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.
November 9, 1872: The Great Boston Fire of 1872 destroys 776 buildings, many of them in the financial district. An estimated 30 people, including 12 firefighters, die in the blaze.
November 9, 2004: Journalist Iris Chang dies by suicide with a handgun. She has been suffering from severe depression, for which she was prescribed mood stabilizer medications.
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Bram Stoker
Bummer November 8th
November 8, 1965: 52-year-old journalist Dorothy Kilgallen dies at home of an apparently accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates.
November 8, 1996: Anna Grace Gimmestad, who is 16 months old, dies of kidney failure. She became sick with severe food poisoning after drinking Odwalla brand unpasteurized apple juice contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Before this incident, which sickened an additional 70 people in the U.S. and Canada, the company had purchased apples that had fallen off of the apple trees, where they likely became contaminated with fecal waste from farm animals. Odwalla executives pled guilty to 16 counts of distributing an adulterated food product; the company was fined $1.5 million dollars (more than $2.9 million in 2023 dollars, adjusted for inflation) and began flash-pasteurizing its products.
November 8, 2020: Beloved Canadian-American game show host Alex Trebek dies of pancreatic cancer.
November 7, 1837: Anti-slavery newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy is shot to death by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, which is near Illinois’ border with “slave state” Missouri.
November 7, 1908: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are killed in a shootout with police in Bolivia.
November 7, 1980: Actor Steve McQueen dies in his sleep following surgery in Juárez, Mexico. He’d been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, which metastasized and caused large tumors in his neck, chest, and abdomen.
Between February and October 1980, McQueen had attempted to treat his disease with alternative therapy directed by William Donald Kelley, who called his quack treatment regimen “non-specific metabolic therapy.” In McQueen’s case, the treatments didn’t distract him from seeking conventional medicine; his doctors had already told him his cancer was inoperable and terminal. The quack “alternative medicine” did, however, cost him thousands of dollars while having no effect whatsoever on his disease. Kelley also falsely claimed in the media that his treatment of McQueen was successful, and this false claim may have cost other cancer patients their lives if they chose not to seek conventional treatment. Kelley, who died in 2005, did not have a license to practice medicine.
Erin's Dream Diary
Last night we watched the penultimate episode of VisionQuest, the Marvel-Disney series that's the latest installment in the trilogy that includes WandaVision (which introduces the Maximoff twins, Billy and Tommy) and Agatha All Along (which follows up with Billy). We'd also just binged Amadeus (2025), a miniseries based on Peter Shaffer's play. VisionQuest and Amadeus both starred Paul Bettany, who played Vision and Antonio Salieri.
(Mozart was played by Will Sharpe, who was in WhiteLotus season 2 with F. Murray Abraham, who played Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's 1984 movie adaptation of Shaffer's play. When I watched Amadeus as a child, I thought F. Murray Abraham seemed ancient. He was in his mid-40s then. In the MCU, F. Murray Abraham is Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon.)
And then we stayed up too late watching a documentary on YouTube about teenagers who did unbelievably bad things. But I didn't have nightmares about wicked teens.
Instead, I dreamed I lived in a small Pennsylvania town where Taylor Swift was the mayor. She declared our annual Halloween parade was going to be by train this year. Everybody except the small children thought this was a very sad parade, since the decorated trains had to be spaced 20 minutes apart for safety.
Our town only had two restaurants, a breakfast cafe and a Mexican restaurant, both terrible. We tried to give the two restaurant owners helpful hints.
I lived with my brother, a car mechanic, who had recently broken his arm in a motorcycle accident. He had the hospital set the broken arm with his hand free in the middle of his chest, he said, so he could still flip people off. I'm actually the older sibling, but in this dream he was 19 and I was an 18-year-old high school senior. Nominally our single mother also lived there, but she was constantly at work.
Left unsupervised and bored by my small town, I used the lackluster Halloween parade as an excuse to flirt with an older guy. He worked at the local paint factory. That was the guy in my dream who looked like Paul Bettany.
But in real life, I don't like Paul Bettany because he's friends with Johnny Depp, who was badly abusive to his wife Amber Heard. Not only was he abusive, but Depp ran a publicity campaign to trash Heard's name in the media. I even fell for it until I learned better. Amber Heard, I'm sorry. You were right and your ex is a monster. And Paul Bettany, I suspect, is not a very nice guy either.
Yet in my dream, I was trying to convince him - the paint factory guy - that I was a grown adult with some dating experience and a suitable companion for the evening.
I do have to say that all of the actors in Amadeus (2025) looked very beautiful in late 18th century period costuming with era-appropriate hairstyles.
November 6, 1816: Gouverneur Morris, who signed the Declaration of Independence, dies at the age of 64. Morris had attempted to treat a urinary blockage using a whale bone. He caused himself internal injuries, which became infected, causing his death.
November 6, 1986: On approach to an airport in the Shetland Islands, a Boeing-Vertol Model 234LR Chinook helicopter loaded with workers returning from the Brent oilfield has its transmission fail, causing its two rotor blades to collide. The helicopter nose-dived into the sea and crashed. Of the three crew members and 44 passengers on board, only one crew member and one passenger survived.
November 5, 1605: Guy Fawkes attempts to blow up the English Parliament, an act known as the Gunpowder Plot. The plot is foiled, Guy Fawkes is convicted and hanged, and burning an effigy of Fawkes becomes an English tradition.
November 5, 1976: St. John’s College student Thomas Fitzgerald dies from a chest wound he sustains when members of the Pershing Rifles military honors society, intimidating him with a bayonet as part of an initiation ritual, accidentally pierce his chest.
November 5, 1983: Four British and two Norwegian divers are working on the semi-submersible oil drilling rig the Byford Dolphin in the North Sea. The party consisted of four divers and two dive tenders. All four divers were inside a diving chamber, connected by a short passage to a diving bell. The chamber and the diving bell were separated by a clamp, a safety precaution needed for the divers to safely move from one to the other.
For some reason, one of the dive tenders opens the clamp prematurely, causing an explosive decompression in the chamber. All of the air rushes forcefully out of the chamber at tremendous pressure. The tender who opened the clamp and all four divers are killed instantly. The body of one of the divers is forced through a 24-inch opening. The other dive tender is severely injured, but survives.
November 5, 2021: Ten people die in a crowd crush at musician Travis Scott’s Astroworld event in Houston, Texas. An additional 25 people are hospitalized for injuries.
November 5, 2025: Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney dies of pneumonia. Just kidding! That's not a bummer; he was a horrible human being.
November 4, 1918: One week before the Armistice that will end the war, the poet Wilfred Owens is killed in the First World War.
November 4, 1982: The family of Dominique Dunne takes 22-year-old Dominique off life support after medical tests reveal that she has no brain activity. The young actress has been in this state since she was attacked and strangled by her estranged boyfriend on October 30th. Her killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to only six years in prison. Dunne’s parents, Dominick and Lenny Dunne, became advocates for crime victims after the outrage of their daughter’s killer’s light sentence.
November 4, 2001: University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida) student Chad Meredith drowns after consuming alcohol and then being told to swim by members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity as part of a hazing ritual. Meredith’s family sues Kappa Sigma and is awarded $12,600,000.
November 4, 2004: Working at a hospital in Minnesota, 31-year-old Tracy Kraling enters a walk-in washer, a room where large equipment can be sterilized with jets of hot water. Kraling becomes trapped in the washer, which then scalds her with water at 180 degrees Fahrenheit. She dies in hospital of her burn injuries the following day. Her employer is later found liable for multiple OSHA violations.
November 4, 2012: A 2-year-old visits the Pittsburgh Zoo with his 34-year-old mother. The mother holds the boy up on a railing to view Lycaon pictus, the African wild dog or African painted dog. The child loses his balance and falls 11 feet into the animal enclosure, where he is attacked by the pack of wild dogs and killed.
African wild dog photographed by Mathias Appel. Public domain
November 3, 1793: Playwright and early feminist Olympe de Gouges is executed by guillotine by the French Revolution’s Revolutionary Tribunal. Although convicted of “seditious behavior” and attempting to reinstate the monarchy, of which de Gouges is not guilty, her real “crime” is criticizing the Revolution and wondering in writing if it had gone too far.
November 3, 1900: 12-year-old Porter Military Academy of Charleston, South Carolina, student Thomas Finley Brown dies of internal injuries after his classmates haze him by blindfolding him and dropping him 12 feet into a mostly-empty swimming pool.
November 3, 1973: Engine failure aboard National Airlines Flight 27 between Miami and San Francisco damages the other two engines, the right wing, and the fuselage, causing the plane to lose a window. A passenger sitting near the missing window was fatally sucked out of the plane through the window opening. Some sources report that only the man’s tobacco pipe and sunglasses were ever found; one source reports that the man’s arm was discovered two years after the incident. The flight makes an emergency landing in Albuquerque; 24 passengers are injured.
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