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. 

Almanac for November 5th

Re: The Unfortunate Incident of November 5, 2024 

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 5th: https://ko-fi.com/post/Remember-Remember-the-5th-of-November-F1F615MH2H

Today's Observance: Guy Fawkes Day

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

Bummer November 5th

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.

Almanac for November 4th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 4th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/November-4-Mischief-Night-W7W715MG8X

Author Julie S. Howlin's post of the day: Discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb

Bummer November 4th

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

Almanac for November 3rd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 3rd: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-3-Some-Past-Election-Days-Y8Y715GFWA

Photo taken by Erin O'Riordan on November 3, 2017

Today's Observance: Election Day (U.S.), St. Malachy's Day

Artist Birthday: William Cullen Bryant

Bummer November 3rd

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.

Almanac for November 2nd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 2nd: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-2-All-Souls-I2I315GF5S

Today's Observance: All Souls Day

Beatles Trivia: November 2, 1994, South Bend: In our continuing exploration of the Beatles in Media, I learned that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not about LSD at all, but rather about a drawing that Julian Lennon drew when he was quite small.

Fair use.

Bummer November 2nd

November 2, 1973: John Lennon releases his fourth solo album, Mind Games, and Ringo Starr releases (in the U.S.) his third solo album, Ringo. Ringo features songs written with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Studio musicians on Ringo include Marc Bolan and Billy Preston.

November 2, 1987: George Harrison releases his final album, Cloud Nine. 

https://amzn.to/4yXSKZv

Bummer November 2nd

November 2, 1920: On the day of the U.S. presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James Cox, white residents of Ocoee, Florida attacked African-Americans in their community in order to prevent them from voting. The Ocoee Massacre, as the violence came to be known, killed two white residents and 30 to 35 Black residents of the Orange County town. Ocoee’s police chief was openly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

November 2, 1944: Chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., whose environmentally-unfriendly accomplishments included putting lead in gasoline and inventing Freon, dies of strangulation in his home after becoming entangled in the rope-and-pulley system he had rigged up to help him cope with disability stemming from a bout of polio.

November 2, 1962: Actor Alan Ladd, age 48, is found lying in a pool of blood in his home with a bullet wound to the chest. He tells police who investigate that he’d shot himself accidentally after thinking he’d heard a burglar in the house. Ladd, whose mother had died by suicide when Ladd was 24, may have attempted suicide, missing shooting himself in the heart only by the accident of the bullet bouncing off his ribs.

Public domain in the United States

November 2, 2004: Vincent Van Gogh’s 47-year-old great-grand-nephew Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker, is shot and then has his throat slit while riding his bicycle on the east side of Amsterdam. His killer is a 26-year-old man, Mohammed Bouyeri, who has ties to Egyptian terrorist group Jama'at al-Muslimin, a radical Islamist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Van Gogh was a vocal critic of some Islamic practices, especially those associated with fundamentalist Islam.

Almanac for November 1st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for November 1st: https://ko-fi.com/post/November-1st-All-Saints-P5P115GE5Z

The St. Paul (MN) Echo, October 30, 1926

Today's Observance: All Saints Day
Artist Birthday: Laura La Plante

Sadly, I lost the Dangerous Innocence audiobook when my laptop crashed earlier this year.

The Watauga (NC) Democrat, April 8, 1926

Beatles Trivia: November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.

Public domain in the United States

Bummer November 1st

November 1, 1755: The city of Lisbon, Portugal, is devastated by an earthquake, subsequent fires, and a tsunami. Lisbon is Europe's 4th-largest city at the time. It’s estimated that between 12,000 and 50,000 people die as a result. Among the priceless artifacts destroyed in the disaster were navigator Vasco da Gama's records and original paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Titian.

Almanac for October 31st

October 31, 1926 Douglas (AZ) Dispatch

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 31st: https://ko-fi.com/post/Halloween-M4M2159Y79

Today's Observance: Halloween/Samhain (Witches' New Year)
"Halloween Horror on Old-Time Radio" on Once Upon a Screen blog

Poem for today: "WHO WE GONNA CALL" by Amanda Gorman

Bummer Halloween:

October 31, 1871: Emily and Mary Wilde, the older half-sisters of Oscar Wilde, attend a Halloween party at Drumacon House near Ulster, Ireland. During the last dance of the evening, Mary gets too close to a candlestick and catches her dress on fire. Emily, too, catches her dress on fire as she rushes to help her sister. Party host Andrew Reid leads the women outside in the hope that the snow would help them extinguish the flames, but both sisters die of their injuries, Mary (age 22) on November 9th and Emily (age 24) on November 21st.

October 31, 1926: Harry Houdini dies of peritonitis due to a ruptured appendix. Houdini had visited Canada’s McGill University on October 22, when a student asked to punch Houdini in the stomach (which Houdini was famously able to withstand, when properly prepared), but then did so before the magician was ready.

October 31, 1963: Spectators gather to watch a Holiday on Ice performance at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. A natural gas explosion starts in a storage area that food vendors use to store pre-popped popcorn. The explosion kills 81 people and injures an additional 400. 

October 31, 1974: Ronald Clark O’Bryan gives Pixy Stix candy straws laced with cyanide to his two children, two neighbor children, and a fifth child he knew from church. Only one of the children, O’Bryan’s 8-year-old son Timothy, ate the poisoned candy. After Timothy died, police confiscated the other contaminated Pixy Stix, which O’Bryan claimed he had gotten from a neighbor. O’Bryan was convicted of the murder, which he appears to have planned to collect insurance money, and was executed by the state of Texas in 1984.

October 31, 1990: Magician Joseph “Amazing Joe” Burrus, age 32, attempts a Halloween night stunt at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California. He’ll attempt to escape from a coffin made of plastic and glass and buried under mud and wet cement. The weight of the cement and mud crushes the coffin, burying Burrus alive. Although he is quickly dug out of the grave, he can’t be revived.

October 31, 1993: 23-year-old actor River Phoenix is pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, after collapsing from an overdose of cocaine and morphine.

October 31, 2002: A 21-year-old man named Chris Jenkins leaves a costume party at the Lone Tree Bar in Minneapolis. He's never seen again until his body is discovered near a dam in February 2003. Although police at first ruled his death an accidental drowning, it's now believed Jenkins was murdered by being thrown from a bridge.

October 31, 2006: 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras dies immediately upon impact when the Porsche belonging to her parents, which the teenager is driving without permission, strikes a toll booth at over 100 miles per hour. The accident is terrible enough, but Catsouras’ family suffered further when gruesome crash scene photos taken by the California Highway Patrol were leaked on the Internet.

October 31, 2016: Natalie Babbitt, the author of Tuck Everlasting, dies of lung cancer. 

On the same day in Bemidji, Minnesota, a 17-year-old student named Jeremy Jourdain goes missing and hasn't been seen since.

And here is a screenshot that my cat Jerry took by putting his little paws on my phone.

Almanac for October 30th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 30th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-30-Sense-and-Sensibility-D1D2159V23

The St. Paul (MN) Echo, October 30, 1926

Artist Birthday: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The Milwaukee Leader, January 13, 1926

Bummer October 30th

October 30, 2015: A fire inside the Colectiv night club in Bucharest, Romania kills 64 people, including four members of the band Goodbye to Gravity, whose pyrotechnics display had initiated the blaze. Guitarists Mihai Alexandru and Vlad Telea die at the scene; drummer Bogdan Enache and bassist Alex Pascu die in the hospital. Lead singer Andrei Gălu is badly burned but survives. Many of those who die in the hospital do so from infections, possibly because of inadequate disinfectant measures used in Romanian hospitals.

On the same day in the United States, 20-year-old Richard Pananian of Burbank, California, is driving southbound on the 5 Freeway in Los Angeles, near Griffith Park, in his Ford Fiesta at approximately 7 p.m. According to other drivers, he's driving erratically and using the shoulder of the road when the Fiesta strikes a pickup truck occupied by a 45-year-old driver and two passengers. No one in the pickup is seriously hurt, but Pananian's Fiesta loses control, veers up the embankment, and ejects Pananian from the driver's seat. It's unclear whether Pananian dies of traumatic injuries due to the vehicle collision or from the ejection, but his body lands on the metal ledge of the road sign reading "Colorado St. 3/4 Mile." 

In the morning rush hour traffic, it's difficult for Los Angeles rescue workers and accident investigators to reach Pananian's body. His body, covered in a white sheet, lies on that ledge above the freeway for more than two hours. Since it's the day before Halloween, some witnesses reported thinking the accident victim's body is a prank or a Halloween decoration.

October 30, 2022: In the early hours of the morning, a Lyft driver drops off 23-year-old Bryce Broca and his friends near an apartment building in Eagan, Minnesota. Broca walks away from the group but continues a video chat with them until his phone goes dead. After that chat, Broca is never seen again.

The same day in Morbi in Gujarat, India, a pedestrian footbridge with a capacity of 125 people collapses when more than 500 people try to cross the bridge at once. 141 people die, most of them women, elderly men, and children. The youngest victim was an 18-month-old baby.

Almanac for October 29th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 29th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-29-Winona-Ryder-M4M5150FEQ

Bummer October 29th

October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley, is executed by electrocution.

October 29, 1994: Francisco Martin Duran of New Mexico stood outside the fence surrounding the White House and fired 29 rounds from an SKS rifle at a group of men on the grounds. None of the men were injured, and Duran was tackled by three civilians. 

Duran is eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President William J. Clinton. Clinton is inside the White House watching a football (American football) game when the incident occurs. 

October 29, 1998: An arson fire at a Halloween disco celebration in Gothenburg, Sweden. Four teenagers were found guilty of starting the fire, allegedly because they hadn’t been allowed to enter the disco for free. The fire killed 63 people, many of them also teenagers.

October 29, 2003: A dust explosion at the Hayes Lemmerz aluminum wheel manufacturing plant in Huntington, Indiana, injures three workers, one of whom subsequently dies from his severe burns.

Almanac for October 28th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 28th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-28-Gullivers-Travels-U7U2150E79

Bummer October 28th

October 28, 1905: Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) student Stuart Lathrop Pierson is hit by an unscheduled train and killed during a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity initiation.

October 28, 1991: The commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail is lost amid the so-called Perfect Storm weather event that began with Hurricane Grace, formed on October 26th. The boat sinks with six crew members aboard near Sable Island, Canada. Their bodies are never recovered. In all, the Perfect Storm claims 13 lives.

October 28, 1995: During the evening rush hour on the Metro subway system in Baku, Azerbaijan, passengers aboard a subway car smell smoke. An electrical fault has sparked a fire. The train stops short of the station. Its tunnel quickly fills with smoke and carbon monoxide. Passengers aboard one car are forced to climb into another car to escape when the doors become stuck. A crowd crush follows, resulting in almost 300 injuries and the deaths of 286 passengers and three rescue workers.

Almanac for October 27th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 27th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-27-Ariel-H2H8150DSM

Bummer October 27th

October 27, 1899: Cornell University student Edward Fairchild Berkeley is sent by the Kappa Alpha Society on an errand intended to keep him busy while the fraternity prepared for his formal initiation. Told to pin a particular piece of paper to either a tree or a bridge (accounts vary), Berkeley fell into a canal and drowned.

October 27, 2013: Lou Reed dies of liver disease after having received a liver transplant in May 2013.

October 27, 2019: The 56-year-old mother of a father-to-be in Knoxville, Iowa, is struck and killed by a fragment of metal at a “gender reveal” party for her son and his pregnant partner. The family had filled a metal umbrella stand with gunpowder with the intention that it would stream pink sparks like a firework, revealing that the unborn child is a girl. Instead, the gunpowder caused the umbrella stand to explode.

Almanac for October 26th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 26th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-26-Happy-Birthday-Ms-Rodham-Clinton-G2G5150CKE

The October 26, 1926 Cordele (GA) Dispatch. 100 years ago, children in Chicago found it a merry Halloween prank to steal their neighbors' gates off the hinges. Notice the typo, "movies are houses cooperating" rather than "movie houses are cooperating."

Bummer October 26th

October 26, 1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to sing on the radio in the U.S. and the first African-American to win an Academy Award for acting, dies of breast cancer in Los Angeles. She’s 59 years old.

October 26, 1990: 15-year-old William Anthony Odom, setting up a gallows scene for a Halloween tableau in North Carolina, accidentally hangs himself when the rope he’s using tightens on him.

October 26, 2001: 25-year-old nursing assistant Chante Jawan Mallard of Fort Worth, Texas, is driving, allegedly under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy. She strikes 37-year-old Gregory Glenn Biggs, a homeless construction worker. The force of the collision propels Biggs through Mallard’s windshield, where his body becomes lodged. Rather than seeking aid for Biggs, Mallard continues driving home, parks her car in her garage, and leaves the injured man inside her garage. Biggs dies of his injuries some time between when Mallard arrived home and October 28th. At this time, Mallard and a male friend left Biggs’s remains in a park and attempted to burn the car in order to destroy evidence. 

Police arrested Mallard after witnesses heard her at a party talking about “hitting a white man.” The medical examiner testified in court that Biggs’s injuries were survivable if he had been taken to a hospital in time. Mallard was convicted of murder and tampering with evidence. The male friend and a cousin who helped him move the body are convicted and imprisoned for evidence tampering.

October 26, 2018: A bomb addressed to then-Senator Kamala Harris is intercepted by authorities in Sacramento, California. Cesar Altieri Sayoc, Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threat.

October 26, 2022: Food writer Julie Powell dies of cardiac arrest at age 49 after battling a COVID-19 infection.

--

What was Diane Meyer grateful for on October 26, 2024?

https://bottlecap.press/products/ordinarygratitude

acknowledging things that used to scare me
breakfast with friends
minding my own damn business
sunshine
the sweet old lady Uber driver
apple picking
fall air
leaving changing color
thinking about why I'm feeling the way I do
finishing my book
oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips
new opportunities
proud of myself today

Almanac for October 25th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 25th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-25-St-Crispins-Day-O5O5150BN1

Bummer October 25th

October 25, 1958: Six days after his vehicle crashes and catches on fire during the Moroccan Grand Prix, English Formula One racing driver Stuart Lewis-Evans succumbs to his burn injuries.

October 25, 1993: Actor Vincent Price dies of lung cancer.

October 25, 1999: A Learjet flying from Orlando, Florida, to Texas fails to pressurize during flight. As a result, the two crew members and four passengers are all incapacitated by the lack of oxygen. The jet cruises on autopilot until it runs out of fuel, then crashes near Aberdeen, South Dakota. Among the six dead are professional golfer Payne Stewart.

Almanac for October 24th

Torrington (WY) Telegram, Oct. 21, 1926

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 24th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-24-Shaved-Fish-Z8Z3150ASR

October 24, 1975: Apple Records releases Shaved Fish, a compilation album by John Lennon with the Plastic Ono Band, in the U.S. 

Bummer October 24th

October 24, 1960: The Soviet Union tests its R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Scientists and technicians worked on pre-launch testing and, due to scheduling pressures, began launch preparations at the same time. A short circuit causes the missile’s second-stage engine to fire prematurely, igniting the first-stage fuel tanks, resulting in a tremendously powerful explosion. 

The Soviet Union would not permit any information about the disaster to reach the public until 1989. The number of people killed and injured in the accident is estimated to be between 54 and 300 people. Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, the head of the USSR’s R-16 program, was among those killed.

October 24, 1963: 30-year-old actor Beverly Wills, smoking in bed, accidentally sets her home on fire, killing herself, her grandmother, and her 4- and 7-year-old sons.

October 24, 2010: Pan Jin-yu dies at the age of 96 in Taiwan. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Pazeh language.

October 24, 2013: 20-year-old Brooke Greenberg dies of bronchomalacia, a condition of weakened cartilage in the bronchial tubes usually seen in newborn babies. Although Brooke is 20 years old, she appears to be a toddler due to an extremely rare condition, now called neotenic complex syndrome. Her body had ceased to grow after age five, she still had her baby teeth, couldn’t speak, and she is estimated to have a mental age of nine months to one year old. 

October 24, 2018: The Secret Service intercepts an explosive device mailed to the home of former U.S. President Barack Obama. On the same day, two suspicious packages are mailed to U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat who is African-American like the former president. One package is intercepted by the Capitol Police; the other causes the evacuation of a Los Angeles postal center. Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threats.

Almanac for October 23

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 23: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-23-The-Scottish-Play-O4O2150A1J

Bummer October 23

October 23, 1731: Fire breaks out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, England. The house holds the Cotton Library, a collection of books and historical documents gifted to the British Crown by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, a Member of Parliament who died in 1631. The fire destroys 13 manuscripts and damages 200 others. The Nowell Codex, the single manuscript on which the Epic of Beowulf is recorded, is among those damaged.

October 23, 1951: 34-year-old Filipino actor and film director Fernando Poe Sr. dies of rabies. He had let a puppy lick his wound, due to a folk belief that doing so would allow the wound to heal faster, apparently without knowing that the dog was infected with rabies.

October 23, 1983: During the Lebanese Civil War, a truck bomb kills 241 U.S. military personnel; a similar bombing kills 58 French Army troops. 

Almanac for October 22nd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 22nd: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-22-Im-the-Shrew-H2H715094Z

The Producers News (Plentywood, Montana), Oct. 22, 1926. Notice how they're using "Halloween Night" to mean the night before Halloween, after sundown on the 30th.

French Republican Calendar day name (1 Brumaire) - Apple

Deborah Griscom Passmore, 1840-1911, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bummer October 22nd

October 22, 1877: At least 207 miners are killed by an explosion at the Blantyre Colliery. The youngest victim is an 11-year-old boy. The flammable chemicals in the mine are probably ignited by an open flame, possibly by one of the workers lighting a tobacco pipe.

October 22, 1953: Milligan College (Tennessee) student Calvin Dougherty dies of internal injuries sustained as part of a class hazing. Ordered to race by upperclass students, Dougherty inadvertently runs into the cable of a tennis net, rupturing his pancreas and injuring his spleen.

October 22, 1986: Musician, comedian, and traffic reporter Jane Dornacker dies in an ambulance a short time after the helicopter from which she has been delivering a traffic report for WNBC radio crashes into New York City’s Hudson River. The pilot survives.

October 22, 2005: Bellview Airlines Flight 210 crashes shortly after takeoff from Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria. All six crew members and 111 passengers are killed. The cause of the crash is unknown, although weather and excessive wear on the aircraft have been posited as possible factors. Sadly, the high speed of the crash and looting in the aftermath made it difficult for authorities to identify the victims.

October 22, 2009: The county government of  Zhenyuan, Gansu province, China, announces on social media that it has burned 65 “illegal publications” outside of a local library. It describes the books as either “religious” or displaying “leanings,” presumably leanings that tend to disagree with the Chinese government.

On the same day, in the United States, novelist/blogger Mac Tonnies dies at age 34 of a cardiac arrhythmia.

Almanac for October 21st

Excuse me, the Spokane Woman of October 21, 1926? What kind of faces are we calling "Character Masks?" Folks, the 1920s were hella racist.

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 21st: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-21-Carrie-Fisher-W7W514YDF0

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Bummer October 21st

October 21, 1966: “[On this date] a massive coal-tip slid down a mountainside and engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 persons, mostly school children. In response to an appeal the following week in a national newspaper, an English psychiatrist, J. Barker, obtained a large number of reports from respondents who felt they may have received paranormal information concerning this tragedy. After all claims were carefully checked out, thirty-five cases remained which Dr. Barker considered worthy of confidence. In twenty-four cases, the respondents had related the information to someone else before the landslide occurred. Dreams figures in twenty-five of these accounts. In one, the dreamer saw, spelled out in large, brilliant letters, the word ABERFAN, In another, a telephone operator from Brighton talked helplessly to a child, who walked toward her, followed by a billowing cloud of black dust or smoke.” 

- Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle

October 21, 1969: Jack Kerouac dies of internal abdominal hemorrhage caused by his heavy alcohol use. He is 47 years old.

October 21, 2021: Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is accidentally shot and killed by actor Alec Baldwin on the film set where the two are working. The Pietta .45 Colt revolver Baldwin was using as a prop shouldn’t have been loaded with live ammunition. 

Almanac for October 20th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 20th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-20-Rimbaud-A0A314YCC0

Bummer October 20th

October 20, 1728: The Copenhagen Fire of 1728 begins and burns through October 23rd. It destroys nearly a third of the city’s buildings, leaving approximately 20% of Copenhagen’s population homeless. The University of Copenhagen library loses approximately 35,000 texts.

October 20, 1977: Cassie Gaines, her brother Steve Gaines, Ronnie Van Zant, road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and pilots William Gray and Walter McCreary die when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s chartered plane runs out of fuel and crashes in the woods outside Gillsburg, Mississippi. Drummer Artimus Pyle, guitarist Gary Rossington, and keyboardist Billy Powell all survive with serious injuries.

October 20, 1990: Stunt performer Brian Jewell, portraying a hanged man at a New Jersey “haunted hayride” attraction, accidentally hangs himself in earnest.

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 19th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 19th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-19-Z8Z014YAK3

Bummer October 19th

October 19, 1950: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, age 58, dies after apparently suffering a heart attack and falling down the stairs of her home. 

October 19, 1977: A small fire breaks out aboard the charter plane used by members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. No one is hurt, but the fire makes Cassie Gaines hesitant to board the plane the next day.

Almanac for October 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-18-B0B114VTQK

Bummer October 18th

October 18, 1984: 26-year-old actor Jon-Erik Hexum dies six days after an accident on the set of a TV show called Cover-Up. He accidentally shoots himself in the head with a gun filled with blanks, and the wadding of one of the blanks severely injures him.

October 18, 2015: Death metal bass player Frank Watkins, who played in the bands Obituary and Gorgoroth, dies at age 47 of cancer.

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 17th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 17th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-17-Black-Poetry-Day-K3K614SOG5

National Library of Wales, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bummer October 17th

October 17, 1586: Sir Philip Sidney dies of an infection from a thigh wound he’d suffered at the Battle of Zutphen that September, when Sidney loaned his armor to a soldier who’d forgotten his own. Sidney is 32 years old.

October 17, 1814: Eight people die as a result of the a 22-foot-tall vat of fermenting porter bursting and causing a chain reaction of bursting beer barrels in London. Victims either drowned in the resulting flood or died of sudden, acute alcohol poisoning from inhaling the vapors.

October 17, 1873: Cornell University student Mortimer N. Leggett dies during a Kappa Alpha Society hazing ritual that involved walking in the woods blindfolded. Leggett and three others fell into a gorge; the others survived.

October 17, 1955: Wealthy race car driver/playboy Joel Thorne is flying a private plane in North Hollywood, California, when he flies into an apartment building, killing himself and three residents of the building. The youngest victim is two months old.

Almanac for October 16th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 16th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-16-Hedwigs-Day-E1E7FQAKV

Today's Observance: St. Hedwig's Day
Artist Birthday: Nico
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Oscar Wilde

Bummer October 16th

October 16, 1793: Queen Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne of France is executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.

October 16, 1991: A 35-year-old man drove his pickup truck through the window of a restaurant called Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. From inside the truck, he begins firing one Glock 17 pistol and one Ruger P89 pistol at the approximately 150 people eating lunch inside the restaurant. He then exited the truck, shouted a misogynistic rant about his distrust of women, and began selectively shooting people. 

When police arrived, the man engaged in a firefight with them. He was shot by police three times, stated that he would not surrender, and then killed himself by shooting himself in the head. The rampage killed 23 people and wounded 27 others.

Almanac for October 15th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 15th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-15-Little-Nemo-in-Slumberland-I2I414R0PX

Bummer October 15th

October 15, 1917: Dutch exotic dancer Margaretha Zelle, who performs under the stage name Mata Hari (a Malay expression for “the sun”), is executed by a French firing squad, having been accused of spying for Germany in the Great War. Modern biographers believe she was innocent of spying and was scapegoated.

October 15, 2020: 26-year-old South African adult film star and aspiring social media influencer Karissa Rajpaul dies following a cosmetic procedure in Encino, Los Angeles, California. The mother and daughter who performed the “butt lift” procedure, which involved injected silicone into the buttocks, had no formal medical training in this procedure. 

In 2025, both women were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, sentenced to 3-4 years in prison, and then released when it was determined their time had been served.

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