February 1, 1999
In Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1900, a fire destroyed the docks of two ocean steamship
companies, burned down two ocean liners, and incinerated 326 people. (Dreamland:
America At The Dawn Of The 20th Century)
February 2, 1999
In 1978, Dan White, a former policeman, shot and
killed San FranciscoHarvey Milk. Whitepsychiatrists to originate what is
now called the "Twinkie
defense." The defense claimed that WhiteTwinkies, Coca-Cola and potato
chips resulted in extreme
blood sugar level variations exacerbating his manic depression
which, in turn, led to his psychopathic behavior. He served
only 4 years in prison for Manslaughter. Upon his parole, he
committed suicide with a gun. (San Francisco
Confidential).
February 3, 1999
On February 3, 1998, during a routine U.S. Marine training mission in the
Italian Alps, a Prowler jet swooped low over the ski resort at Cavalese,
severing a cable and sending a gondola filled with skiers plunging 320
feet to the ground, killing all 20 aboard. (People, 2/8/99)
Addendum courtesy Andrew Humes: "It was recently put in the paper
that the Marine pilots were flying according to an incomplete map,
something unacceptable in modern military. They were flying an apporoved
low-altitude exercise according to the map provided."
February 4, 1999
Ryukai Matsushima, the chief monk at Kudokuin Buddhist Temple, glances
around the group's small graveyard a few hundred feet from his office and
surveys a jumble of graves crammed into every available square inch. With
more than 125 million rapidly aging people packed into land the size of
California, Japan is running out of more than just housing and living
space. It's also running out of room for the dead. "Unless we try
something new, all of Japan will turn into a
graveyard," Matsushima says. And indeed, Japan is trying something new.
The pressure to squeeze more and more human remains into less and less
space has produced a blizzard of innovative burial options. Grieving
Japanese are lining up to put their relatives in group graves
and burial condominiums. The government is offering cheap lockers. For
high-tech mourners, there are indoor revolving graveyards, and even
virtual tombs on the Internet. Already, more than 97 percent of Japanese
dead are cremated, most in free or heavily subsidized state-run
crematoriums. And while many U.S. graves resemble beds -- reflecting the
Christian focus on a symbolic rebirth of the entire body -- Japanese tombs
can be tall and compact because Buddhists believe the ancestral spirit
remains in the bone remnants. Even so, graveyard space is evaporating.
The problem is exacerbated by the common practice of burying only
first-born sons -- who also inherited most of the wealth -- and their
wives in the Japanese ancestral tomb, with others left to start their own
line. This rather rigid system has frayed as cities expand, nuclear
families break down and more married women balk at spending eternity with
the in-laws. (The Los Angeles Times)
Tharpa writes: Just for the record: It is not a Buddhist belief that, "the ancestral spirit remains in the bone remnants." This may be a Japanese belief, but there is no foundation for it in the teachings of the Buddha and I have never come across it before.
February 7, 1999
Dental Distress: In July, the Tennessee Supreme Court reinstated patient
Frances Blanchard's lawsuit against Memphis dentist Arlene Kellum for
allegedly committing battery by attempting to pull out all 32 of her teeth
in one sitting. (Blanchard, who has a gum disease, said she thought it
would be done over several visits.) Kellum was half done when Blanchard
fainted and had to be hospitalized for six days. And a jury in Oklahoma
City awarded $1.3 million to Mark
Macsenti in June for brain damage he suffered when dentist Jon D. Becker
went to sleep during an appointment and left Macsenti hooked up to nitrous
oxide for about 10 hours. (News Of The Weird)
February 8, 1999
A Nigerian man was arrested under a bridge in Lagos in possession of
roasted human limbs and the bones of former victims he had eaten, local
newspapers said. The papers said Thursday police arrested the man
Wednesday after residents heard the cries of a woman he was about to kill.
"Some of the limbs and feet on the man's grill are believed to be those of
a young woman, going by the size of the feet and the long black permed
hair," the Guardian newspaper said. "The rest of the body... was said to
have been eaten up before the arrest," it said. The papers said the man
was mentally ill and had lived under the bridge for years. Papers quoted
residents of the working class district as saying the man had long been
suspected of murdering people to sell their body parts for use in ritual
sacrifices. (Netcenter
Offbeat News, donated by Michelle Moreno)
February 9, 1999
Two amputated human feet have been found in an alley-way in the southeast
Ohio town of Pomeroy. Police Chief Jeff Miller says the victim was
white... but he doesn't know the age, sex or circumstances involved.
Miller says there was no blood at the scene... leading him to think the
feet had not been severed recently. The Franklin County coroner's office
is examining them.
Update: In reference to the February 9, 1999 Morbid fact the feet turned
out to be that of a bear. A man from Athens somehow altered them to look
like human feet. He was arrested and charged with causing a panic. -
Kimberly Wieland (Yahoo!
News, donated by Linda)
February 10, 1999
The Benders were German immigrants who came to America to carve
themselves a piece of the American dream. Trouble was, they took the
carving part literally and became notorious as America's first
serial-killer family. William John "Pa" Bender moved his bizarre
little family from parts unknown to Mound Valley, Kansas in 1871 and
opened a dingy little saloon. Ma Bender spoke only German and suckled
two unusual children, the elder being John Bender, whose IQ was in the
idiot range and who had a tendency to cackle like a lunatic. Daughter
Kate Bender was a well-rounded specimen of young womanhood. A
self-described Mentalist, Kate wasn't without earthly talents either:
she was a regular Annie Oakley with a carving knife. In Mound Valley,
the Benders built their dream business, a little saloon that beckoned
locals - and more important, lonely wayfarers - with food, drink, and
... well, Kate Bender's ample hospitality. The Bender brand of
hospitality was so overwhelming, some guests never left. But in March
of 1873, after three years of uninterrupted "business", the Bender
fortunes were about to change. Dr. William H. York, a prominent
Kansas politician returning to his home in Independence after visiting
his brother, rode into the Benders' lives one mild evening. As was
their routine, the Benders knocked York unconscious and quickly
dispatched him to a secret 6-foot-by-5-foot pit under the floorboards
where Kate finished the job, slitting the customer's throat, and
within moments, the Benders had returned order to their respectable
little saloon. But Dr. York was hardly the sort of itinerant loner
the Benders had become accustomed to "detouring". Troubled by his
brother's mysterious disappearance, Col. A.M. York gathered a posse
and retraced Dr. York's path which took him directly to the Benders.
They admitted having seen the doctor and said they sent him on his
way, and the York posse believed them. However, the Benders soon
vanished and were never seen or heard from again. A search of the
garden behind the Bender Saloon turned up eleven corpses, one of them
a little girl. Their skulls had been crushed by a blunt object. And
all for less than $1,000 which the Benders had lifted from their
victims. (The Big Book Of The Weird Wild
West)
February 11, 1999
In 1904, a huge fire in Baltimore burned for thirty hours and
destroyed 2,600 buildings in an eighty-block area of the city's
business district. The fire was the worst thing to happen to an
American city since the Chicago Fire of 1871. Two months later, a
similar fire destroyed much of Toronto, Canada. (Dreamland: America At
The Dawn Of The Twentieth Century)
February 13, 1999
Crowned Tsar of Russia at the age of 14, Ivan IV (1530-84) instigated
'the Terror' against the fuedal aristocracy, during which thousands were
killed. He took pleasure in torturing his foes, was married five times
(his wives had a strange habit of dying young) and was renowned for his
practice of sexual indulgence of every conceivable kind. Cheerful Ivan
celebrated his inauguration by hanging 30 men on the Moscow highway, had
Prince Shuisky eaten alive by his own hunting dogs and even accidentally
killed his own son. (Bizarre)
February 15, 1999
In what may be one of the most heinous examples of police
corruption and cover-up, Haj Muhammad Mustapha Tabet, a 54-year-old
police chief of Morocco, was charged with rape, deflowering virgins,
inciting debauchery, abduction, and assault of 518 women in his flat
over a seven-year period. Tabet secretly recorded the encounters on
some 118 videotapes, said to be "not only pornographic but also horror
films". His supervisor and ten other senior police officers were also
charged with obstruction of justice and destroying evidence. At his
trial Tabet, who was married with two wives and five children, claimed
that the women were willing sexual partners. He suffered from sexual
obsessions, he said, and claimed to have had sex with 1,600 women in
the past three years. The court didn't buy it. On March 15, 1993 he
was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death. Five months
later he was executed before a firing squad. Tabet got off relatively
February 16, 1999
Since 1960, some 300 divers have died while exploring
Florida's underwater caves. (National Geographic)
February 17, 1999
In January, 1998, devastating El Nino rains (the second worst in
history) struck Peru, causing deadly mudslides and flooding. Even the
dead were displaced: flooding from a ruptured earthen dam destroyed a
cemetery, floating caskets and skeletons through the streets of
Mampuesto. (National Geographic)
February 20, 1999
In separate incidents over a three-day period in July, three cousins
in Shasta County in northern California lay down on or dove onto
Highway 89 directly in front of approaching cars, apparently on
purpose, resulting in the death of one and serious injuries to the
other two. There was no evidence of suicidal intent, and according
to the Redding Record Searchlight newspaper, "Authorities are
baffled . . . and fear more members of the large family may partake
in [this] odd behavior." Killed was Lance Wilson, 19; injured were
Mark Wilson, 20, and Lee Alex Gonzalez, 18. (News Of The
Weird)
February 21, 1999
During World War II, the Japanese procured numerous jugun ianfu
("comfort women"), females imported from Korea, the Philippines, Burma,
China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Netherlands to cool the jets of the rank
and file. Not that the women had much choice in the matter. More than
200,000 girls and women were forcibly inducted in the program, half of
them dying as a direct result of the treatment they endured. Many were
detained in the program 3 to 5 years, and were raped 5-20 times a day. At
an average of 10 rapes a day, 5 days every week, each girl was violated at
least 7,500 times during their 3 years of service. (Criminal And
Deviant Sexuality)
February 23, 1999
On October 12, 1915 Edith Cavell, 49, a British nurse tending to
the war wounded at a Red Cross hospital in Brussels, was executed by a
German firing squad for her part in helping some 200 Allied POWs
escape to the Dutch border. The Allied governments denounced the
action as murder. German officials defended it as necessary "to
frighten those who might presume on their sex to take part in
enterprises punishable with death." (The People's Almanac
#2)
February 25, 1999
Undoubtedly the most dangerous singular sexual activity would be
autoerotic asphyxiation. Usually performed by adolescent males, this
technique is the deliberate constriction of blood flowing to the brain
while masturbating. The lack of oxygen produces lightheadedness,
supposedly enhancing the sexual experience. As you can imagine,
squeezing the blood out of your brain isn't the healthiest of
activities. On occasion, the carotid artery collapses, producing
unconsciousness in seconds, and eventually death. One researcher
estimates 500 to 1000 deaths annually nationwide, so this is not
something you should approach offhandedly. Not only do you run the
risk of dying, you also risk looking incredibly stupid when they find
you! (Criminal And
Deviant Sexuality)
February 28, 1999
An entire soccer team was killed by lightning during a match in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, while the home team escaped untouched.
The 11 dead were aged between 20 and 35 and 30 other people received
burns at the match at Basanga, in eastern Kasai province.
(Bizarre)
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