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A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “A Dog Named Rico.” I think he’s about 15 now and still trucking along, but he’s gone mostly deaf. It’s kind of funny that whenever I snuggle him I kind of have to yell “You’re a good boy!” so he can hear it. I do that because he LOVES being told he’s a good boy while getting s…

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Sometimes storm chasers die when that tornado turns in a direction they’re not anticipating and they’re all oh fuck we are so fucking fucked. Same thing happens to volcano chasers, when an unexpected pyroclastic flow comes at them at 400mph and they only have time to say “Oh, fu—.”

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 3, 1991--

French couple Katia and Maurice Krafft had a good run. For a quarter century they were pioneers in the tracking and recording of the world’s most active volcanoes. The two met in university and had a shared love of mountains that go boom. The couple first visited Mount Stromboli in Italy to record its continuous eruptions. They discovered people and governments were willing to pay for that kind of footage and analysis, and a lifelong career as globetrotting volcanologists was born.

The pair was fearless, which is a necessary trait when your job involves hiking up an explode mountain that others are fleeing from. They were often the first on the scene of a newly erupting volcano, and were rock stars in the world of erupting rocks. Unfortunately, you can only say fuck you Mother Nature so many times before Mother Nature decides “No, fuck you” and melts your ass and your fancy volcano suit too.

Maurice had once said that when he died, he wanted it “to be at the edge of a volcano.” On June 3, 1991, Mt. Unzen in Japan said sure dude, no problem. But it wasn’t just his and Katia’s luck that ran out that day. So did the luck of an American volcanologist named Harry Glicken, along with 40 firefighters and journalists covering the eruption.

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Maurice had also said that despite wanting to die at the edge of a volcano, he figured the probability of that happening was “quite low.” Well, they were at the edge of the volcano, and despite being experts in predicting when a boom mountain is going to go big boom—knowledge they shared with the world and likely was used to save lives by letting people know when it was time to fuck off from an area that’s about to become seriously unpleasant—they should have watched Raiders of the Lost Ark where Belloq says, “Archeology is not an exact science. It does not deal in time schedules.” Yeah, neither does volcanology. Shit explodes when it damn well wants to.

Unexpectedly, a cloud of gas, rock, and ash superheated to 800° Celsius swept up and over the plateau the group had selected to make their observations from, instantly killing 43 people.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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Freddie said it best: “I want to ride my bicycle!” Alas, unless I want to drown, I can’t for a few days. It’s doing the cats and dogs thing in Calgary, and people are worried about flooding again. It flooded so bad in 2013 that parts of the bike paths along the river washed away, and it took a few years to rebuild them. …

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Sometimes your concerns about the guy your daughter is dating are justified. Born Pearl Taylor in Ontario, Canada to a good family, she eloped with a bad boy at the age of 16. Twelve years later she committed one of the last stagecoach robberies in U.S. history.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 30, 1899--

Her family was affluent, and they sent Pearl to an expensive boarding school where she met a drunken gambler and womanizer named Frank Hart and she said oh fuck yeah he’s dreamy, and married him. Big surprise, he was an abusive piece of shit, and she left him and returned to her mother. But like many who are abused, Pearl was under the spell of the controlling Frank and she went back to him, then left him again and returned again several times. She had two children with Hart, sending them to be raised by her mother.

Pearl left her husband again in 1893, and earned her living in mining camps as a cook and sex worker. During this time she developed a fondness for booze, cigars, and morphine. She still loved her mom though, and in 1899 she learned her mother was gravely ill and was desperate to travel home to see her. But she had no money for the fare. I know, she said, I’ll rob a stagecoach. She involved a man with the alias “Joe Boot” in her scheme, but neither were criminal masterminds, and they didn’t think about how to get away with their caper.

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On May 30, 1899, Pearl, her hair cut short and wearing men’s clothing, along with Joe, held up a stagecoach outside the city of Globe, Arizona. There was no one riding shotgun because it had been years since anyone robbed a stagecoach and the driver was all the fuck you doing? People don’t rob stagecoaches anymore. But Pearl said hands up motherfucker my mom is sick.

They got $400 from the passengers, and Pearl returned a dollar to each of them for a night’s food and lodging. Then the pair fucked off into the bush. Posse time!

While trying to avoid the law they got lost and rode in circles, and six days later the sheriff and his men came upon the sleeping thieves. Joe said hey I give up and Pearl said you’ll never take me alive and fought like a rabid wildcat overdosed on Adderall. But yeah, they still took her alive.

A few days later she used her beauty and charms to break out of jail, but her freedom was short-lived. Her exploits made her a celebrity. She was sentenced to five years and served two. Afterward, she became part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for a short time, and was involved in several petty crimes. Her second marriage, which lasted 50 years, was a quieting influence on Pearl. She led a private life from then on, living to be 84.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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The odds were one in fifty-seven million. No fertility treatments. Just a married couple living in a farmhouse in central Ontario, Canada, who did what married couples do and happened to make five identical girls. Then the government took the babies away and put them on display. Because, money.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 28, 1932--

The Dionne Quintuplets, born on May 28, 1934, were two months premature. Delivered by obstetrician Dr. Allan Dafoe and two midwives, they became the first quintuplets to survive to adulthood, but their childhood was totally fucked-up.

News of the unusual birth spread, and everyone wanted a peek. The Chicago World’s Fair, with pressure from Dr. Dafoe and the family pastor, convinced the parents to sign a contract saying they could display the quints. But Mom and Dad realized their mistake and decided to sign them over to the Red Cross to get out of the state fair contract.

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Instead, the parents went to Chicago to make stage appearances as the mother and father of the famous babies, and—hypocrisy alert!—the premier of Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn said, “Oh, they’re bad parents who will exploit them, so let’s ram through the ‘Dionne Quintuplets Act’ so the government will be their guardians (and we can exploit them instead).” Paraphrased.

Three thousand tourists a day flocked to the government-built nursery and controlled compound to watch them play. The kids had minimal contact with their parents, despite Dad setting up a souvenir shop across the street. The attraction was called “Quintland” and was the province’s biggest tourist trap of the time, netting more visitors than Niagara Falls.

The five girls appeared in three feature films, and were used to hawk products such as soap, toothpaste, and chocolate bars. And guess who was chief overseer of the girls? The same doc who delivered them. Dafoe made the modern equivalent of close to three million dollars off them as the celebrity doc of the day.

The quints were returned to their parents when they were nine, but it wasn’t a happy reunion. Their parents, also made wealthy by their children’s labor, had since had three more kids, and treated the returning girls poorly. In 1995 the three surviving sisters accused their father of having sexually abused them as teens. Two years later they wrote an open letter to the parents of the newly born McCaughey Septuplets cautioning them to not put the babies’ lives on display, because their lives had “been ruined by the exploitation we suffered.”

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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“Incel” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate.” This fuckless—I mean feckless—group is comprised almost exclusively of young men, usually white, who lament their inability to get laid. It’s a toxic online subculture that despises women while also wanting to use them for sex. But it’s not really about the sex. Rather, incels are a hate group that cannot abide having their sense of entitlement thwarted. They want to conquer the bodies of beautiful women to gain status in the male hierarchy, or some dumbfuck bullshit idea like that.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 23, 2014—

The Isla Vista, California, massacre on May 23, 2014, brought the word “incel” into the common vernacular. The term was actually coined by a woman in the ’90s as a way to help people. But like many things it was co-opted and warped by men like Elliot Rodger.

Rodger, a 22-year-old virgin, couldn’t find a girlfriend, and to him that was enough to justify mass murder. But not before writing a 107,000-word hate-filled manifesto about how much he despised women for “starving him of sex.” Using a combination of stabbing, shooting, and his car as a weapon, he murdered six people and wounded fourteen others during his rampage before putting his gun to his own head.

I wish people bent on murder-suicide would do it in the reverse order.

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To give you an idea of how fucked-up the incel community is, they anointed Rodger “Saint Elliot” because he “martyred” himself to the cause. Incels number in the tens of thousands online, and several mass murders have been committed by them in North America, resulting in dozens of deaths. A shift in how these killings are treated came as a result of a February 24, 2020, stabbing attack in Toronto that killed one woman and injured another. A minor-aged male incel was charged. Police later labeled it an act of terrorism.

And that is an accurate determination. Incels are as radicalized as any terror group. They have their own lexicon to slot people into various groups. They are nihilists who feel their lives are doomed due to not being considered conventionally attractive, so burn the world down. But they are not all beyond hope. There are many former incels. Learn the terminology and seek to intervene if you know someone who is at risk of being sucked into this terrorist organization.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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Greetings from Ottawa. I’m writing this on my pocket intergalactic space transponder so please forgive my brevity and any typos.

My wife and I have traveled to Ontario for a wedding and decided to take a few days to visit Canada’s capital. I was here once on business 27 years ago for a single day in the middle of winter…

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Auschwitz. The name is instantly recognizable, sending shivers down the spine of anyone possessing a modicum of humanity. Truth is stranger than fiction, and also more terrifying. This was not a solitary house of horrors, but 22 of them, an assembly line of death that revealed the depths of depravity to which our species is capable of sinking.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 20, 1940--

Located 30 miles southwest of Kraków, Auschwitz had been a Polish Army barracks. Germany invaded Poland the previous summer and had been on a spree of arresting a variety of Polish citizens ever since. Psychotic douchebag motherfucking piece of elephant excrement Heinrich Himmler, known as the “architect of the Holocaust,” approved the location as a concentration camp in April of 1940, and on May 20 the first 30 prisoners arrived.

The first to arrive were “career criminals” who were made into functionaries to handle the administrative tasks of running the camp, so fewer SS (fucking Nazis) were needed on staff. And these were some sadistic shitweasels. A month later when Polish inmates began to arrive, the functionaries were anything but kind. These first 30 prisoners killed many of their fellow inmates.

By the spring of 1941, over 10,000 prisoners were housed in Auschwitz, most of them Polish. At first it was resistance fighters, anti-Nazis, intellectuals, and politicians sent to the camp. However, once Hitler declared his “Final Solution” to “the Jewish question” the place was transformed into a death camp.

It became a death camp because it was conveniently centralized in the Germans’ conquered territories as well as close to rail lines for the transport of the doomed, and the fucking Nazis were all about efficiency in their mass murder.

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Not everyone was immediately murdered. If you could work, they’d work and starve you to death for the war effort rather than use gas. The camp grew in size during the war, and during its operation at least 1.1 million human beings were exterminated behind its walls, almost a million of them Jewish. There was also horrific medical experimentation by Josef Mengele. He earned the nickname “Angel of Death” and was never brought to justice for his myriad crimes.

As the Soviet Red Army closed in toward the end of 1944, the Germans began to destroy the evidence of what they’d done, burning records and buildings alike. What followed was the “Auschwitz death march” of 60,000 prisoners to other camps farther away from the advancing Soviets. Those who survived the march were put on trains destined for camps in Germany.

When the Soviets entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found 7,600 sick and starving prisoners who had been left behind, along with piles of corpses. Holocaust denial is illegal in sixteen European countries, including Poland, as well as in Israel. The fact that such laws are necessary is yet another condemnation of our species.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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“Okay, so, like” *takes hit from joint* “We build a bomb, right? But it’s not a regular bomb. *another hit* It’s, like, a bouncing bomb. A bomb that can bounce ... on water. And then, and then, it hits this Nazi dam ... and BLAMMO!” *uncontrollable giggling*

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 17, 1943--

In the 1982 film Conan, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dad tells him about the “riddle” of steel, but he didn’t mention anything about hydroelectric dams that were critical to its mass production. World War II was very much a conflict of metal used to rend flesh from bone.

Ew. Anyway, there were hydroelectric dams in Northwest Germany generating power to make steel and the Brits wanted to blow that shit up. Problem was, the accuracy of bomber aircraft at the time was ... not so good. That’s why they preferred to blow up entire cities and say, “Eh, good enough.”

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There were torpedo nets around the dams, so that wasn’t going to work, and the idea came about to create a cylindrical-shaped bomb whirled to a backward spin of 500 rpm that would skip like a flat stone across the water, hit the dam wall, sink, then blow that damn dam to damnation. But you know how when you skip a stone you need to throw it low to the water? These fuckers had to fly low.

They flew low most of the way, to avoid radar detection. Only about a hundred feet. Nineteen Lancaster bombers were involved in the operation, and one got so low its bomb was ripped off by ocean waves, and two others crashed into power lines. Did I mention this was at night? Early in the morning of May 17, 1943, the surviving aircrews approached a number of German dams, getting as low as 60 feet above the water and charging straight at the walls before hitting release.

Two dams were destroyed and a third was damaged. Of the 19 aircraft involved in the mission, eight didn’t return. Things sucked more for those on ground. About 1,600 died from the dam destruction, mostly civilians, a lot of them Soviet prisoners who were forced laborers.

It was such a daring raid the “Dam Busters” became front page news worldwide, making it an important propaganda win. From a larger strategic point of view, it was at first thought to have been only a modest success, and the head of Bomber Command thought it a waste of resources. After all, the fucking Nazis rebuilt the dams within five months. But more recent historical analysis proclaims that dozens of bridges and war production facilities for 40 miles downstream were destroyed, and thousands of acres of farmland needed to feed the Nazi war effort were ruined. A German report said the event resulted in “a considerable loss of production.”

It’s believed the raid, called Operation Chastise, diverted considerable resources to both rebuild and protect the dams against future attacks, resulting in significantly reduced defenses faced by the Allies in the D-Day raid on Normandy a year later.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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Maybe don’t read this one while you’re having breakfast. The idea of eating peoplemeat gives me the barfies. But if you get hungry enough, and cousin Jedediah has gone to the great beyond and isn’t using those thighs anyway, and that’s all there is to eat ... you might decide to go Donner Party on his frozen ass.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 12, 1846--

My kingdom for a fucking GPS. The post-apocalyptic movies with roving hordes of cannibals have me thinking I’d just rather die. Going cannibal to survive a winter lost in the mountains while you hope to make it back to civilization? Okay. Cannibal forever because society collapsed? Excuse me while I leap from this very high cliff.

I’ve been to the Midwest, and I’ve been to California. I can understand the desire to leave the former for the latter. And that’s what the pioneering Donner-Reed party did on May 12, 1846. Leaving Missouri on the Oregon Trail, they decided hey let’s try this unproven shortcut. Oh, shit. That wasn’t a short cut at all and now we’re way behind schedule. Good thing we left early in the season. Wait. You’re saying we should have started a month earlier? Well, crud.

Now we’re in the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s November but it’s only a hundred miles to go. Come on, Donner clan! We can do it! It’s not gonna snow early this year. Famous last words. It did snow early. They were so close, and yet so very fucked.

The mountains went from passable to a giant frozen roadblock. They were trapped. Eighty-one people made camp at Truckee Lake—now called Donner Lake because some person in charge of renaming shit was a sick motherfucker—which is at 6,000 feet elevation and not far from Lake Tahoe. More than half of the 81 were under the age of 18, and six of them were infants.

Now the nasty stuff. A month after getting stuck, 17 men, women, and even children tried to hike out. Called the “Forlorn Hope,” they got real hungry and thought about drawing lots for a human sacrifice to eat. Or maybe fight a duel with the loser becoming trail mix. Then some of them up and conveniently died the natural way and got turned into Donner kebobs. Two in the hiking party were Native Americans who refused to go cannibal, and they fled the group. But they were hunted down and shot because the other hikers were all hey we can’t let that food get away! Seven of those hikers made it to safety.

Back at Truckee Lake, they ate the pack animals and the dogs and tree bark and, occasionally, each other. It’s estimated half those left behind resorted to cannibalism. Starting in February, three months after they were first trapped, the rescue began. It took a couple of months to lead all the survivors out to safety. Of the 81, 45 made it out alive.

One of the survivors was one-year-old Isabella Breen, who lived to be 90.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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I really need a new phone.

It’s an iPhone 13 and the camera is shit. And it’s starting to glitch too. I know what I’m asking for this Christmas. Anyway, it explains the shit photos from last night’s Triumph concert despite being less than 40 feet from the stage.

I had a better haircut this time.

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Once upon a time, there was a prevailing belief that Nazis were bad. People embraced the idea so vehemently, much of the world went to war to stop them. Those were the fuckin’ days. Well, those days were hell, but they got the job done, and on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. They called it VE Day: Victory in Europe.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 8, 1945--

By the way, when I say “they,” I mostly mean Russia. Russia led the way in getting the job done. If I were being fair, I’d say VE Day was May 9, because that’s when Russians celebrate it; the German surrender came after midnight, Russia time. But Stalin was a dick, so May 8 it is.

Russia takes VE Day—they just call it Victory Day—very seriously. It’s a national holiday. The sixtieth and seventieth anniversaries in 2005 and 2015 were the largest holiday celebrations—complete with the big-ass military parade—in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union.

How come America doesn’t get a day off for VE Day? Well, maybe it’s because they didn’t lose in the neighborhood of 26 million people fighting the fucking Nazis. About 95 percent of Allied deaths dealt by Germans were Soviets. Likewise, three-quarters of the German losses in World War II came at the hands of Soviet soldiers. They weren’t nice to the Germans after the war either.

The Russians don’t call it World War II. They call it the Great Patriotic War. And these soldiers were patriots. The opening scene of the 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates, showing only one rifle for every two Soviet soldiers, and depicting fleeing Soviets being gunned down by their officers, is about as faithful as Jude Law when a hot young nanny walks into the room.

Fleeing soldiers were more likely to be court-martialed and put in “penal battalions,” and those guys were used as cannon fodder. But the Soviets weren’t actively trying to lose the war by needlessly throwing lives away. It’s just that Hitler was dedicated to depopulating the East to make room for the expanding German Empire, and therefore dedicated far more military resources to the Eastern Front.

Americans certainly helped win the war in Europe, but the next time someone tells you it was the United States who beat the fucking Nazis, give them a solid eye-roll.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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I went skiing again, this time to Lake Louise with a good friend and one of her friends. While skiing my friend’s friend met a new friend, except I don’t think he will end up becoming her good friend.

Confused yet?

Last night was my father-in-law’s birthday party at my house and I made my motherfucking cheeseburgers. I rea…

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“What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”

When it comes to remembering the Kent State Massacre, two things stand out: the song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the photograph of a despairing Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a slain protestor.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 4, 1970--

On May 4, 1970, students at Kent State University in Ohio were protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War, with U.S. forces bombing neutral Cambodia. Two thousand people showed up. So did the National Guard.

They tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas, which was thrown back at them by the protestors. Despite the protesters being at least seventy feet away and unarmed, dozens of Guardsmen proclaimed to fear for their lives and opened fire on the crowd. A presidential commission later asserted the slaughter “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” No shit.

The body Vecchio cried over was that of Jeffrey Miller. The photograph seems to convey an image of a young woman crying over the death of a friend, but she didn’t know the man. Mary Ann was a fourteen-year-old runaway from Florida who was only on campus that day because it was where hitchhiking had taken her. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said of that moment. “I was screaming because I couldn’t help him.”

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The image ran on the front page of almost every newspaper in the United States and many other publications internationally. For novice photographer John Filo, it won him a Pulitzer and launched his career. For Mary Ann, she said it ruined her life.

The governor of Florida said Vecchio was part of a communist conspiracy. When she returned home to her parents, neighborhood children and classmates shunned her. She received tens of thousands of pieces of hate mail saying things that would make any YouTube comment section seem tame by comparison.

Vecchio would struggle for years, eventually marrying and settling in Las Vegas. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, she finally met the man who made her famous. John Filo approached her with sadness in his eyes, and she burst into tears and embraced him. Filo, who also suffered much backlash over the photo, said of the meeting, “I’m just glad she doesn’t hate me.”

And the song? Many radio stations banned it because of its criticism of President Nixon, but it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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Berlin fell on May 2, 1945, and Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky was there, but almost not. Hence, the big-ass fuck-you Hitler smile. He was born in 1915 in Moscow to a Jewish family. His father, Aron, was a lawyer and that meant he was smart, which meant Stalin didn’t like him and he had to die. Aron Dolmatovsky was shot in 1938 on false charges of being against the glorious revolution or some “enemy of the people” bullshit while Yevgeniy was away in East Russia working on his writing career. Yevgeniy wouldn’t find out what happened to his father until the 1950s, after Stalin kicked the autocratic bucket.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 2, 1945--

As war with the Nazi assbadgers approached, Yevgeniy was made a military correspondent because his poems had become famous and were made into songs used for propaganda purposes. Two months into the war with Germany, he was wounded and captured. Being a Soviet captured by Nazis is bad. Being a Jew captured by Nazis is lethal.

But Yevgeniy escaped! Sheltered by a Ukrainian family who risked their lives to do so, Dolmatovsky recuperated then headed back to the front lines and was captured again godfuckingdammit!

This time it was Italians who took him prisoner, but they didn’t have their shit together and Yevgeniy escaped again and wrote a poem about it, and the Soviets set that poem to music and used it as fuck-the-Axis propaganda because of course they did. Being captured twice raised the suspicions of the Soviet secret police so Yevgeniy got to spend some quality time with the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB). But he was a good storyteller so they said yeah you’re fine back to the front with you also here have a promotion.

He continued to write poems during the war based on his experiences, many of which were set to music. World War II wasn’t fun for anyone, but especially not for the Soviets, who did the majority of the dying in the European theatre. It explains just how happy Dolmatovsky must have been carrying that Hitler statue head to celebrate it being almost over. The photo was taken by another famous, and also Jewish, Yevgeniy—this one with the last name Khaldei, who became known for his wartime photography. Khaldei’s most famous photo was inspired by Americans raising their flag over Iwo Jima; it’s called Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag and was taken the same day as his photo of Dolmatovsky.

Weighed down with medals, Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky returned to live in Moscow after the war and continued to write poetry. He died in 1994.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

ANOTHER NOTE: This photo is on the cover of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down: Number 2 (see the cover below), which you should totally buy if you haven’t already.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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This story of courage? This is what the Supreme Court killed today.

There are a whole lot of Americans who really hate it when Black people vote. One of the most powerful speeches in the history of the United States was delivered by Black woman and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer on August 22, 1964, to an audience of millions, to denounce voter suppression.

It was at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City where Hamer gave her nation-changing speech, and President Johnson was scared shitless of her. Fannie, who had worked tirelessly to get the vote for Black people in her state after being forcefully sterilized in 1962, walked with a limp and had a blood clot behind her eye from being beaten by police for her efforts.

She formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to counter the all-white Democratic delegation that was full of segregationist assmunchers, and demanded credentials to speak at the DNC. Johnson was shitting his pants because he needed Democratic Party support in the South, so he held an impromptu press conference to derail her speech, but it didn’t matter.

Entering Boardwalk Hall, Fannie had to shoulder her way through men who refused to give her space. She then spoke without the benefit of notes for 13 captivating minutes on the oppressive regulations in her state that made it nigh impossible for Black people to vote. She described being stalked by police, fired from her job, arrested, brutally beaten while in police custody, and shot at, all for daring to register to vote. It was during this speech she coined the term “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Hamer went into detail of the many roadblocks put in front of Black people who attempted to vote in Mississippi. Despite the right being guaranteed in the constitution, white supremacists in the state did all they could to prevent Black people from having a political voice, including administering literacy tests and a host of other bullshit voter-suppression hoop jumping. Add to this the state-sanctioned violence and employers firing Black people who registered to vote, and it kept white racists firmly in control of the state.

Hamer closed her speech by saying, “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” President Johnson’s press conference did serve to interrupt the broadcasting of Hamer’s speech, but it was later shown on the evening news for millions to see. The speech proved a pivotal moment in American history that contributed to the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Of course, it was far from the waving of a magic wand. To this day voter suppression is a significant problem in the U.S.

Fannie Lou Hamer continued fighting for equality after her landmark speech. She died in 1977 and was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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“I’m tired, boss.”

That’s a line from The Green Mile. Fortunately, things are not near so desperate as they were in that tale, but I am le tired.

Tired of editing. Tired of pain. Tired of snow. Tired of him.

I need to catch you up. Trust that it’s not all a big bitchfest. Things are improving. But also … uncertain?

I have be…

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No Kum-Sok was a North Korean fight pilot who said fuck this place and pointed his plane southward in search of freer pastures.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 27, 1953--

Kum-Sok defected, flying his Soviet-made MiG-15 into South Korea. The United States was all hey awesome thanks for taking us up on our offer here is your $100,000. And Kum-Sok said what offer I just wanted to get the fuck outta that place.

It was called Operation Moolah and launched on April 27, 1953, during the Korean War. Communicated via radio and leaflet drops, it began: “To all brave pilots who wish to free themselves from the communist yoke . . .” The Americans offered $50,000 (double for the first one to defect) to any pilot bringing them a MiG-15, because USAF pilots said it was a better plane than theirs.

The MiG-15 showed up early in the war and American pilots were kinda freaked out, saying the plane had numerous advantages over their F-86 Sabres. But they weren’t exactly correct about that, and Moolah ended up being something of a successful failure. The Korean War ended in an armistice three months after the operation began, with no takers, but what did happen was that MiGs were grounded for several days right after the public bribe campaign began, possibly for the North to do a psychological evaluation of their pilots to weed out any who might be tempted to defect.

And when the MiGs started flying again, Americans began blowing them out of the sky at an unprecedented rate. Not only that, but North Korean MiG-15 pilots often just noped right the fuck out of their aircraft, pulling the ejection cord at the first sign of American fighter planes. The reason was that the Soviet pilots—the ones who weren’t supposed to be involved in the war in the first place—had been grounded because the USSR was fearful one of their own might take up the Americans on their offer, which would be a PR catastrophe.

Two months after the war ended, Kum-Sok showed up in his MiG at Kimpo Air Base in South Korea, having no knowledge of the financial reward for doing so. He said he’d heard rumors his loyalty was being investigated and in North Korea that is a bad thing, so he said fuck you guys and boogied for the South.

Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager flew the captured MiG and said it was “the most demanding situation I ever faced.” The North’s aerial victories were not due to the plane being amazing, he said, but that the Soviet pilots were well trained in dogfight tactics.

Kum-Sok immigrated to the United States, changed his name to Ken Rowe, went to school, and worked as an aeronautical engineer for companies such as Boeing, Grumman, Pan Am, and Lockheed. He lived to be ninety, but his best friend didn’t. North Korea executed his friend and four of his fellow pilots as punishment for his defection.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

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I’d like to visit Turkey. After this story, that might not be possible. It’s about the Armenian Genocide: a systematic murder of almost 1.5 million people by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Turkey denies it ever happened.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 24, 1915--

Armenians are documented to have lived in the region for 2,500 years, almost a thousand years before Turks arrived. Centuries later the groups were divided not just along ethnic lines, but religious. The Christian Armenians were mostly peasant farmers; the Turks, representing the ruling Ottoman Empire, were Muslim. As in most lands conquered by Muslim invaders, the Armenians were permitted to remain Christian so long as they paid for the privilege via a tax, called a jizya. Regardless, Armenians were referred to as gavurs, which meant “disloyal” and “not to be trusted.”

So let’s just fucking kill them, the Turks decided.

The impetus was WWI. The Ottoman rulers of Turkey worried the Armenians would ally themselves with the invading Russians. The Ottomans had already lost their Balkan territories and were faced with losing Arab territories. In January 1915 the Ottomans got their asses kicked by Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish. The Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, said hey it wasn’t my shitty plan that lost the battle, it was Armenian treachery!

There was isolated Armenian resistance against Ottoman massacres, and the government used that as an excuse to wipe them out, seeing their own citizens as their greatest enemy. At first, Armenians were kicked out of the army, then killed because they didn’t want any trained soldiers teaching other Armenians to fight. On April 24, 1915, the genocide officially began with the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

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The “men,” meaning any boys aged 12 or older, were separated and marched away to be murdered. Popular methods were to throw them off cliffs or tie them together and throw them in the river to drown. Long after the genocide the waters downstream were polluted by rotting corpses. Over the next year approximately one million Armenian women, children, elderly, and infirm were death marched into the Syrian desert to die of exposure and starvation. During the marches they were given no food or water, and were subject to random massacres, robbery, and rape. Those who survived often faced forced conversion to Islam, and/or being sold into slavery, including sexual slavery.

Turkey basically says hey it was war and people die in war get over it. Turkey’s current leader, President Erdoğan, calls any discussion of the genocide a smear campaign against his country. Despite the vast majority of historians proclaiming it a genocide, only 9% of Turks agree. Out of fear of angering Turkey, fewer than three dozen countries officially acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. The U.S. didn’t officially until 2021. Based on the “success” of the Armenian Genocide, the Turks immediately did it again, murdering several hundred thousand Christian Ottoman Greeks.

It is alleged that Hitler was inspired by the Armenian Genocide to commit the Holocaust.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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It’s referred to as “The Daily Fail” for a reason. The Daily Mail is a birdcage liner of a British tabloid with a long history of sucking. Hell, in the early ‘30s they proclaimed Hitler and Mussolini as awesome fellas. They don’t give a shit about veracity or decency, just pushing paper with anything that will make for a sensational story. “Hey! Look at this blurry photo. It’s not a crusty wank sock rising out of the water. It’s the Loch Ness Monster!”

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 21, 1934--

This is one old fucking lake monster. Some monk in the 6th century wrote of a dude swimming in the River Ness, not the lake, who was allegedly attacked by a “water beast” and drowned. It’s worth noting that water beast stories were all the rage at the time. Kind of like sexy sparkly vampire stories started popping up all over in the 21st century.

There were a couple more sightings of what was probably just a log or some shit late in the 19th century, and then a couple more in 1933, and yet another in 1934. That same year a London gynecologist named Robert Wilson supposedly snapped the well-known photo that most associate with Nessie. The name Nessie, by the way, didn’t come about until the 1940s. Also, I tried to think of a gynecology joke to insert here, but I couldn’t hit the right spot.

Anyway, Wilson didn’t want his name associated with the photo, so it became known as the “surgeon’s photograph.” The Daily Mail published it on April 21, 1934. Many proclaimed it proof of the monster’s existence, while many others said aw come on it’s just a piece of wood or a fucking bird or something.

Many years later, a deathbed confession revealed it to be an elaborate hoax led by Marmaduke Wetherell, who had worked for the Daily Mail and been ridiculed by the paper for falling for a hoax surrounding his finding the monster’s footprints on the lakeshore the year previous. The footprints had actually been made as a joke using the dismembered foot of a hippopotamus turned into a fucking umbrella stand. Wetherell was all “I’ll show you a hoax, motherfuckers,” and involved a number of co-conspirators, including Dr. Wilson, to modify a toy submarine with wood putty to make their fake monster and snap a photo of it and sell it to the paper. It was basically all about exacting revenge on the Daily Mail.

Of course, there have been numerous additional sightings and photos and videos since 1934, but it’s logical to assume the Loch Ness Monster gets filed under “Doesn’t Fucking Exist.”

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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