#irregular incidents

Christopher Lee And The Occult Library He Didn’t Have

There is an urban myth that the late Christopher Lee had an occult library containing some 200,000 volumes on magic and the like… Something that he adamantly denied, in places such as the above video from University College Dublin.

He does say that he knew people who were into that kind of thing, but advises against it due to it causing the practitioners to “not only lose your mind, but you also lose your soul“. Which is both wonderfully ominous and makes me want to know about THOSE people in all honesty.

Personally I think that the rumour started due to Lee being a longstanding fan of the fantasy genre, with the works of JRR Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Peter S. Beagle’s the Last Unicorn to name a few, and due to even people in the 1980s making weird jumps in logic when it came to fantasy and horror fans (see the DnD moral panic, where it was claimed it led to Satanism and human sacrifice), I think that someone saw Lee’s collection and assumed that they were real.

Y’know, like an absolute moron.

And because it’s also Vincent Price’s 111th Birthday, here’s a historical fact about him, that’s kind of obvious in hindsight: He was the visual inspiration of Marvel’s Dr Strange.

Kind of curious what the public perception of the character would be if appearances outside of comics had the actors affecting Price’s distinctive manner of speaking, but it would have been a lot of fun in my opinion.

Oh hey, it’s Christopher Lee’s 100th Birthday! To combine it with Dracula Day (which was yesterday on the 26th May), one of Lee’s most famous roles was as the emponious Count in the films made by the British Hammer Film Productions. However, overtime Lee came to dislike the films as he felt they were subpar, and was growing wary of getting typecast.

This led to him attempting to decline further appearances as the infamous vampire, only for studio executives to essentially resort to emotional blackmail to get him to keep appearing in their films. Saying that as Lee was the main draw to their films, if he were to quit then that would put all of the production crew out of work in response, effectively placing the financial livelihoods of his colleagues in his hands.

The result of this was Lee agreeing continue as Dracula, at least for another film or two. One of which, 1966′s Dracula: Prince of Darkness, having such terrible dialogue that Lee just straight refused to say any of it, making it one of the few film depictions of Dracula who just snarls and hisses through the movie father than actually saying anything.

Sir Basil Zaharoff, known to his friends as Zedzed, was called many things prior to his death as one of the richest men in the world in 1936: an industrialist, a confidence trickster, an arsonist, a bigamist, a “mystery man of Europe“, but it’s in his capacity as the “Merchant of Death“ that he really made his name, as arguably one of the most impactful arms dealers in history, who included the likes of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II among his many clients.

Originally Greek, Basil was born around 1845 in what is now Turkey, in a province of the Ottoman Empire. After a brief spell in Russia, where his family were forced to flee due to a pogrom targeting the Greek community (it being here where they changed their name to Zaharoff) Basil’s first job was as a tour guide in the Galata district in Istanbul… the job he took afterwards being that of being an arsonist, where he worked with firefighters to burn down the homes of wealthy people so they could split the fee the rich would pay the firemen to rescue their expensive possessions.

After a brief time working for his uncle’s form in London (after which he had to flee back to Greece under an assumed name due to accusations of embezzlement), he befriended a Greek political journalist by the name of Stefanos Skouloudis, who put him touch with a Swedish sea captain who acted as an agent for the arms manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt. As the sea captain was leaving that line of work, they suggested that Nordenfelt hire Basil, and in 1877 he signed up with the organisation…

In a career he didn’t fully commit to initially, despite the unstable political situation in the Balkans proving lucrative for his new business. Instead he got an additional job selling railway cars in America as well as posing as a fake Greek prince, “Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, under the guise of which he married Philadelphia heiress, Jennie Billings… Only to have to go on the run from Dutch police after a British man recognised Basil as having already gotten married to a woman in Bristol back in the early 1870s.

Once finally actually focusing on his career as an arms dealer, Basil would go on to sell weapons to Britain, German, Japan, the United States, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Spain, and Greece. Despite his reputation for corruption and for selling weapons to both sides in a conflict (conflicts he often had a hand in starting in the first place), a move he called “the Systeme Zaharoff“, he nonetheless became an instrumental figure in international politics due to his connections to the arms trade.

For one such example, of this allegedly being the case of the faulty Nordenfelt I steam-powered submarine. Now, this instance seems to involve sources referencing each other, but his scam basically went like this. Despite the submarine having a reputation for not working correctly, Basil sold one to the Greeks under the agreement of special payment terms. He then turned to the Ottomans, and told them that the Greeks were buying submarines, so they better buy some as well to defend themselves from their increased threat… And then turned to the Russians after that sale concluded to get them to buy some subs from him too, as the increased threat of Turkish submarines in the Black Sea meant that Russia needed to buy some from Basil as well to defend themselves too from this OBVIOUSsign of aggression.

As time progressed and his influence grew (helped by his purchasing several newspapers, such as the French paper Excelsior, to print editorials about how great the arms industry was), Basil would eventually make millions selling weapons and equipment to the Allies. Additionally he was eventually called upon to use his by now considerable influence to first get Greece to enter the war on the Allies side and then to establish peace talks with the Ottomans to get them to exit the war(he paid them £10 million in gold to leave on the authorisation of the British Prime Minister, in negotiations that would eventually lead to the establishment of Israel decades later).

Following the war, France recognized his services by making him a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, and Britain honoured him with a knight grand cross of the Order of the Bath (the King of England knighted him on the insistence of the prime minister, Lloyd George, despite George V’s vocal disgust at Basil entire deal). In the 1920s, he personally funded a Greek war to occupy territory from a badly weakened Turkey, a move that ultimately proved to be unsuccessful. What was ultimately more successful was his moving into the oil and gas industry, something he saw a lot of potential in, resulting in the incorporation of the company that would eventually become British Petroleum.

Now, you’d think that after a lifetime of evil Basil would be aware that he had something of a public relations problem… And you’d be right, with his attempting to use his literal billions to try and whitewash his legacy with some philanthropy, most of which tying into his fascination with the newly created field of aviation, but others including bizarrely more whimsical things. Such as his donation of £20,000 to refurbish Paris Zoo’s monkey house (initially treated as a hoax by Zoo staff who left the cheque in a drawer for two months).

This did nothing to lesson his negative reputation, however, with his being cited as a direct inspiration for the James Bond supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, among many other depictions in pop culture. Another such example being in the Tintin comic The Broken Ear, which has weapons trader Basil Bazaroff, who sells to both parties of a single conflict that he helps provoke in South America. Tintincreator Herge notable drew his fictional Basil to mirror his inspiration just to make it clear who he was based on, with the company he worked for being a play on Vickers, one of the arms firms the real Basil also worked for.

In 1924, at the age of 74, Basil married yet again, to María del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocinio Fermina Simona de Muguiro y Beruete, 1st Duchess de Villafranca de los Caballeros, former wife of the cousin of King Alfonso XII of Spain. Reportedly one of the richest women in Spain, she promptly died of an infection 18 months into their marriage.

Following Maria’s death, Basil moved into semi-retirement in Monte Carlo, having purchased the debt-ridden public company that ran the Casino Monte Carlo, the main source of income for the principality. This arrangement seemingly being agreed upon through his association with Prince Louis II of Monaco, the understanding that Basil could get the Casino in exchange for him using his influence to prevent the French from eroding the tiny nation’s rights in the Treaty of Versailles.

He would also insist that people address him as Sir Basil, which was technically against the rules as he was by this point a naturalised French citizen (his previously also having been British, his marriage to the woman in Bristol having been suggested by some as a means of obtaining a passport), but he was evidently a snob on top of everything else.

Basil would eventually die in Monte Carlo at the age of 84 of a heart attack. Curiously, despite being incredibly wealthy at the time of his death (he had made $1.2 billion from the Great War alone, and his assets including a palace outside of Paris formerly owned by the infamous Prince Leopold II of Belgium that he filled with art and statues), Zaharoff’s will was proved at just £193,103, rather less than $1 million at the time. Considering his death prompted his servants to quickly burn a ton of his documents, it’s curious to think where all of his ill-gotten gains disappeared to.

Personally? I hope that his servants stole it from him on the downlow. Was no less than he deserved.

One of the several inspirations for the early cartoon character Betty Boop (the others including singer Helen KaneandEsther Jones) was early silent movie actress Clara Bow, pictured above in in a terrifying butterfly ride of some kind.

Clara Bow is an interesting figure for a number of reasons, one of the more tragic of these being how she was effectively forced out of showbiz despite her at the time high level of fame due to a blackmail scheme by a Hollywood tabloid and a disgruntled employee.

Essentially, the story was thus: In 1930, Clara’s friend and former hairdresser-turned-manager-turned-secretary Daisy DaVoe stole a bunch of Clara’s personal papers and attempted to blackmail her now former friend about her personal life if she didn’t cough up some cash.

When this didn’t happen, Daisy teamed up with the Coast Reporter’s publisher Frederic Girnau to write a 60 page article, titled Clara’s Secret Love-Life as told by Daisy, where they laid out Clara’s supposed history of drug fueled bisexual orgies. They then contacted actor (and Clara’s later husband), Rex Bell, saying that if they paid Girnau $25,000 (approximately $432,797.90 in 2022 money) for the entire newspaper, they wouldn’t publish the hit piece.

Bell, acting on Clara’s behalf, refused to pay, so out of spite Girnau sent copies of the article to Will Hays (first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and the man for whom the Hollywood censorship code was named), Superior Court Judges, and local PTA officials. This, ironically, got Girnau in trouble with the federal government even as Bell called the cops on Daisy for her scheme, as due to the statutes surrounding mailing “obscene“ materials at the time, Girnau had violated Section 211 of the U.S. Penal Code on top of his involvement in the blackmail scheme.

Unfortunately for Clara, while it’s totally possible that the studio could have made Daisy and Girnau’s fictional tales of Clara, say, sleeping with an entire football team that included a pre-stardom John Wayne, just go away by paying them what they wanted, Bow’s decision to go to court ended up getting the content of article being made public…

And Hollywood being Hollywood, and people who already had a low opinion of Clara due to her being the poster girl for flapper girl subculture (folk taking a dim view of how young women were suddenly openly drinking, dancing to jazz, and so on), a lot of people saw the content of the article and assumed that it must be true. Because in their minds, Clara apparently having more than one boyfriend prior to her eventually marrying Rex “obviously“ means that the deliberately defamatory content of the article must be true too, right?

Daisy was eventually convicted for grand theft, as it came out in the trial that even before her extortion attempt she had been using her position as Clara’s secretary to steal thousands of dollars from the star. Girnau, meanwhile, was sentenced to eight years in prison due to the aforementioned charge related to posting obscene materials.

Clara’s career, meanwhile, was already on the decline by the time the trial started, and a combination of the stress of the trial and the enormously negative press coverage surrounding DaVoe and Girnau’s lies (as in local papers reported the claims as fact, not condemning them for making stuff up) eventually leading to her having a breakdown, resulting in a period in a sanitarium.

At the age of only 25, her career was over.

While she went on to make a few more movies (mostly due to pressure from her manager), at her request, she was released from the contract of her final movie, the pre-Hays Code noir City Streets (1931). She would eventually go on to marry Rex, and retired to a ranch in Nevada where she lived for the next few decades with her kids and dealt with bouts of poor mental health. Interviews with her following her retirement made it seem like she didn’t particularly regret her career, even if she had come to loathe public life. As she states in a 1933 interview with the Kansas City Star:

My life in Hollywood contained plenty of uproar. I’m sorry for a lot of it but not awfully sorry. I never did anything to hurt anyone else. I made a place for myself on the screen and you can’t do that by being Mrs. Alcott’s idea of a Little Woman.

She died in 1965 of a heart attack at the age of 60.

While actor/director Orson Welles is mostly known these days for Citizen Kane, his infamous War of the World’s radio play, performing in a Transformers movie, and starting an argument over peas, but what is less well known is his work as a social commentator and activist.

Indeed, while his critique of the wealthy in Citizen Kane got him put on a watch-list by the FBI, Welles had been involved in trying to help diversify theatre since 1936, when he worked with an all African American acting company in an adaptation of MacBeth which managed to both win over Shakespeare purists and local activists in Harlem who suspected that Welles was going help made the production insulting towards the actors and the surrounding community.

And in a 1944 column for Free World he talked about the need for social justice and called for “race hate” to be criminalised. The article itself is interesting, especially considering when it was written, here’s a taste:

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature. But this is true: we hate whom we hurt and we mistrust whom we betray. There are minority problems simply because minority races are often wronged. Race hate, distilled from the suspicions of ignorance, takes its welcome from the impotent and the godless, comforting these with hellish parodies of what they’ve lost—arrogance to take the place of price, contempt to occupy the spirit emptied of the love of man. There are alibis for the phenomenon—excuses, economic and social—but the brutal fact is simply this: where the racist lie is acceptable there is corruption. Where there is hate there is shame. The human soul receives race hate only in the sickness of guilt.

The Indian is on our conscience, the Negro is on our conscience, the Chinese and the Mexican-American are on our conscience. The Jew is on the conscience of Europe, but our neglect gives us communion in that guilt, so that there dances even here the lunatic spectre of anti-semitism.

This is deplored; it must be fought, and the fight must be won.

The poll tax is regretted; it must be abolished.

And poll tax thinking must be outlawed. This is a time for action. We know that for some ears even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise us if we’re accused in some quarters of inciting to riot. FREE WORLD is very interested in riots. FREE WORLD is very interested in avoiding them.

We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive. We call for laws, then, prohibiting what moral judgment already counts as lawlessness. American law forbids a man the right to take away anothers right. It must be law that groups of men can’t use the machinery of our Republic to limit the rights of other groups—that the vote, for instance, can’t be used to take away the vote.

Additionally, in his 1945 to 46 radio show Orson Welles Commentaries, he used the opportunity to talk about current events, including protesting the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic test, speaking out against the dissolution of the Office of Price Administration (a service started during World War Two to control prices and rent), and most prominently, denouncing the 1946 assault on African American WWII veteran Isaac Woodard by some white cops in South Carolina.

Woodard was traveling from South Carolina to Georgia by bus, and hours after being honorably discharged, Batesburg (now Batesburg-Leesville) police chief Lynwood Shull and several over officers beat and blinded Woodard after attempting to rob him of $700 (his military pay), fined him $50, and left his injuries untreated so his family were not able to find him until weeks after the attack due to Woodward loosing his memory in addition to his sight.

Initially the NAACP brought the news of the attack to socially progressive news papers and black press, but the organization’s Executive Secretary Walter White and cartoonist Ollie Harrington (recently tasked with building out the NAACP’s public relations) wanted the assault to become national news, so they wrote a letter to Orson explaining what’s up.

And, indeed, with an affidavit from Woodward, Welles read an account by the man about the circumstances leading up to his assault, the attach and the resulting aftermath. The NAACP’s plan to bring Woodward’s attack to a wider international audience succeeded, with Welles covering the subject for four episodes in total and explicitly comparing the conduct of Shull and his men to that of the Nazis in the first episode.

"The boy saw him while he could still see, but of course he had no way of knowing what particular policeman it was who brought the justice of Dachau and Oswiecim to Aiken, South Carolina,” Welles said in that first broadcast. “He was just another white man with a stick, who wanted to teach a Negro boy a lesson—to show a Negro boy where he belonged: In the darkness.”

Naming the policeman Officer X, Welles addressed him directly. “Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour, you won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran,” Welles said. “Go on, suckle your anonymous moment while it lasts. You’re going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name! We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name. It’s going to rise out of the filthy deep like the dead thing it is.”

Welles and the NAACP subsequently worked out the names of the officers responsible, and pressured for Shull and his men to be prosecuted by the Truman administration. And, surprisingly, Harry Truman actually agreed and the racist cops were put on trial for their crime…

…And were found innocent by an all-white jury within 30 minutes. While a pro-segregationist congressman attempted to appeal to J. Edgar Hoover for the FBI to investigate Welles and in his “inflammatory broadcasts“.

The week following the final episode based on Woodard’s case, ABC informed Welles that they were cancelling his show, which would finish airing October 6, 1946.

Despite the lack of success in prosecuting the cops, however, the NAACP had brought enough national attention to the issue of police violence against the African American community to lead Truman establishing the Civil Rights Commission. Additionally, in July 1948 Truman issued two Executive Orders, banning racial discrimination in the military and desegregating the federal government.

Following the trial, Woodard would move to New York City, where he would eventually die in a Veterans Hospital in the Bronx in 1995. Shull would die in his hometown of Batesburg several years later at the age of 95, having faced no legal consequences for his actions.

April 30th marks the time of year known as Walpurgisnacht, which according to folklore was the time of year that witches gather on mountain tops and get up to the kinds of things that over-imaginative Christian folk imagined that unmarried women got up to when they were unsupervised. Hanging out with demons, cooking suspicious things in cauldrons over bonfires, dancing about with no clothes on, flying about on farming equipment, that kinda thing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Walpurgis Night, named for an England-born nun who became a saint after the citizens of the Bavarian town of Eichstätt called upon her to protect her from witches in the 800s, was something of a corruption of pre-Christian traditions that the Church came to disapprove of but as they weren’t able to get people to outright stop their traditions they changed the meaning instead.

So while previously it was a tradition many places in Europe to light bonfires on April 30th as part of the May Day spring celebrations on May 1st, the meaning was changed so that the bonfires folks would likely have made anyway were said to keep witches away instead, as May 1st was also the day Walpurga was made a saint.

In more recent years Walpurgisnacht, which is celebrated in both some central European and Scandanavian countries, has survived as a festival akin to Halloween in countries with a lot of Irish or American influence, complete with a tradition for young people to pull pranks, like trick or treating!

In 1919, the Boston Police Department announced their intention to go on strike in response to their low wages, poor living conditions (unmarried cops were expected to live in filthy, rat infested barracks), and having to pay for their own boots and uniforms (which occasionally got eaten by the aforementioned rats).

Contrasting with the somewhat infamous power wielded by police unions in the United States in the present, Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis and future president Governor Calvin Coolidge ignored their complaints. In their view, strikes were the work of undemocratic foreign communists, and thus threats by workers saying that they’ll go on strike should be ignored…

…Leading to the events of September 9, 1919, more than 1,100 Boston Police officers walked off the job, calling Curtis’ bluff.

This in turn lead to several hours of lawlessness within the city, as both poorer residents from Boston itself and criminals traveling into town by train promptly engaged in robbing stores, smashing windows and flipping over cars while what few cops left around were pelted with stones and bricks.

Coolidge attempted to hire students and faculty from the nearby Harvard University to act as a volunteer police force (you can probably imagine how that went), with the governor using his actions during the subsequent riots as a platform to run for president.

Eventually Boston’s Mayor Andrew Peters asked Governor Coolidge to call in the Massachusetts State Guard and local militia, who managed to gain some kind of control of the situation by shooting into the crowds, killing five.

After things calmed down and the strike ended, Curtis refused to rehire any of the officers that went on strike, with the press firmly blaming the strikers for the subsequent chaos, and seemingly out of spite gave the newly hired replacement cops the pay increase that the strikers had asked for. The cops of Boston wouldn’t be allowed to form a new union for another fifty years, and even then only after another strike.

In the early years of colonial Australia, rather than having a local mint to make regular currency the local economy operated on the barter system, with the various transported convicts being paid with alcohol rather than cash.

The side effect of this is that many local businessmen, many of whom either were in the military or were former military and thus had control over who got land and resources, could naturally rig things in such a way that they would make exponential profits by, say, illegally importing stills to inflate their profits, for one example.

Speaking of American cities with a reputation for being associated with crime, the circumstances of how Las Vegas became… y’know, LAS VEGAS were themselves kind of interesting.

Founded relatively recently in 1905, originally Las Vegas operated as a stop-over on the railway between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. It stayed this relatively small size until the early 1930s with the construction of the nearby Boulder (later Hoover) Dam.

Becausethe size of the construction project meant that there were literally thousands of workers wandering around with nothing to do, the decision was made to legalise gambling to both provide the workers with entertainment and to also provide a source of income for the town in the process.

Now, there were casinos operating in Las Vegas prior to the March 1931 decision to legalise it, but upon it’s legalisation there was a prompt explosion in the amount of casinos, bars and theatres in the city offering entertainment to the many visiting construction workers. Many of these theatres and casinos were owned and operated by the Mob, such as, famously, Bugsy Siegal, but interestingly the anti-gambling Church of Latter Days Saints have also had a strong presence in the city and in the establishment of its many casinos.

Side-Fact: For a city that’s gained a reputation as a holiday destination and entertainment centre, one of the most odd (and dangerous) offerings on display for visitors and guests came in the early 1950s with the advent of Atomic Tourism.

This basically being when you could just drive into the desert to see the US military detonate atomic bombs from relative safety, or even drink a cocktail from a hotel as you see the blasts go off in the distance.

Yes,this was a thing. And yes, there were people operating bus tours for people wanting to see the blasts up relatively close. Additionally, due to Las Vegas being Las Vegas, there was also a beauty test themed around the nuclear testing, with the final winner being a Lee Merlin who was crowned Miss Atomic Bomb in May 1957. Above ground atomic testing was banned by international treaty a few years later with the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1962.

In the days prior to the rise of the FBI, it was actually surprisingly common to find entire towns in the United States that acted as safe havens for various criminals, bank robbers and gangsters that were wanted in other parts of the country.

One famous example of this being St. Paul in Minnesota, which operated on the principle that as long as you’re not committing crimes WITHIN the city you were allowed to spend your time and loot there while you wait for the heat to die down back where you committed your original crime.

It was under this rule that enabled multiple infamous figures from the era, including the John Dillinger, Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson, and Ma Barker and her sons to all live in the town at one point or another.

The source of this odd arrangement came about by the “The O'Connor Layover Agreement”, a layover from the early 20th century police chief John J. O’Connor plan to have detectives placed at the Union Depot and send anyone they deemed to be a potential criminal back out town in order to keep crime rates down.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this system proved to be both popular among residents (considering the loosedefinition of what a “potential criminal”) looked like and massively open to corruption, as residents would vouch for out of towners they insisted were good guys which naturally led to all out bribery as cops were just paid by crooks on arrival to enter the city.

While crime rates within St Paul remained low, the Agreement was tolerated, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the arrangement that began with police corruption was eventually brought to a close with police corruption, when it was eventually revealed that one time Police Chief Thomas Brown had actually participated in the kidnapping of a local brewer in 1933 and a St Paul banker in 1934 respectively.

Eventually with the growth of interstate law enforcement, cities that ended up becoming heavily intertwined with crime became less common, but didn’t entirely vanish. For example, Ohio’s Youngstown was likewise heavily entrenched by the Mob from the 1930s through to the 70s, but unlike St Paul’s relative peace Youngstown eventually became known as Crimetown, USA or Bombtown due to the rapid spike in assassinations and bombings in the 60s and 70s.

Likewise Alabama’s Phenix City (yes, it’s spelt like that) also gained a reputation for crime and vice between the 30s and 50s that led to it gaining the nickname “Sin City“, with most city officials openly being bribed for their positions. By the 50s Phenix City’s reputation was so bad that General George Patton once threatened to bulldoze the place with tanks due to the amount of soldiers going there from the nearby army base only to promptly get drunk, beaten up, and robbed by the locals.

American Roger Ward Babson (July 6, 1875 – March 5, 1967) was famous for several things, among them he predicted and attempted to warn people about the 1929 Wall Street Crash which would directly lead to the Great Depression and contribute to the rise of Fascism.

However, besides theorising how money moves around, he had one true enemy. One so powerful he started an entire institute to study to try and fine a way to defeat. An enemy so powerful that he had three investigators permanently going over designs at the US patent office for inventions to combat them.

This enemy?

Gravity.

Following his sister and grandson both dying in separate swimming accidents, Babson felt that water gravity was the guilty party. As he stated in his 1948 essay ‘Gravity – Our Enemy Number One’,

Gradually I found that “Old Man Gravity” is not only directly responsible for millions of deaths each year, but also for millions of accidents … Broken hips and other broken bones as well as numerous circulatory, intestinal and other internal troubles are directly due to the people’s inability to counteract Gravity at a critical moment.

Applying the same methods that did him so well in the world of economics, Babson attempted to fund a means of studying gravity with his the Gravity Research Foundation (GRF), with the end goal being creating anti-gravity technology that can, for one example, end airplane crashes.

Despite Babson eventually dying in 1967, the GRF is still around, albeit only in the function of holding an annual essay competition. Previous winners of said competition include Stephen Hawking and George Smoot.

It’s widely known that the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane is based upon the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, including elements of his life such as his relationship with a much younger actress, his failed political career and how his palatial estate has a zoo in it because rich people are weird.

And while it is also pretty common knowledge that Hearst’s retaliation against the film may have led to it initially failing financially due to him banning his papers from even mentioning the film and thus preventing the movie from getting much needed publicity, the full extent of his retaliation against both Welles and the production is less well known.

For example, Hearst arranged a smear campaign against Welles to label him as a communist for his involvement with the film, a decision that led to the FBI opening a file on the actor/director/producer which kept him under surveillance from 1941 through to 1948. The idea that film criticising the rich must be in some way trying to undermine America also leading to the FBI investigating the creators of the later film It’s a Wonderful Life.

What is less well know is how Hearst used his clout to lean on the other film studios in Hollywood, in an attempt to get them to pressure Citizen Kane’s distributor RKO into not releasing the film. Indeed MGM’s Louis B. Mayer offered RKO $ 800,000 for the film so that they could burn all traces of it, an offer that the head of RKO refused.

Additionally, at one point a police investigator warned Welles not to return to his hotel room as a 14 year old girl had been put in his room’s closet and two Hearst-employed photographers were on standby to photograph Welles’ planned arrest. SO YEAH, in addition to trying to use the Red Scare to end Welles’ career Hearst also attempted to frame Orson as a sex offender.

However, despite Citizen Kane’s historical standing, the successful damage Hearst did to Welles’ career lingered for decades, with studio interference with his follow-up the Magnificent Ambersons leading to his getting disillusioned with the Hollywood studio system.

For roughly a century, my hometown was the location of the largest biscuit manufactuer in the UK, Huntley & Palmers, and even though they’ve not really been as big of a deal for some time, you can still see various buildings and parks in the area named after the two founders.

However, the popularity of the brand ended up leading to it taking an odd place in British LGBTQ history, all due to one guy’s decision to use the founders’ names as euphemisms.

See, in 1954 the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report after its Chair, Lord Wolfenden, was instituted to examine homosexuality and prostitution after multiple high-profile trials for “homosexual offences“.

Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time (lesbianism never was, but was still highly taboo) and the Wolfenden Report would actually play an important role in in it getting decriminalised in 1967 (albeit for men over the age of 21).

However, the decision was made by Wolfenden and the panel to use Huntley and Palmers as internal euphemisms for “homosexuals“ and “prostitutes“ so not to “scandalise” the secretaries who were writing down the minutes of the meetings surrounding their report.

So yeah. That’s how the British Isles’ largest biscuit brand accidentally got tied to LGBTQ history!

Following the discovery of gold outside of San Francisco in the 1840s, thousands flocked to the city on the way to the gold fields. While some traveled across land, but many chose to get there by ship, and as a consequence of majority of the crews also abandoning ship to go and look for gold alongside the passengers.

The result was San Francisco Bay quickly filling up with empty ships like an airport car-park as captains were left with no crew to sail their boats on to their next destination. Eventually the ships were themselves stripped of furnishings and anything else useful, and some were consequently brought ashore to be used as building materials in the city proper.

Amusingly a high number of the folks that sailed to San Francisco during the gold rush were actually Australians, who came to the city in such numbers it lead to the establishment of an unofficial Sydney Town. The local San Franciscans didn’t take kindly to the arriving Australian gold prospectors, whom they called “Sydney Ducks“, and accused them of bring crime and drunkenness to the city.

Many of these Australian prospectors would end up returning home (followed by many Americans going the opposite direction) following the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851, however.

Feburary 24th marks the 80th anniversary of the incident that was known contemporaneously as the Battle of Los Angeles. In early 1942, rumours of an attack on Los Angeles by the Imperial Japanese armed forces sent the inhabitants into a panic, leading to defence forces firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the sky… At an attack that didn’t exist.

Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, understandably the general public in the US was on edge, and following an attack on the Ellwood Oil Fields near Santa Barbara on Feburary 23rd, Los Angelenos were even more so.

So when the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) on the 24th issued a warning that there was potentially an imminent attack that was going to take place on mainland California… folk when bananas when the US army announced that there were hostile aircraft approaching, leading to the air raid alarms to go off in Los Angeles as lights searched for enemy planes and anti-aircraft crews pumped over a 1000 rounds of ammunition into the sky.

Embarrassingly though, there were no actual aircraft, with a commission later concluding that it was a false alarm, with any supposed sightings being caused by misplaced weather balloons illuminated by searchlights that people mistook for planes. This explanation, naturally, lead to both contemporary newspapers accusing the government of trying to cover-up a potential attack… in addition to the the whole affair later being seized by the UFOlogy community, who claimed that the aircraft or lights folks claimed to see in one of the main photos of the event (see main image) where actually alien visitors.

In any case, even if the attack wasn’t real the damage that came afterwards certainly was, with numerous buildings and cars getting destroyed by shell debris that dropped back to Earth in addition to the three people who died in car accidents in the ensuing panic and additional two who died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hours-long cacophony of gunfire and sirens.

During the Second World War, Iceland was invaded and occupied by first the British and the Americans out of a fear that it would be used as a base by the Germans, who had themselves occupied Denmark, the nation that previously also governed Iceland via their countries sharing a king.

The reaction to the occupation was mixed, as while the Americans did things like build Reykjavík Airport, the Allied presence in the previously neutral kingdom made the local Icelandic people targets of the Nazis, with some 200 people killed by German mines, U-Boats and aircraft. The Icelandic people did use the time to officially declare themselves to be an independent republic separate from the Danish monarchy in

Whilethe Allied invasion of Iceland was justified by it being done preemptively in case the German did it (in addition to being surprisingly cordial and nonviolent, with accounts from the time being mostly Icelandic folk watching the British and Americans with bemusement), the same could not be said for the invasion of San Marino.

The small neutral Republic of San Marino, which is surrounded by all sides by the Italian peninsula, had officially declared that they weren’t involved in the War from the start, and for the most part had been left alone by the fascist government of Italy.

This came to an end in 1943, when Allied forces heading North through Italy first bombed San Marino under the mistaken belief that it had been occupied by the Germans (killing 35 people), closely followed by the German ACTUALLY invading (ignoring the signs the locals had put up on the border declaring their neutrality) to turn the country into defensive position against the Allies’ advance.

Once it was confirmed that Germans were actually now in the city, British and Indian forces launched into the Battle of San Marino against the invading German forces. The British themselves occupied San Marino for a grand total of one day, before leaving the nation in the care of local defence forces, as the Allied advance pushed further North the next day.

Some fifty years after the infamous Salem Witch Trials, the British colonial city of New York was itself subject to a period of murderous mass hysteria in what became known as the Conspiracy of 1741.

In the spring of 1741, thirteen fires sprung up around Lower Manhattan, with no official culprit found, rumours began to swirl around that it was a result of Catholic saboteurs, born of the then contemporary war between Britain and Spain, as well as supposed competition between enslaved people and poor white settlers. Combined with a particularly harsh winter, tensions were high in what was, at the time, the second largest hub of the slave trade outside of Charleston, South Carolina, with New York City becoming a power keg awaiting a reason to explode…

The metaphorical match for this powder keg being a 16 year old indentured servant Irish girl by the name of Mary Burton, who when arrested while in possession of stolen goods, immediately accused others of being part of a conspiracy by slaves and poor white people to burn down the city, kill all the wealthy white men, and form their own government (complete with a king).

Just as with Salem, the hundreds of people arrested under the suspicion of being part of the conspiracy (a conspiracy that historians claim likely never existed), with many of the slaves, freed black people, and lower class white people absolving to save themselves by accusing others as “also” being involved.

In all, 34 people were executed in relation to this possibly fictional potential uprising, including 17 black men, two white men, two white women were hanged, and with an additional 13 black people who were burnt at the stake as, again, being suspects in an uprising that likely didn’t exist. The two supposed ringleaders, a white cobbler and tavern owner called John Hughson and a slave named Caesar, where gibbeted and left out to rot as an example to other potential revolutionaries in the future.

An additional 84 men and women were transported to the Caribbean to be sold into slavery for their part in the “conspiracy“, while 72 men where spared death with the lighter sentence of just getting exiled from the colony.

Again, all of these deaths came about over a fear of an revolt against slavery that historically probably was never real in the first place. Unlike the Salem Trials, which were less about actual witchcraft and more about paranoid superstition (possibly combined with ergot poisoning) being used by locals as an excuse to settle grudges against their neighbours, the 1741 “conspiracy“ was itself likely a product of those with an investment in the status quo violently protecting their wealth against even the suggestion of emancipated slaves and lower class white people. There was no conspiracy, but the authorities demonstrated in no uncertain terms what they would do to those who dared to seek freedom on their own terms.

Curiously, the musical Chicago(which debuted as a stage production in 1975 and later adapted into a film in 2002), was actually based on a real murder trial in the titular city… Albeit the show is filtered somewhat through several other fictionalised accounts of the case, such as a 1926 play of the same name which was itself made into a silent comedy-drama in 1927.

In 1924, 24 year old bookkeeper Beulah Annan shot then man whom she had been having an affair with, Harry Kalstedt, in the back. Her accounts of what happened after this varied from telling to telling, but the most famous version is that they were drinking wine in her bedroom, as you do, but they got into a violent argument. Belulah said they both reached for the gun, and as she got to it first, she then shot him as he was putting his hat and coat on.

She then reportedly watched him die slowly on her floor for the next several hours as she played the Hula Lou foxtrot record as she drank martinis. Once he was dead, she called her husband, Albert “Al” Annan, to tell him that she had killed a man who had tried to “make love to her“.

The resulting murder trial was… a mess. The fact that the murderer was an attractive young woman and the “seedy details” of her affair and the crime itself were quickly seized by the tabloid press of the time, thrusting Beulah into the limelight as a kind of celebrity.

Her husband Albert believed her tales that it was self-defence, even though her account of what happened and why changed multiple times over the course of the trial. But his hiring her the best lawyers he could afford with their savings worked, with Beluah managing to get off with an acquittal… Whereupon she promptly dumped him, telling the press immediately after she was confirmed to be a free woman: “I have left my husband, he is too slow“.

Following the trial, Beluah costed on her infamy for a time, getting married twice more (once to a boxer, which ended in divorce due to his being abusive). Eventually, four years after the trial Beluah passed away from TB at Chicago Fresh Air Sanatorium, where she was staying under the name Beulah Stephens. It was 1928, and he was 28 years old.

So yeah, kind of bizarre that this case has had multiple interpretations in multiple genres over the years, I wonder what it is about this case in particular that seemed to catch the attention of the audience to the degree that the interpretations of Beluah’s crime were all very successful in their ways.

When the Black Death finally made its way to England in 1348 after travelling across Asia and Europe, it was met with much amusement by the Scots, who said the English’s misfortune ‘had befallen them through the revenging hand of God’ and eagerly awaited the ‘foul death of England‘.

Now due to Scotland’s climate, they had escaped the plague for a tad longer than some other countries, due to it being too cold for the fleas that transmitted the disease, but this streak came to an abrupt end in 1350 with the decision by some Scottish nobles to send soldiers South with the intention of conquering England…

Only for the Scottish soldiers to catch the plague after attacking Northern English towns and cities like Durham, quickly realise that they weren’t as immune to the disease as they originally thought, and then as the armies fled back but North the rats and fleas came with them and introduced the plague to Scotland en masse.

As contemporary English chronicler Henry Knighton wrote: “The Scots, hearing of the dreadful plague among the English, suspected that it had come about through the vengeance of God, and, according to the common report, they were accustomed to swear “be the foul deth (sic) of Engelond (sic)”. Believing that the wrath of God had befallen the English, they assembled in Selkirk forest with the intention of invading the kingdom, when the fierce mortality overtook them, and in a short time about 5,000 perished.

“As the rest, the strong and the feeble, were preparing to return to their own country, they were followed and attacked by the English, who slew countless numbers of them.”

In a far less murderous example fo history repeating itself, there has been a recent spike in corona virus cases in Scotland in the past couple of months… which people have concluded is due to folks coming down to London for the Euro 2020 football matches, with 2000 cases being linked to linked to people travelling South for the event.

So yeah, social distancing. It’s there for a reason, and travelling in large numbers to an area you know is riddled with disease is a bad idea.