherman (accounts vary) discover the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. Rogers, who was 20 or 21 years old and worked as a cigar seller in New York City, was last seen by her family on the 25th. Although the case is officially unsolved, it’s suspected she was either murdered by her boyfriend Daniel Payne or perhaps died as a result of an illegal abortion. Payne killed himself by overdosing on alcohol and laudanum on October 7, 1841. The discover of Rogers’s body inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”

July 28, 1914: The Great War begins in earnest when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

July 28, 1945: In foggy weather, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell bomber crashes into the Empire State Building. All three crew members on the plane and 11 people inside the building are killed. 

In the impact, elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver is thrown from her elevator car and suffers severe burns. Rescue crews place her in another elevator car to send her down to the ground for medical treatment; that elevator car, with its cables damaged in the accident, plummets 75 floors to the basement. Remarkably, Oliver survives, with broken bones, and is once again rescued from the rubble of the elevator crash. This is considered the record for the longest survivable fall in an elevator.