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.
Beatles Trivia May 14, 1968: John Lennon and Paul McCartney appear on The Tonight Show to talk about the newly-formed Apple business venture. While Johnny Carson is on vacation, the show is co-hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and pro baseball catcher-turned-tv personality Joe Garagiola. (Neat guy, Joe Garagiola. He was an honorary member of the Akimel O’otham tribal community because he helped bring badly-needed resources to the deeply impoverished Gila River Indian Community.)
Bummer May 14
May 14, 1988: In what becomes known as the Carrollton Bus Collision, a bus full of teenagers coming home from a church trip to King’s Island amusement park is struck by a drunk driver and catches fire. The intoxicated driver, Larry Mahoney, is killed along with the bus driver and 25 passengers.
May 14, 2015: Guitarist B.B. King dies peacefully in his sleep of vascular problems related to his Type 2 diabetes. He is 89 years old.
May 14, 2018: Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633, flying between Chongqing and Lhasa, experiences explosive decompression when a damaged windowpane separates from the aircraft. First Officer Xu Ruichen is partially sucked out of the aircraft. He suffers a sprained wrist, an eye injury, and cuts. A flight attendant also suffers minor injuries. Remarkably, the flight is able to make an emergency landing without fatalities. Captain Liu Chuanjian is widely considered a hero.
May 13, 1985: The Philadelphia Police Department destroys 61 homes via two explosive devices dropped from a police helicopter in an attempt to end a standoff with the MOVE compound. The members of MOVE were followers of a man who called himself John Africa and emphasized so-called natural living, resistance to police brutality, and animal rights.
The MOVE house was considered a nuisance to its neighbors. The Philadelphia PD obtained warrants for four MOVE members for various violations. Police evacuated the neighborhood around the MOVE house, then showed up in force to enforce the arrest warrants and evacuate the other residents of the house. A firefight ensued.
Of the seven adults and six children in the house, only one adult woman and one 13-year-old boy survived. The fire department allowed the unoccupied houses around the MOVE house to burn after the bombing.
May 13, 1988: American jazz musician Chet Baker dies of an apparently accidental fall from a window in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
May 12, 1976: Original Yardbirds lead singer Keith Relf dies at his London home at the age of 33. Relf is apparently playing an electric guitar in his basement when the shock occurs. Although taken to West Middlesex Hospital, the father of two boys is pronounced dead. His chronic asthma and emphysema, along with medications he took for these conditions, may have been a contributing factor that weakened his ability to withstand the shock.
May 12, 1982: Norwegian-Spanish priest Juan María Fernández y Krohn attacks Pope John Paul II with a bayonet, apparently believing the Pope was in league with Soviet communists. The attack occurs in Fátima, Portugal, the site of an alleged apparition of Mary the mother of Jesus, where the Pope has gone on a pilgrimage.
The Pope is slightly wounded, but recovers. Fernández y Krohn is sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder and contempt of court, but released after three years.
May 12, 2010: Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 leaves Johannesburg, South Africa, bound for Libya. A series of errors by the flight crew causes the aircraft to crash into low terrain, killing 103 of the aircraft’s 104 occupants. Among the dead is novelist Bree O’Mara, an Irish and South African dual citizen.
The sole survivor was a 9-year-old boy from the Netherlands. Both of his legs were broken, but he sustained no life-threatening injuries. His parents were killed in the crash, so he was subsequently adopted by his aunt and uncle.
May 11, 1910: Lewis Emerson Rader, Sr., a politician who served in the Washington state legislature until 1899, dies of starvation while attempting a “fasting cure” under the supervision of quack medical practitioner Linda Laura Hazzard. Hazzard, who practiced medicine while falsely claiming to be a doctor, will also die from her own quack practices in 1938.
May 11, 1984: A fire breaks out in the Haunted Castle attraction inside Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in New Jersey. The fire is put out within 90 minutes and at first all staff and guests are thought to be accounted for. Later, the badly burned bodies of eight teenage guests are found inside the attraction. The teenagers died after becoming trapped inside the castle.
May 11, 1981: Bob Marley dies of acral lentiginous melanoma, a form of skin cancer not related to exposure to UV rays, which has spread to his lungs and brain. Marley is only 36 years old. His last words are reportedly, “Money can’t buy life.”
May 11, 1985: The Bradford City football (soccer) stadium in West Yorkshire, England catches fire when a fan drops a lit cigarette into the litter under the bleachers. High winds, wooden bleachers, and flammable roofing material quickly spread the fire, and locked exits prevented some fans from escaping quickly. More than 200 people are injured and 56 spectators die.
May 10, 1692: Sarah Osborne of the Massachusetts Bay Colony dies in prison where she’s been awaiting trial, having been accused of witchcraft.
May 10, 1933: Led by Joseph Goebbels, a crowd of 40,000 Germans gathers at the State Opera building in Berlin to watch the German Student Union burn approximately 25,000 books that they’ve decided are “un-German.”
May 10, 1943: Fire destroys the grounds of the National Library of Peru in Lima, taking it with numerous irreplaceable historical artifacts.
May 10, 1992: Singer and actress Sylvia Blagman Syms suffers a heart attack and dies during the standing ovation while performing in the Oak Room cabaret of the Algonquin Hotel.
Beatles Trivia May 9, 1964: Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly” becomes the #1 song on the U.S. popular music charts, ending the Beatles’ 14-week streak of having the #1 single. Three Beatles songs (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “She Loves You”) contributed to the streak.
Bummer May 9th
May 9, 1914: Cereal manufacturer Charles William (C.W.) Post, recovering from emergency surgery for what was believed to be appendicitis, dies by self-inflicted gunshot wound when he can longer stand his severe abdominal pain.
His death leaves the Post cereal fortune to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who uses some of it to build her mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.
May 9, 1977: American novelist James Jones dies at age 55 from congestive heart failure.
May 9, 1987: All 183 people on board die when LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 crashes into a wooded area outside Warsaw, Poland. Faulty roller bearings inside one of its engines caused an explosion that, in turn, caused the aircraft to lose flight control and electricity. Unable to dump fuel, the aircraft hit the ground at 295 miles per hour and exploded.
On the flight recorder, the crew can be heard saying, “Do widzenia! Cześć, giniemy!" (“Goodbye! Bye, we’re dying!”)
May 9, 2001: 126 people die at Ohene Djan Stadium in Accra, Ghana, when police fire a tear gas canister into the stands and a stampede results. During a football (soccer) game between Accra Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko, Ghana’s two most popular teams, Kotoko supporters threw bottles onto the field. When police fired the tear gas, some of the stadium’s gates were locked and fleeing fans found themselves unable to escape. Ten people died from trauma and the other 116 from crush asphyxia.
May 8, 1794: French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who works as a tax collector, is tried and convicted of treason during the French Revolution. He is executed by guillotine the same day.
May 8, 1902: In the deadliest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, Mount Pelée erupts and destroys the town of Saint-Pierre, killing between 29,000 and 30,000 people and leaving only a handful of survivors.
May 8, 1974: 36-year-old blues-rock musician Graham Bond dies, crushed under the wheels of a Tube train at Finsbury Park Station in London. Most authorities agree that the manner of his death was suicide. Bond had financial and creative problems prior to his death and was known to experience severe depression.
May 8, 2012: Children’s book illustrator and author Maurice Sendak dies in the hospital of complications from a stroke.
May 7, 1896: Serial killer H.H. Holmes (real name: Herman Webster Mudgett) is executed by hanging at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia after his conviction for 27 murders and attempted murder of six other people. His neck does not break when his body is dropped, and it takes over 15 minutes for Holmes to strangle to death.
May 7, 1918: The RMS Lusitania is sunk by a German U-boat, killing 1,198 people.
May 7, 1999: As part of a NATO action intended to curb Serbian aggression in Kosovo, a NATO aircraft accidentally bombs the Chinese embassy to Serbia, killing three Chinese citizens and injuring 20 others.
May 6, 1937: The airship Hindenburg catches fire and crashes while attempting to dock at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey. One person on the ground, 13 passengers, and 22 crew members are killed. Many of the survivors suffer severe burns.
The event was captured by several news reel cameras and covered for the radio station WLS (Chicago) by reporter Herbert Morrison. Morrison’s commentary has become as widely remembered as the disaster itself. An urban legend states that Morrison was fired for having a too-human (read: unprofessional) reaction to the tragedy, but this is untrue, although he did leave WLS to take a job at another station about a year after the accident.
May 6, 1965: James Krebs, the former center for the Los Angeles Lakers who retired from the NBA in 1964, dies at the age of 29. While helping a neighbor remove a tree that a storm had knocked over onto the neighbor’s roof, Krebs is fatally struck in the head by one of the tree’s limbs.
May 5, 1927: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published.
Bummer May 5th
May 5, 1821: Exiled former emperor Napoleon Bonaparte dies at age 51 of an unknown ailment on the British island of Saint Helena. His cause of death has been speculated to be anything from stomach cancer to accidental cyanide poisoning to deliberate arsenic poisoning.
May 5, 1945: Six people are killed by a Japanese incendiary device near Bly, Oregon.
May 5, 1968: Character actor Albert Dekker is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation by his fiancee inside the bathtub of their Hollywood home. Police found no evidence of either foul play or suicide. Dekker appears to have practiced self-bondage, including placing a ball gag in his own mouth, and died as a result of accidental self-strangulation from a noose wrapped around the shower curtain rod.
May 5, 1994: American Michael Fay, age 18, receives four lashes with a bamboo cane after being convicted of vandalism in Singapore. Fay attended the Singapore American School and lived with his American mother and Singaporean stepfather. This is believed to be the first time an American was sentenced to corporal punishment in another country.
May 4, 1897: On the second day of a charity bazaar set up by Catholic charitable organizations in Paris, aristocratic women shop in a wooden warehouse set up to look like a Medieval market. Decorations of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache, and wood help achieve this effect. As an extra attraction, an early movie projector called a cinematograph is set up with ether lamps as a light source.
The projection equipment catches fire. With flammable materials all around and little to no signage marking the exits, the largely female crowd is trapped inside. 126 people die; 200 more are injured. Many of the dead were so badly burned that they could only be identified by their clothing, jewelry, or expensive dental work.
May 4, 1970: Members of the National Guard open fire at students at Kent State University who are peacefully protesting against the Vietnam War. They wound nine students and kill four other students.
May 3, 1950: Wittenberg College (Springfield, Ohio) student Dean Niswonger takes part in a Alpha Tau Omega fraternity hazing ritual in which he’s dropped off away from campus and has to find his way back. Niswonger falls asleep by the side of a road and is hit by a truck and killed.
May 3, 1963: Civil rights protestors in Birmingham, Alabama are brutally beaten by the police. Filmed images of the violence are distributed throughout the world, bringing international attention to the African-American civil rights movement.
May 3, 2007: 3-year-old Madeleine McCann from the U.K. is reported missing from the hotel room of her parents in Algarve, Portugal, where the McCanns are vacationing. As of 2026, the girl’s whereabouts are still unknown.
May 2, 1536: Anne Boleyn, Queen of England and second wife of Henry VIII, is arrested and charged with incest, witchcraft, adultery, and treason. She’s taken to the Tower of London. These charges are false: Henry’s real reasons for wanting to be rid of Anne include her failure to provide him with a male heir and his desire to court her lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour.
May 2, 1957: Censured U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy dies of hepatitis at the age of 48 after struggling with severe alcoholism and morphine addiction.
May 2, 1981: Antiques dealer Jim Williams shoots 21-year-old Danny Hansford at Williams’s historical home, Mercer House (formerly owned by composer Johnny Mercer) in Savannah, Georgia. The lovers had been in an argument; Williams argued the killing was self-defense. After four trials, Williams was acquitted. The homicide is the basis of John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
What was Diane Meyer grateful for on May 2nd, 2024?
classical music pasta and wine do your best! finishing a book seeing mom soon honesty over everything peanut butter life is because of, and meant for, learning experiences, becoming
May 1, 1866: Rioting breaks out in Memphis, Tennessee. The violence begins with a shoot-out between Black veterans of the Union Army and the all-white Memphis police. It escalates to mobs of white civilians, with the support and participation of the police, attacking Black neighborhoods. Over the next three days, 46 Black residents and two white residents of Memphis are killed and more than 91 buildings are burned, including all of the city’s Black churches and schools.
May 1, 1947: 23-year-old Evelyn McHale jumps to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. She lands on her back on top of the roof of a car, her shoes having fallen off her feet, one gloved hand grasping her pearl necklace. Photography student Robert C. Wiles takes a picture of her body where it lies. The photo is published in Time magazine, later reproduced as a print by Andy Warhol, and then recreated by David Bowie in his “Jump They Say” video.
May 1, 2003: A coach bus filled with trade union delegates travels toward QwaQwa, Free State, South Africa, for May Day celebrations. As the driver becomes disoriented in the dark shortly after passing the town of Bethlehem, he apparently turns down an unlit gravel road, unknowingly headed directly toward Sol Plaatje Dam and driving too fast. The bus drives directly into the water and overturns. By the time police arrive the next day, 51 people have drowned. Only 10 people are able to escape the overturned bus and get to safety.
May 1, 2017: One day after his 70th birthday, jam band pioneer Bruce Hampton gets on stage for a tribute concert called Hampton 70: A Celebration of Col. Bruce Hampton. Members of R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and other well-known bands participate. During the encore, Hampton collapses on stage, as he often does during his shows. The tribute band onstage continues to play for several minutes before anyone realizes anything is wrong. Hampton is then taken to a nearby hospital, where he dies of a massive heart attack.
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