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.
May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.
May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.
May 21, 1976: Yuba City (California) High School sends its choir students to a nearby high school for a Friendship Day event aboard a chartered bus. The bus’s air brakes fail. With no ability to brake, the bus strikes a rail, leaves the highway, and falls 21.6 feet. It lands on its roof. One adult faculty advisor and 29 students are killed. All 24 survivors, including the bus driver, are seriously injured.
May 20, 1943: Australian bacteriologist Dora Lush dies of scrub typhus. She’d accidentally pricked herself with an infected needle while trying to develop a vaccine for this disease. Lush is 32 years old.
May 20, 1989: Saturday Night Live actress Gilda Radner dies of ovarian cancer. She’s 42 years old.
May 20, 2013: Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek dies of bile duct cancer.
English school, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bummer May 19th
May 19, 1536: Henry VIII of England’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, is beheaded.
May 19, 1935: Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” dies of his wounds six days after a motorcycle crash. He is 46 years old.
May 19, 1993: SAM Colombia Flight 501 crashes into a mountain upon approach to José María Córdova International Airport in Medellín, Colombia. All 132 people aboard are killed. The crew’s navigation abilities were impaired by thunderstorms and by a malfunctioning radio beacon.
May 19, 2016: EgyptAir Flight 804, flying from Paris to Cairo, crashes into the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 66 people on board. The suspected cause of the crash is a cockpit fire, perhaps caused by a crew member smoking a cigarette (an action which was not prohibited), worsened by an oxygen leak coming from a mask inside the cockpit, that rapidly spread out of control.
May 19, 2018: A 32-year-old bicyclist is killed by a mountain lion while cycling in North Bend, Oregon.
May 18, 1927: Local school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe rigs explosives inside the Bath Township, Michigan elementary school to explode. He murders his wife and sets his house and barn on fire. Kehoe also fills his automobile with nails and explosives, detonating it and killing himself and sending shrapnel flying. The local mail carrier loses a leg when the vehicle explodes and later dies from his injuries.
As a result of the school explosion and detonation of the vehicle, 38 children and a total of five adult victims are killed. The exact reason for Kehoe’s rampage is unknown, but he may have been upset about losing a local election and his wife’s increasingly poor health.
May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington State, erupts. An estimated 57 people die as a direct result of the volcano, and over one billion dollars’ worth of property is destroyed.
May 18, 1996: 29-year-old musician Kevin Gilbert is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation at his home in California.
May 18, 2017: Musician Chris Cornell, age 52, dies of suicide by hanging.
Now let's move onto something significantly more life-affirming: My all-time (2017-2026) most-played songs on Spotify, Part II.
"Love Is Blindness" by Jack White is the only cover of a U2 song that I actually like better than a U2 song.
"Gettin' It" features into the plot of the tv series Blindspotting, an amazing musical love story starring the uber-talented Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton (the musical) fame. Her character's beloved is played by Rafael Casal and he is also great in this. He's basically playing the most ride-or-die husband in modern musical history.
"Soul Kitchen" by the Doors is playing in the Umbrella Academy episode where Klaus meets Dave, the closest thing he has to a love of his life. It's beautiful and tragic and I was more than a little obsessed.
I should watch the Bruce Springsteen movie starring the gorgeous Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame. (The Bear also had Jon Bernthal, who is about to return to playing The Punisher on Disney+. Right after the latest season of Daredevil: Born Again showed us Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as a couple, with their daughter, future Captain America Danielle Cage. I hyperventilated. JonesCage was all I ever wanted out of Marvel's The Defenders. Well, that and for [spoilers] Electra to still be alive, but we can't have everything, can we?)
(P.S. Jon Bernthal is also starring on Broadway in the theatre version of the classic Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon. And while I have mixed feelings about Jews and Italians being used interchangeably in media - don't get me started again - that's pretty fuckin' awesome. I love that guy. I just love him, period.)
I'm done listening to Nicki Minaj now that she's joined Team Maga (a.k.a. the American fascists who want to reinstate white supremacy) and how we just all know instinctively that if she was in that juke joint in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, she would have let those vampires in and fixed them a Myx Moscato to boot.
"The Future" from Batman (1989) isn't actually my 121st most-listened song, it's in fact the first song I ever listened to on Spotify on March 31, 2017. I wonder what I was thinking that day. It's true that as a 12-year-old in 1989, I was hella excited about Batman, and I saw it in the theater twice, once regular movie theater and once drive-in. Maybe I was leaning into 1980s nostalgia, as I sometimes do, with or without Murry Head. Maybe I was fantasizing about Christian Bale's Batman, as I sometimes do, with or without Cillian Murphy.
May 17, 1946: William Jefferson Blythe Jr., the father of future 42nd U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton, is driving from Chicago toward his home in Hope, Arkansas when his Buick’s tire blows out. Blythe loses control of car, which crashes, throwing him into a ditch. Blythe survives being thrown from the vehicle but is unable to pull himself out of the water in the ditch before he drowns. The future president is born three months after his father’s death.
May 17, 1995: A 35-year-old man in San Diego steals a 56-ton M60A3 tank from the National Guard. The Army veteran, who’s dealing with substance abuse issues and their consequences, destroys an estimated $149,000 worth of property as the tank crushes vehicles and infrastructure including utility poles, fire hydrants, and traffic lights. No one else is hurt, but when the tank becomes disabled, San Diego police force the hatch open and shoot the tank thief, killing him.
"Hymn to Virgil" was a 2025 obsession. I feel like Lady Gaga's "Disease" came in between the "Joyride" days and the winter of "Hymn to Virgil." My tag for Hozier on Tumblr is "our lord and savior Andrew Hozier Byrne," and I'm only a little bit being ironic.
I need to read If Not For My Baby, the romance novel based on a Hozier rpf.
That Rihanna song? Reminiscent of JohnLock, to me. This is a meme I made in 2017.
"Here With Me" by Dido is from Love, Actually, a film which has both BBC Sherlock's Martin Freeman and Andrew Lincoln of Walking Dead and Wuthering Heights fame.
"Cruel Summer" was my #24 most-listened song of 2025, when I wrote, "24. Cruel Summer - Taylor Swift: My #4 song last year and probably the Taylor Swift song that brings me the purest joy. But I can only listen to it in the summer. I abandon it when autumn comes. I forgot that I started listened to it because of Good Omens.
"I have to admit, the revelation that Neil Gaiman is a garbage heap of a human being really dulled my enthusiasm for Ineffable Spouses. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, it's not your fault."
But now, in May 2026, Good Omens 3 is out and I will be watching it soon.
That '80s bop by Tiffany, of course, besides having been part of my 1980s childhood, was also on the Umbrella Academy soundtrack.
I've been listening to Nirvana since the '90s, but what rekindled my love for "Come As You Are" specifically was its appearance in the Captain Marvel movie.
"I Drove All Night?" Destial playlist. "Boom Clap?" I'll always associate that with the film version of The Fault In Our Stars. And then there's this, with Danila Kozlovsky from the Vampire Academy movie.
May 16, 1940: During World War II, the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, rebuilt after German troops burned it down in the First World War, is shelled by the Nazis. The rebuilt library catches fire again, and approximately one million books and other materials are lost.
May 16, 1953: Roma jazz guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt dies of a brain hemorrhage. He is 43 years old.
May 16, 1955: Writer/activist James Agee has a heart attack and dies in the back of a taxi cab in New York City. He’s 45 years old.
May 16, 1984: “Anti-comedian” Andy Kaufman dies of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is 35 years old.
May 16, 1990: Sammy Davis Jr. dies of complications of throat cancer.
May 16, 2005: Three-year-old Eliza Jane Scovill dies of AIDS-related pneumonia. Her HIV-positive mother Christine Maggiore questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, did not take anti-HIV medication during her pregnancy with Eliza Jane, and refused to have Eliza Jane treated for HIV. Maggiore was investigated by local child protective services, who declined to take action on the grounds that Maggiore had taken Eliza Jane to see several physicians. The Medical Board of California did place the medical license of one of these physicians on probation.
May 15, 1886: Poet Emily Dickinson dies of kidney disease at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She’s 55 years old. Dickinson has not left the home since 1865.
May 15, 1953: Chester “Chet” Miller dies in a car crash during practice for the 1953 Indianapolis 500. He is 50 years old.
May 15, 2016: Jane Little (born Jane Findley) plays with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, as the double bass player has done since 1945, when she made her debut at age 16. Little is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the musician with the longest tenure with a single orchestra. Little, who is being treated for multiple myeloma, collapses on stage as the orchestra plays “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” She dies later in the day.
