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.
78. "Typing" Nico Muhly - Instrumental track that emulates the sound of a typewriter, from the Kill Your Darlings soundtrack, on the Reading playlist. [And I still haven't seen Tulip Fever.]
77. "Falling In Love Again" Friedrich Hollaender, Marianne Faithfull - cover of the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich in her film The Blue Angel. One day last July I happened to hear the Diahann Carroll version of this song. Terrible. It sent me scrambling for Faithfull's very good cover.
76. "You Ruined Nirvana" McKenna Grace - Grace plays the granddaughter of a Ghostbuster in the last two movies in the franchise. Which is funny because the next song is...
75. "Good Girls (from the Ghostbusters Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [2016])" Elle King - that's the all-woman Ghostbusters reboot with the Chris Hemsworth scene that cracks me so consistently up. I laughed my ass off at that movie.
The lyrics are written from the POV of a naughty woman who may be some kind of minor demon or evil spirit. I had it on my Halloween soundtrack.
74. "I Like It Rough" Lady Gaga
73. "Algorhythm" Childish Gambino - samples "Hey Mr. DJ" by Zhane (1993)
Dave: Ondaatje started a food fight, salmon mousse all over the scene
All: Spilled some dressing on Doris Lessing, these writer types are a scream!
I like to go out dancing
My baby loves a bunch of authors
We'll be together for ages
Dave: Eatin' and Sleepin' and
Jean (in bus driver voice): Eatin' and Sleepin' and
Mike (as Dr. Ruth): Eating und Sleeping und
Murray: Turnin' pages
All: Yeah!
From the Liner: Mike-vocals; Murray-vocals, bass, spring muffler; Jean-vocals, sheet metal, snare; Dave-lead vocal, guitar
You can tell this is a song from the ‘90s because it contains the words “new cd player.”
*You can still go to the Sidewalk Cafe in Venice Beach, California, but they don't have this awesome literary menu with a sandwich called the Mario Puzo anymore.
September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.
September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.
September 2, 2004: A fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, destroys 12,500 irreplaceable books and damages an additional 62,000 materials, including Friedrich Schiller's death mask and 35 oil paintings of historical significance.
September 2, 2018: An air conditioner short circuits, causing a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The museum loses an estimated 92.5% of its collection.
September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison.
September 4, 2006: Wildlife expert, zookeeper, and filmmaker Steve Irwin is filming a dive in shallow water near the Great Barrier Reef. He is struck in the chest by a stingray’s tale. The barb of the tale pierces his heart, killing him.
September 5, 1983: Canadian stunt performer Ken Carter is killed when the rocket car he’s using to jump over an Ontario pond overshoots the landing ramp, flips, and lands on its roof.
September 6, 1951: Joan Vollmer is shot and killed in an American-owned bar in Mexico City by her husband, William S. Burroughs. Both were intoxicated. Vollmer is alleged to have placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs was supposedly trying to shoot the glass off her head with a pistol. Instead he shot Vollmer in the head and killed her instantly.
This is portrayed in the film Beat (2000). Vollmer is played by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland.
September 7, 2018: Rapper Mac Miller, aged 26, dies of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine, and fentanyl.
September 8, 2016: 59-year-old performer The Lady Chablis, who’s featured prominently in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt and played herself in the 1997 film based on it, dies of pneumonia at Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia.
September 9, 1898: French poet and literary critic Stéphane Mallarmé dies suddenly while suffering from what had been a relatively mild case of tonsillitis. While being examined by his doctor, Mallarmé has a coughing fit so severe he dies of asphyxia. He is 56 years old.
September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.
September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.
September 12, 1977: Poet Robert Lowell dies of a heart attack in a taxi cab on his way to see his ex-wife, writer and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick.
September 13, 1996: Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur dies from gunshot wounds in Las Vegas.
September 14, 1899: Real estate developer Henry H. Bliss becomes the first person killed in the U.S. from a motor vehicle collision. The previous day, he had stepped off a trolley car and been struck by an electric taxi cab, knocking him to the ground and crushing his chest.
September 14, 1927: Dancer Isadora Duncan is killed in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle of the car she’s riding in, breaking her neck.
Photo of Isadora Duncan by Arnold Genthe (1869–1942), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
September 15, 1958: A commuter train traveling from Bay Head, New Jersey, to Jersey City ignores warning signals and falls into Newark Bay through an open bridge lift. The crash kills 48, including Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s brother-in-law James Carmalt Adams.
September 16, 1977: T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who never learned to drive, is the passenger in a Mini 1275GT automobile when it crashes into a fence post and then a tree, killing Bolan instantly.
September 16, 1985: Aerobatic pilot Arthur “Art” Scholl crashes his plane and is killed while filming spin footage for the movie Top Gun. He crashes into the Pacific Ocean; his aircraft is never recovered.
September 18, 1961: United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others die when their Transair Sweden DC-6 aircraft crashes in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld had been traveling to Katanga, a disputed state that broke off from the Congo after Congo gained its independence from Belgian colonial rule. The cause of the crash is disputed. It may have been caused by pilot error, although some have speculated that it was shot down to assassinate Hammarskjöld.
September 18, 1970: 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix dies of asphyxiation at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He appears to have aspirated vomit after taking an overdose of barbiturates, presumably his girlfriend’s sleeping pills.
September 18, 1988: Poet/filmmaker Kathleen Collins dies of breast cancer at the age of 46.
September 19, 1902: One hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!”
September 20, 1989: The last fluent speaker of the Kamassian language, Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova-Andzhighatova, an approximately 105-year-old woman, dies. Kamassian is one of the Samoyed languages of the Ural Mountains. In fact, it was the last of the Samoyed languages to go extinct.
September 20, 1997: Musician Nick Traina, the son of author Danielle Steel, passes away from an overdose of the prescription medication lithium. He is 19 years old.
September 22, 1978: Stunt performer A.J. Bakunas dies from his injuries after a failed stunt fall from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kincaid Towers the previous day. Bakunas lands on the air bag as planned, which splits, allowing his body to hit the ground at approximately 115 miles per hour.
September 23, 965: Al-Mutanabbi, a courtly poet of the Abbasid Caliphate who wrote in Arabic, dies in what is now Iraq. His birth date is not known, but he was thought to be about 50 years old at the time of his death. He died in a fight with a group of assailants who were insulted by one of his poems.
September 23, 1939: Sigmund Freud dies of cancer of the jaw. He had been diagnosed with epithelioma of the mouth in 1923, and although the tumor had been surgically removed, the surgery was incomplete. By 1939, the cancer that had spread to his jawbone was so painful, and also inoperable, that Freud asked his personal physician to give him a life-ending dose of morphine.
September 23, 1973: Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and is in his fifth day of hospitalization. He calls his wife to let her know he isn’t feeling well and dies a few hours later, officially of heart failure.
Some have speculated that Neruda may have been poisoned in the hours before his death. Chile’s coup d’etat that ended the term of democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende had happened on September 11th. Neruda had been Allende’s ambassador to France and his home had already been searched by the military forces of coup leader General Augusto Pinochet. Neruda famously told Pinochet’s troops that the only dangerous thing they would find was poetry.
September 23, 1994: Psycho writer Robert Bloch dies of cancer of the esophagus and kidneys at the age of 77.
September 24, 2007: Camera operator Conway Wickliffe is killed while filming stunts for the movie The Dark Knight. He is the passenger in a pickup truck driving parallel to a stunt car; the driver misses a turn and the truck crashes into a tree.
September 26, 1937: Blues musician Bessie Smith dies of traumatic injuries she suffers in a car accident. She was the passenger in a car driven by her boyfriend Richard Morgan. Morgan, driving along U.S. Route 61 toward Clarksdale, Mississippi, misjudges the speed of a truck he’s coming up on and swerves at the last moment to avoid rear-ending the truck but sideswipes it instead. Since Smith is in the passenger seat and possibly has her hand and/or forearm sticking out of the passenger-side window, she sustains severe crush injuries to the right side of her body and a partially amputated arm. Surgeons at Clarksdale’s African-American hospital surgically amputate Smith’s arm. She never regains consciousness following surgery.
September 27, 1986: Metallica bassist Clifford (Cliff) Burton dies in a tour bus accident in Sweden. The bus skids off the road while members of the band are sleeping in their bunks. Burton is thrown out of his bunk and through the window; the bus falls on top of him.
September 29, 1902: French writer Émile Zola dies of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney flue in his home. The manner of his death may have been accident, assassination, or suicide. He’s 62 years old.
September 29, 2010: A 24-year-old man whose family says he suffers from mental illness pours gasoline on himself and sets himself on fire near the statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine. The man is critically injured but survives. Coincidentally, the date the statue was unveiled to the public was also September 29th, in 1888.
September 30, 1962: Paul Guihard, a journalist for France’s Agence France-Presse, is in the U.S. covering African-American student James Meredith’s attempt to enroll in the whites-only University of Mississippi. White students on the campus start a riot, during which Guihard is shot through the back, piercing his heart.
His shooting is never solved. Guihard is considered the only journalist to have been killed during the U.S. civil rights movement.
September 30, 1997: Post-modern writer Kathy Acker, age 50, dies of breast cancer while undergoing alternative treatment in Tijuana, Mexico.
August 1, 1994: An electrical fault sparks a fire at Norwich Central Library in Norwich, England, that destroys an estimated 100,000 books and historical papers.
August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette.
August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.
August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.
August 3, 1924: Author Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack at age 66.
August 3, 1966: 40-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead of an apparently accidental morphine overdose.
August 4, 1875: Hans Christian Andersen dies, possibly suffering from liver cancer and never having recovered from injuries from falling out of his bed.
August 4, 1962: Marilyn Monroe dies, apparently by suicide, of an overdose of prescription sleeping medicine.
August 7, 2016: 10-year-old son Caleb Schwab is killed while riding the Verrückt water raft ride at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City, Kansas. The tallest such ride in the world at the time, the ride had a screen over the top, held in place with a series of metal support rings, to keep guests from accidentally flying off the ride in the event that the raft should become airborn. Caleb, who was riding on the front of a raft with two unrelated women riding on the back, struck the metal support ring and was decapitated when his raft became airborne.
August 8, 1965: American author Shirley Jackson dies at age 48 of cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by her alcoholism and use of a variety of prescription medicines.
August 10, 1978: Three teenage girls, all members of the Ulrich family, are killed in an automobile accident while riding in a Ford Pinto. The state of Indiana charges the Ford Motor Company with homicide, claiming that the company was aware of manufacturing defects that made the vehicle more likely to cause death in the event of certain types of accidents. Ford is found not guilty.
August 12, 1964: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dies.
August 12, 1982: Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashes into a mountain after the pilots lose the ability to steer the plane. Of the 509 passengers and 15 crew members, only three passengers and one crew member survive. Rescue operations are delayed due to darkness and mountainous terrain, which means many people who may have initially had non-fatal injuries died of exposure, blood loss, and other conditions.
August 12, 2022: Indian-British* author Salman Rushdie is stabbed ten times at an event in Chautauqua, New York, allegedly by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Rushdie suffers nerve damage to one arm, one eye, and his liver. The attacker was apparently motivated by a late Iranian religious leader’s description of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous since it depicted the prophet Muhammad as a fictional character.
Rushdie is an atheist. The attacker had not read The Satanic Verses.
*Rushdie now lives in the United States with his wife, American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
August 13, 1521: Hernán Cortés and his small army of Spanish conquistadores conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán after an extended siege that began in 1519.
August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr.
August 16, 1949: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell dies in the hospital of injuries she sustained on August 11th when she was struck by a speeding car with an intoxicated driver. The driver was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in jail.
August 17, 1966: English race car driver Ken Miles is killed when the Ford Mk IV he is test-driving crashes at over 200 miles per hour.
August 18, 1992: On or around this date, 24-year-old adventurer Christopher McCandless dies of apparent starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. The story of his nomadic, short life is the basis of the book and film Into the Wild.
August 19, 1936: According to LitHub, “Federico García Lorca—the Spanish avant-garde poet, playwright, and ardent socialist—was shot and killed by Nationalist militia before being buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere outside Granada, where he remains to this day.”
Lorca had predicted his manner of death in his 1929 poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends:”
“Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
August 21, 1986: A naturally-occurring limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon releases poisonous carbon dioxide into the air, killing 1,746 people.
August 23, 1981: East German comedic actor Rolf Herricht suffers a heart attack and dies while performing in Kiss Me Kate at Berlin’s Metropol theatre.
August 25, 1984: Truman Capote dies of liver disease.
August 25, 1914: During World War I, German troops occupying Leuven, Belgium, set fire to the city and destroying almost half of it. 300 civilians die. Included in the burning and destruction is the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, which loses approximately 230,000 materials, including priceless medieval manuscripts.
August 25, 1992: The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina is destroyed by Serbian bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo.
August 26, 2001: Tit and I got out of bed this morning and turned on the news to hear that the singer/dancer/actor Aaliyah had perished in a plane crash in the Bahamas. Born in 1979, she was only 22 years old.
August 27, 1883: Mount Krakatau (Anglicized as Krakatoa), which had begun to erupt on the 20th of May, intensifies in seismic activity with an eruption that destroys more than two-thirds of its island. The eruption is one of the loudest sounds ever heard by human ears, with the explosion being heard 4,800 miles away from the Indonesian site of the volcano. Pyroclastic flows, ash expelled into the atmosphere, and resulting tsunamis are estimated to have killed more than 36,400 people. Only the 1815 Mount Tambora explosion is thought to have been deadlier.
Content Warning: Accidents, natural disasters, death, guns, mass death.
This is a second sneak peek at a very tentative, very early-stage work in progress I call Erin O’Riordan’s Almanac of Bad Days. Part I dropped on August 3, 2022.
September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.
September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.
September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison.
September 4, 2006: Wildlife expert, zookeeper, and filmmaker Steve Irwin is filming a dive in shallow water near the Great Barrier Reef. He is struck in the chest by a stingray’s tale. The barb of the tale pierces his heart, killing him.
September 5, 1983: Canadian stunt performer Ken Carter is killed when the rocket car he’s using to jump over an Ontario pond overshoots the landing ramp, flips, and lands on its roof.
September 6, 1951: Joan Vollmer is shot and killed in an American-owned bar in Mexico City by her husband, William S. Burroughs. Both were intoxicated. Vollmer is alleged to have placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs was supposedly trying to shoot the glass off her head with a pistol. Instead he shot Vollmer in the head and killed her instantly.
This is portrayed in the film Beat (2000). Vollmer is played by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland.
Courtney Love attending Life Ball in Vienna, Austria, May 31, 2014. Public domain image.
September 7, 2018: Rapper Mac Miller, aged 26, dies of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine, and fentanyl.
September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.
September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.
September 13, 1996: Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur dies from gunshot wounds in Las Vegas.
September 14, 1899: Real estate developer Henry H. Bliss becomes the first person killed in the U.S. from a motor vehicle collision. The previous day, he had stepped off a trolley car and been struck by an electric taxi cab, knocking him to the ground and crushing his chest.
September 14, 1927: Dancer Isadora Duncan is killed in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle of the car she’s riding in, breaking her neck.
September 16, 1977: T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who never learned to drive, is the passenger in a Mini 1275GT automobile when it crashes into a fence post and then a tree, killing Bolan instantly.
September 16, 1985: Aerobatic pilot Arthur “Art” Scholl crashes his plane and is killed while filming spin footage for the movie Top Gun. He crashes into the Pacific Ocean; his aircraft is never recovered.
September 18, 1970: 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix dies of asphyxiation at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He appears to have aspirated vomit after taking an overdose of barbiturates, presumably his girlfriend’s sleeping pills.
September 19, 1902: One hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!”
September 20, 1997: Musician Nick Traina, the son of author Danielle Steel, passes away from an overdose of the prescription medication lithium. He is 19 years old.
September 22, 1978: Stunt performer A.J. Bakunas dies from his injuries after a failed stunt fall from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kincaid Towers the previous day. Bakunas lands on the air bag as planned, which splits, allowing his body to hit the ground at approximately 115 miles per hour.
September 27, 1986: Metallica bassist Clifford (Cliff) Burton dies in a tour bus accident in Sweden. The bus skids off the road while members of the band are sleeping in their bunks. Burton is thrown out of his bunk and through the window; the bus falls on top of him.
September 30, 1997: Post-modern writer Kathy Acker, age 50, dies of breast cancer while undergoing alternative treatment in Tijuana, Mexico.
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