Almanac for November 12th

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Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 12th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-12-Toms-Diner-D1D115VVGE

Artist Birthday: Richelle Mead

Bummer November 12

November 12, 1956: Israeli troops massacre approximately 100 Palestinian civilian men in Rafah, Gaza Strip, supposedly because they mistake the men for soldiers.

November 12, 1961: 40-year-old optometrist Arthur Duperrault is taking his family on a cruise from the Florida Keys to the Bahamas aboard the chartered yacht Bluebelle. The vessel, captained by 44-year-old Julian Harvey, set sail on the 8th. Julian’s wife Mary Dene Harvey came aboard as the ship’s cook.

Apparently intent upon collecting an insurance policy by claiming his wife had been lost at sea, Julian Harvey kills Arthur Duperrault, Arthur’s wife Jean, their 14-year-old son Brian Duperrault, their 7-year-old daughter Rene Duperrault, and Mary Dene. Besides Julian, the other survivor is 11-year-old Terry Jo Duperrault, who witnesses the crime in progress and jumps off the yacht with a cork flotation device, then swims away. Julian is found in the dinghy on November 13 by the crew of the oil tanker Gulf Lion, with Rene’s body aboard. Rene is found to have died by drowning. He claims a sudden squall scuttled the Bluebelle, that he was unable to save anyone, and that he found Rene floating in the water and attempted to revive her.

Terry Jo is rescued by the merchant freighter Captain Theo on November 16. Rushed to a Miami hospital in critical condition, Terry Jo gradually recovers from dehydration, sunburn, and exposure to the elements, then tells authorities what Julian Harvey has done. Once Harvey learns that Terry Jo survived and contradicts his story of a terrible accident, Harvey dies by suicide in a motel bathroom.

November 12, 1974: Monmouth College (New Jersey) student William Flowers dies of suffocation during a Zeta Beta Tau fraternity hazing ritual. The Zeta Beta Taus make him lie in a hole they’ve dug in the sand; the walls of the hole collapse on Flowers.

November 12, 1981: Popular 1950s actor William Holden dies after slipping on a rug in his bedroom, striking his forehead on the bedside table, and bleeding to death while apparently too intoxicated to help himself in Santa Monica, California. 

Suzanne Vega reads the account of Holden’s death in the newspaper while sitting in a diner and memorializes this diner trip in her song “Tom’s Diner.” She was a frequent patron at Tom’s Restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and 112th St. in New York, while she attended Barnard College. 

Vega performs the song “Tom’s Diner” a capella on her 1987 album Solitude Standing. In 1990, English music producers Nick Batt and Neal Slateford, working under the artist name DNA, add an instrumental background to Vega’s track. The collaborative version was certified gold in the U.S. and was a #1 hit in four European countries. 

The lyrics include:

“I open

Up the paper

There's a story

Of an actor

Who had died

While he was drinking

It was no one

I had heard of

And I'm turning

To the horoscope

And looking

For the funnies”

The day Vega describes must have been Nov. 18, 1981, when the New York Post carried the story about the discovery of Holden’s body. We know Vega read the story in the Post because it was the only one of New York’s then-daily newspapers that had “funnies,” or comic strips.

November 12, 2018: Ohio University student Collin Wiant dies of asphyxia after inhaling whipped cream chargers filled with nitrous oxide as part of a Sigma Pi fraternity hazing ritual.

Almanac for November 11th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 11th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-11-Vonnegut-M4M315V75I

Today's Observance: Veterans Day/Armistice Day

Artist Birthday: Peaches (Merrill Nisker)

Peaches at Dorothy Surrenders

Bummer November 11th

November 11, 1994: Pedro Pablo Zamora, an AIDS educator who appeared on the MTV program The Real World: San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 22.

November 11, 1995: Kenule (Ken) Beeson Saro-Wiwa, who belonged to the Ogoni people of Nigeria, became a well-known playwright and environmental activist in response to the degraded environment of his native Ogoniland region caused by irresponsible petroleum waste disposal. He was assassinated by hanging under the false charge that he’d been involved in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. Eight other activists were similarly falsely accused and executed by Nigeria’s military dictatorship.

November 11, 2000: One hundred sixty skiers ride the ascending train of the funicular railway to Kitzsteinhorn Glaciers near Kaprun, Austria. The last car of the train, with no passengers in it, overheats when a heating unit malfunctions. Fire breaks out, melting the pipes carrying hydraulic fluid to the braking system. The loss of pressure to the system made the doors inoperable, and the electrical system also went out. Twelve passengers toward the rear broke out the acrylic window of their train car and escaped downward toward the bottom of the train tunnel.

The conductor manages to open a door manually, and the remaining passengers who are still conscious and have not passed out due to smoke inhalation flee the funicular by walking upwards toward the top of the tunnel. The conductor and all of those passengers who walk upwards pass away due to smoke inhalation. In all, there are 155 fatalities, including German Olympic skier Sandra Schmitt and her parents.

November 11, 2008: 30-year-old Paula Goodspeed, an aspiring singer, is found dead in her car outside the home of singer Paula Abdul in Sherman Oaks, California. She is suspected to have died by suicide using an overdose of prescription drugs. Abdul had been one of the judges on the episode of American Idol on which Goodspeed appeared as a contestant, singing a rendition of "Proud Mary" in the style of Ike & Tina Turner. 

Goodspeed, whose given first name at birth was Sandra, changed her name to Paula. She has been characterized in the media as stalking Paula Abdul, although members of Goodspeed's family have disputed this characterization. Officials who responded to the discovery of Goodspeed's body found a photo of Abdul hanging from Goodspeed's car's rearview mirror.

Almanac for November 10th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 10th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-10-Martinmas-Eve-X7X015V6EU

Bummer November 10th

November 10, 1898: In the Wilmington insurrection, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina drove the duly-elected government of the city from office, successfully staging a coup against them for the perceived offence of including African-Americans in the city’s governance. White supremacists engaged in an organized campaign of vilifying Blacks in newspapers and in speeches. 

They attempted to physically block Black North Carolinians from voting in the November 8th election. When their intimidation failed to result in the all-white government they desired, white people in Wilmington took to openly rioting, physically attacking African-Americans and burning Black-owned homes and businesses. An estimated 2,000 Black residents of Wilmington were displaced, and an unknown number of people were killed.

November 10, 1975: The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks to the bottom of Lake Michigan in an autumn snow squall, taking all 29 hands down with her. 

November 10, 2010: Hollywood publicist Veronica “Ronni” Chasen, age 64, is killed in a random robbery attempt while driving home from a screening of the film Burlesque. After she is shot, she crashes her car into a street light. Police find her at the wheel, bleeding and semi-conscious; she dies at the hospital a short time later. When the suspect is confronted by police, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.

Almanac for November 9

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 9th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-9-Hedy-Lemarr-V7V715V5Z3

 French Republican Calendar day name (19 Brumaire): Pomegranate

Bummer November 9th

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.

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Almanac for November 8th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-8-Bram-Stoker-A0A215RKZP

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.  

Almanac for November 7

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 7th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-7-Cicero-C0C715Q98X

Bummer November 7th

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 White Lotus 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.

Previous Dream Diary installments here.

Almanac for November 6th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 6th: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-6-Me-and-Mr-Jones-Q5Q815MNAW

Artist Birthday: James Jones

Bummer November 6th

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.