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.
June 9, 1865: Charles Dickens and his friend/perhaps lover Ellen Lawless Ternan are riding in a train on a voyage home from Paris. The train is near the village of Staplehurst, Kent, when it crosses a bridge. The engineer is unaware, until it's too late, that the bridge is closed for repairs and about 42 feet of track have been removed.
Dickens and Ternan, riding in the first-class car near the front of the train, are carried over the gap by the momentum of the engine. Their car lands on its side, but although they're shaken, they don’t have any serious injuries.
The center and rear cars of the train fall into the river below. Ten passengers are killed. Approximately 50 others are injured. Dickens helps render aid to the victims at the scene; some of them die in front of him. For the rest of his life he suffers flashbacks; in modern terms he could probably be said to suffer from PTSD.
June 9, 1930: Jack Lingle, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, is shot and killed by Leo Brothers, who worked as a bouncer at a club owned by Al Capone. Initially hailed as a martyr for freedom of the press, Lingle is later discovered to have connections to illegal gambling and liquor bootlegging.
June 8, 1913: Emily Wilding Davison dies of her injuries, including a skull fracture, four days after being knocked down by Anmer, a horse owned by King George V of England, during the 1913 Derby at Epsom Downs. Davison attended the Derby to protest in favor of voting rights for English women, carrying the purple, white, and green flag used at the time by the women’s suffrage movement. She climbed around a guard rail and onto the track as Anmer passed by, traveling approximately 35 miles per hour. As she reached for the animal’s reins, the horse knocked her down.
Since Davison hadn’t discussed her plans for the protest with anyone who knew her, her exact intentions are unclear. She may have been trying to attach the suffrage movement flag to Anmer’s bridle.
June 8, 1971: J.I. Rodale, an early advocate of sustainable and organic farming and founder of Rodale Press, appears as a guest on a pre-taped episode of The Dick Cavett Show. In his interview for the show, Rodale states that he’s never felt better and intends to live to be 100 years old. Unfortunately, he suffers a fatal heart attack at the age of 72 that evening, as he’s sitting in a chair on the Cavett Show set listening to another guest being interviewed. Rodale is pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital; the episode is never aired.
June 8, 1982: Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, who married rock ‘n roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis in 1971, is staying with a friend while in the process of divorcing Lewis. The two were scheduled to meet in divorce court on the 21st of June. Less than two weeks prior to the court date, Pate drowns in the friend’s swimming pool.
June 8, 1997: Chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahn is taken off life support and dies from acute mercury poisoning. On August 14, 1996, she had been working with the highly toxic chemical dimethylmercury when several drops of the substance fell onto her latex glove-covered hand. The chemical permeated her glove and was absorbed by her skin; she began having neurological symptoms of heavy metal poisoning within three months.
June 8, 2018: Chef Anthony Bourdain, age 61, dies of suicide by hanging.
June 7, 1937: 26-year-old actress Jean Harlow dies of kidney failure. Her illness may have been a complication from a case of scarlet fever she contracted as a teen.
June 7, 1984: On or around this date, the Indian Army burns the Sikh Reference Library building in Punjab, India, to the ground. The library held approximately 20,000 materials, including irreplaceable handwritten manuscripts. The status of these materials is unknown and considered classified by the Indian government; they may have been destroyed, sold off into private collections, or held in an undisclosed archive somewhere.
June 7, 1993: NBA player Dražen Petrović is killed in a road accident while riding on the German Autobahn highway system in Bavaria. Petrović is not wearing a safety belt and is ejected from the vehicle, which is driven by his girlfriend.
June 7, 2016: Recent college graduate Colin Scott, age 23, goes to see his sister Sable. The two visit Yellowstone National Park together. Near the Norris Geyser Basin, Sable and Colin veer off the boardwalk where visitors are encouraged to walk. Colin falls into a natural hot spring, where he dies by some combination of drowning and burns from the scalding-hot water. Colin’s body cannot be recovered, having largely been dissolved in the hot, acidic water.
June 6, 1867: Archduchess Mathilde Marie Adelgunde Alexandra of Austria, who is smoking a cigarette, attempts to hide the cigarette from her father, Archduke Albert, Duke of Teschen, by concealing it behind her back. She accidentally sets her delicate gauze dress on fire and very shortly afterward dies of her second- and third-degree burn injuries.
June 6, 1892: Yale University student Wilkins Rustin dies of peritonitis. He’d participated in a Delta Kappa Epsilon hazing in which he’d been led through the street toward Moriarty’s Café while blindfolded. Rustin walks directly into a carriage pole, rupturing his intestine.
June 6, 1968: U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (Sr.) is assassinated by gunshot in Los Angeles.
June 6, 1971: A mid-air collision between a U.S. military plane that had deviated from its flight plan and commercial Hughes Airwest flight 706 kills 50 people. Only 1st Lt. Christopher E. Schiess, the radar intercept officer aboard the F-4B fighter jet, survives the collision that occurs over Duarte, California. Schiess, 24 years old at the time, is able to eject himself from the jet and parachute to safety.
June 6, 2006: American artist Luis Alfonso Jiménez Jr. dies in his Hondo, New Mexico, studio while working on his 32-foot-tall sculpture titled Blue Mustang, which is now at the Denver International Airport. A large piece of the sculpture came loose from a hoist, fell on him, and severed an artery in his leg.
June 5, 1981: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issues its first report on a cluster of medical cases in what will soon become known as the AIDS epidemic. This report described an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in people who otherwise appeared to be healthy; this opportunistic infection had previously been seen only in people who were known to have compromised immune systems. The human immunodeficiency virus would be identified some time between 1984 and 1986.
June 4, 1923: Jockey Frank Hayes, age 22, has a sudden fatal heart attack in the middle of a horse race. His horse, Sweet Kiss, is the first to cross the finish line, still carrying Hayes’s body. Hayes’s heart attack may have been related to his crash dieting, since jockeys are required to weigh as little as possible.
June 4, 1978: A search party discovers the body of Ted Weiher, age 32, inside a remote camping shelter in Plumas National Forest in northern California. Weiher died of starvation and dehydration and has severe frostbite on both feet. He and his four close friends (all of whom had intellectual disabilities and/or mental health challenges) had last been seen by their families on February 24th of that year, when they attended a basketball game together. The bones of three of the others were discovered in the woods nearby, apparently dispersed by scavenging animals. They’re thought to have died of hypothermia. No trace of the fifth man has ever been found.
June 4, 2004: A 52-year-old man in Granby, Colorado, goes on a spree during which he uses a steel- and concrete-reinforced bulldozer to destroy several buildings, including Granby’s mayor’s house and the town hall. The man had modified the vehicle over the course of a year and a half, plotting his revenge against the town based on a grievance stemming from a bill he owed for illegally dumping sewage from his business rather than properly connecting the business to the town’s sewage system. In the process of destroying the local hardware store, the bulldozer falls into the building’s basement and the engine stops working. The man, armed with several firearms inside of and protruding from the armored bulldozer, then dies by suicide. No one else is harmed.
June 3, 1943: In the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, white servicemen stationed in Los Angeles go on a racist rampage, beating young men of Mexican, Black, and Filipino backgrounds. The military members are allegedly outraged that largely Latino members of the “pachuco” subculture wear the flashy style of suit that requires a large amount of fabric, which is supposed to be rationed during wartime. More than 150 people are severely beaten, and police arrest over 500 people. Young men of color, not their Caucasian attackers, make up the bulk of those arrested.
June 3, 1991: Mount Unzen on the island of Kyushu in Japan erupts. The eruption kills 43 people, include married vulcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft.
June 3, 1998: A high-speed train in Germany derails and crashes into a bridge, killing 101 people.
June 3, 2009: Actor David Carradine dies at the age of 72 of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation in Bangkok, Thailand, at what was then the Swissôtel Nai Lert Park Hotel (as of 2022, Mövenpick Bangkok Dusit Medical Services Wellness Resort).
June 2, 1919: Anarchists simultaneously set off mail bombs containing dynamite and sulfuric acid in eight U.S. cities. Night watchman William Boehner and anarchist publisher Carlo Valdinoci are killed.
June 2, 1937: Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral organist Louis Vierne plays a farewell concert for an audience of 3,000 people. The 66-year-old finishes his performance, then turns to his assistant and says, “I’m going to be sick.” Vierne suffers a fatal heart attack at his organ, holding down one final, continuous note.
June 2, 1941: Heinrich Ludwig “Lou” Gehrig dies of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at age 37.
Goudey Gum Company, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
June 2, 1990: Twelve people are killed in the Lower Ohio Valley tornado outbreak that affects Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
June 2, 2013: Grizelda Kristiņa dies at the age of 103. She was the last fluent native speaker of Livonian, a Uralic language closely related to Estonian.
Marilyn Monroe was born 100 years ago today, on June 1, 1926.
Bummer June 1st
June 1, 1600: Quaker preacher Mary Dyer is executed by hanging in Boston for the crime of repeatedly preaching Quaker doctrine in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where it’s illegal to be any religion other than Puritan. Offered a last-minute reprieve, Dyer refuses it, choosing to be martyred for her cause.
June 1, 1981: A mob of Sinhalese people in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, burns the Jaffna Public Library. The mob formed in protest of the killing of three Sinhalese police officers the night before, at a rally held by a Tamil pro-democracy political party. The burning of the library, which destroyed an estimated 97,000 books and manuscripts, came as part of clashes between the Sinhalese, who make up about three quarters of the population of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil minority.
June 1, 2001: According to an official Nepalese investigatory team, Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shoots and kills nine members of his own family. Among the victims were his father King Birendra, his mother Queen Aishwarya, and Dipendra’s younger brother and sister. And additional four relatives are wounded. Dipendra shoots himself following the massacre; while he is in a coma, he is declared king.
He dies on June 4th. Riots break out at his funeral, since many Nepalese people believe Dipendra’s body doesn’t deserve any of the ceremonial honors traditionally bestowed on a deceased king.
June 1, 2009: Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashes into the Atlantic Ocean after the flight crew fails to recover the aircraft from a stall. All 228 people on board are killed. Among the dead are composer Silvio Sergio Bonaccorsi Barbato and Classical harpist Fatma Ceren Necipoğlu.
May 31, 1889: The South Fork Dam of the Little Conemaugh River fails, flooding Johnstown, Pennsylvania. More than 2,200 people are killed.
May 31, 1921: The Tulsa Race Massacre begins the destruction of 35 blocks of the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacist terrorists. Officially, 29 Black residents of Tulsa and 13 white residents die as a result; historians believe the true death toll to be between 75 and 100 people.
The exact cause of the violence and destruction is unknown, although it may have started due to rumors that a 17-year-old white teenager working as a elevator operator was touched or harassed by a Black teenager. A precipitating incident appears to have been an attempt by a white man to disarm a Black man, leading to the weapon firing. A gunfight that killed 12 people ensued. After this, small groups of white people began randomly attacking Black people walking alone. Whites burned and looted Black businesses and homes.
As a result of this domestic terrorism, many Black survivors chose to leave Tulsa. The Red Cross counted 1,256 houses burned, 215 houses looted but not burned, and $1.5 million in damages in 1921 money, roughly equivalent to $34 million in 2021.
May 30, 1955: William John Vukovich Sr., who won the 1953 and 1954 Indianapolis 500s, dies in a car crash during the 1955 Indy 500. Vukovich’s car went over a wall, sailed through the air, flipped several times, and struck a low bridge. Vukovich is partially decapitated and dies instantly when his car struck the bridge. His grandson, William Vukovich III, will die during racing practice in 1990. Metal roll bars installed in vehicles and safety-certified driver helmets were mandated starting with the 1956 Indy 500.
May 30, 1958: Pat O’Connor is killed during the last lap of the Indy 500 amidst a 15-car pile-up. O’Connor’s car strikes Jimmy Reece’s car, sails through the air, lands upside-down, and catches fire. His death is due to head trauma from the car’s upside-down landing.
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May 29, 1985: A riot at the football (soccer) match in Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Belgium leads to the deaths of 39 people, some of them crushed when a wall is partially knocked down.
May 29, 1997: 30-year-old musician Jeff Buckley drowns in the Wolf River in Tennessee.
May 29, 2021: Registered dietician and pastor Gwen Shamblin Lara, who founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Franklin, Tennessee, to marry her religious and weight loss beliefs, dies in the crash of a Cessna 501 Citation I/SP into Tennessee’s Percy Priest Lake. All seven people on board are killed, including Shamblin’s husband Joe Lara and the pilot. Shamblin’s congregation later learned that although the preacher was a multi-millionaire, she left none of her fortune to the church.
May 28, 1977: A fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky kills 165 people and injures an additional 200 people out to dinner during the Memorial Day weekend. Fire code allowed for 1,500 patrons to be seated in the club at a time; on this night, more than 3,000 people were packed inside. The building had no fire walls, no sprinkler system, and numerous problems with the electrical wiring.
May 28, 2010: A Jnaneshwari Express train derails in West Bengal, India, killing 148 passengers. The cause of the derailment is thought to have been either a terrorist bombing or sabotage.
May 28, 2016: Harambe the gorilla is shot and killed at Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden after the animal grabbed a 3-year-old child through the bars of the gorilla enclosure.
Beatles Trivia May 27, 1967: Tit Elingtin is born in Pontiac, Michigan, one day after the Beatles had released their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (in the U.K.; its U.S. release date was June 2nd).
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Cilla Black
Singer Cilla Black in Amsterdam, Feb. 16, 1970. Public domain via Dutch National Archives
Bummer May 27th
May 27, 1792: Two large earthquakes cause the Mayuyama dome of Mount Unzen to collapse. A landslide hit the city of Shimabara. When the mass of debris reached Ariake Bay, it triggered a tsunami that swept across the bay and hit Higo Province before rebounding and striking Shimabara again. The earthquakes, landslide, and tsunami are thought to have killed 15,000 people.
May 27, 1907: As San Francisco is still recovering from the great earthquake of the previous year, health officials identify patients suffering from bubonic plague. The outbreak, which also includes patients in nearby Oakland, will eventually kill 78 people.
May 26, 1822: The church of Grue, Norway, catches fire during a Pentecost service. Constructed entirely out of wood, the church had three doors, one of which was quickly blocked by the fire. Between 113 and 116 people are killed.
May 26, 1903: Marcel Renault, one of the three Renault brothers who founded the car company, dies of injuries he sustained two days before racing in the Paris-Madrid race sponsored by French and Spanish automobile clubs. He’s one of five drivers killed during the race, along with three spectators.
May 26, 1914: St. John’s College (Annapolis, Maryland) student William Bowlus dies of a gunshot wound fired at him by a first-year student. Bowlus, a third-year student, attempted to enter a dorm room occupied by five first-years to engage them in a class hazing ritual. The first-years refuse to reveal which of them fired the shot, so local law enforcement declines to prosecute.
May 26, 1991: Lauda Air Flight 004, flying from Bangkok to Vienna, breaks apart mid-flight and crashes into a national park in Thailand. All 223 people on board are killed. The bodies of victims who could be recovered were taken to a hospital in Bangkok, where they were stored without refrigeration; as a result of decomposition, 27 victims were never able to be identified.
Lauda Air belonged to Austrian Formula One driver Andreas “Niki” Lauda, who himself had suffered severe burn injuries and almost died in a racing accident on August 1, 1976, at the German Grand Prix.
***
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If my words are not being censored by the Trump Regime, you may find my books here on Gumroad.
May 25, 1812: An explosion at Felling Colliery in England kills 92 men and boys.
May 25, 1895: Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and taken to Newgate Prison for processing. He is later transferred to Pentonville Prison, where he is sentenced to hard labor, is malnourished, and is only allowed to read either the Bible or The Pilgrim’s Progress.
May 25, 1979: American Airlines Flight 191, bound from Chicago to Los Angeles, loses an engine shortly after takeoff due to improper maintenance. It crashes less than a mile from the end of the runway. All 271 people on board are killed, as are two people on the ground.
My mother’s first cousin, James Zielinski, was one of the passengers killed in this accident.
May 25, 1985: Tropical Storm One, formed over the Bay of Bengal on May 22nd, reaches Bangladesh. The storm surge, torrential rains, and floods kill more than 11,000 people.
May 24, 1964: During a football (soccer) match between the Peruvian and Argentinian national teams in the Estadio Nacional in Lima, a Uruguayan referee makes a controversial call against Peru. Fans throw trash onto the field. One man who attempts to invade the pitch is brutally beaten by the Peruvian National Police. A riot and a crowd crush ensue, since the exit doors have been sealed with corrugated steel shutters. The 328 people who die mostly die of crush asphyxia or of internal injuries.
May 23, 1926: Playwright Henrik Ibsen dies after his third stroke.
May 23, 1934: Murderous bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are driving a 1934 Ford Deluxe V-8, with Barrow at the wheel, when they notice Henry Methvin, a member of their “gang,” parked at the side of the road. Unknown to them, Methvin is working with law enforcement, who are hiding in the nearby bushes. As Barrow slows down the Ford to talk to Methvin, police open fire, firing 160 rounds into the Ford. Barrow, struck in the head, dies almost instantly. Parker is also killed at the scene; witnesses describe hearing her scream as bullets strike her.
May 23, 1990: While Scottish psychedelic/electronic band The Shamen is in the Canary Islands filming a music video for its song “Move Any Mountain,” band member Will Sinnott, who performed under the name Will Sinn, drowns off the coast of La Gomera island. Unconfirmed reports implicate psychedelic drugs in his drowning accident.
May 23, 1999: Canadian wrestler Owen Hart dies during a match in Kansas City, Missouri. As Hart is being lowered into the ring, his harness fails. Hart falls 78 feet onto the top rope, severing his aorta. Hart’s lungs fill with blood; he dies from blunt force trauma and internal bleeding at the hospital.
A Bessie Love film based on an ACD novel. Nov. 11, 1925
Bummer May 22nd
May 22, 1960: An earthquake centered near Lumaco, Chile, is one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded and causes a tsunami that devastates Hilo, Hawaii. An unknown number of people are killed by the earthquake and tsunami; estimates range between 1,000 and 6,000 people lost their lives.
May 22, 1981: Film director Boris Sagal, best known for directing the Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, dies after walking into the rotors of a helicopter on the set of the miniseries World War III. Partially decapitated, he is rushed to the hospital, where he dies a few hours later. Sagal is the father of five children, including actress Katey Sagal.
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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.
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