Intl. Notebook, Mondo Bizarro

October 1 2021

LONG STORY, SHORT TAIL

Mystery attackers of U.S. embassy workers in Havana might not be Cuban—or human.

A couple of nights ago PSGP and PI-1 were in deep slumber in their seaside apartment when a high pitched noise sprang up in the wee hours. It took only moments to identify the sound as a cricket, which somehow had gained entry to their bedroom though it’s on the top floor three stories up, and the exterior doors were shut. What followed was a comedy of errors, as PSGP tried in vain to pinpoint the noise and eject the interloper, while PI-1 cursed all of creation because insects were now conspiring to disturb her sleep. They ended up moving out of the bedroom. The next day PSGP had another look around, and after a more careful examination located the cricket—outside on the balcony. It had never gained entry to the flat in the first place. It was just that loud and disorienting. This is an absolutely true story, and even the timeline is factual. It really did happen night before last.

So imagine our surprise when an item came across the wires this morning about the infamous Havana Syndrome. You know the one. U.S. embassy personnel stationed in Cuba, beginning in 2016, reported mysterious sounds in the building, which brought on headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, balance problems, and other weird effects. The State Department and the American press immediately ran a political football the entire length of the unverified news field and claimed Cuban or Russian sonic or energy weapons were probably the cause. Nobody explained what Cuba or Russia had to gain from quasi-effectual sonic attacks, and it didn’t matter, because you never let implausibility get in the way of rekindling the Cold War. But there are these people called scientists, and they have a way of studying things until they find answers, and yesterday the most likely cause of the dastardly Havana Syndrome was revealed to be crickets.

The JASON Group, an independent organization of scientists that works with the U.S. government, analyzed recordings made by embassy personnel and found only one phenomenon to be a sonic match—the Indies short-tailed cricket. There the sneaky bugger is just below. This mystery was actually unravelled back in 2019, but the report was classified—probably to milk a few more years from a patently ridiculous story of being targeted by commies. Let’s face it—when you have top level Cuban figures defensively trying to explain that they have no

sonic or energy weapons, and the American press is pretty much dismissing those claims, you keep the pressure on. Some experts note that sonic weapon frequencies wouldn’t be recordable, and the enemy attack theory is thus unaffected. In other words, the recordings given to JASON scientists weren’t of the actual phenomenon in question. Well, okay, but we prefer crickets. Please let it be crickets. Or maybe the answer is twofold. Maybe Havana Syndrome is caused by crickets trained by Cuba or Russia. Bet those egghead scientists didn’t even think of that.

Cuba, Russia, Havana

Mondo Bizarro

August 14 2021

MEDICAL EXAMINER

Tabloid crosses line between science and science fiction.

Our examples of the cheapie tabloid National Examiner all have art on their front pages, but when you have a scoop like this cow blockbuster, typography alone is more than adequate. Needless to say—but we’ll do it anyway because in this millennium people believe in illuminati pedophile rings in pizza parlors—a cow never gave birth to a baby boy. Hope that wasn’t disappointing to hear. The story, from this issue that hit newsstands today in 1967, claims that it happened in Russia when a woman named Natasha Kropotkin was critically ill and her fetus was transferred to a cow in order to save its life. The fetus, not the cow.

Anyway, the achievement stands second only to the launch of Sputnik in Soviet scientific annals. Kropotkin is a Russian word meaning gullible, by the way. If the child had been real, though, he’d be in his fifties today, and we imagine him working in the field of animal husbandry, middle management level. Medically speaking, other than involuntarily mooing at times of stress and having a tremendous problem with gas, we picture him as normal in every way. He’d also be hung like a bull. Elsewhere inside Examiner are many more bizarre stories, and a couple of nice photos of Italian actress Maria Grazia Bucella. You can see plenty more mid-century tabloids in our comprehensive index located here.

Soviet Union, Russia, Italy, Maria Grazia Bucella, Elsa Lafontaine, Annette Johnson, Britt Semand, tabloid

Mondo Bizarro

July 22 2021

TO SPITE HIS FACE

Lord of the Rings fan raises his game, lowers his life prospects.

An interesting item began popping up online yesterday about Fernando Franco de Oliveira, an avid Lord of the Rings fan from Brazil who made himself look like an orc with the help of tattoos, dermal implants, and surgery—including an operation to remove his nose. The result is what you see above, and well, it’s both atrocious and very sad. We liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it’s junior high literature. Imaginative and well written to be sure, but a typical person aged twelve to fourteen—like we were when we first came across it—would be able to read the books and enjoy them. Same with the movies. They’re officially rated for filmgoers aged thirteen and up.

The point is that neither the books nor movies are something to let influence your life to the extent that you get your eyeballs tattooed black and your ears crimped. There’s not a lot to say about this other than that the obsessive quest for individuality on a planet of almost eight billion people has claimed another victim—a mentally ill one. Yes, yes, we know. You’re not supposed to say things like that these days. You’re supposed to be supportive and non-judgmental, but we can do what we want on our website, and we judge that de Oliveira is mental.

Being able to express himself rationally, de Oliveira can of course present the façade of a sane person, but his outward appearance makes a mockery of that, because to do what he’s done is to deliberately destroy one’s life, or—even worse—to not understand that to do it is to destroy one’s life. True, he was never a beauty queen, as you see in the soft-bodied, monobrow dominant photo at right. But he still had a nose. And anyone with a nose has a shot at good things in life.

De Oliveira will of course tell you his existence is good, that people tell him he looks cool, that chicks dig it or he has a committed partner who loves it, that he was never happy until finding himself in this way, that it even earns him money, and anyone who hates on him is really the one with problems, but he’ll be using his surgically forked tongue to lie through his vampire teeth. He’s insane. End of story. He’s even crazier than Caius Veiovis and that guy probably bites the heads off bats. All that said, we’d still rather hang out with Orc Boy than someone who bases their life upon Atlas Shrugged. At least he’s decided to be a monster only on the outside.

Brazil, The Lord of the Rings, Fernando Franco de Oliveira

Mondo Bizarro

June 15 2021

WON’T GET UFO-ED AGAIN

More people are talking about alien visits but they still aren't happening.

Have you noticed the uptick in talk about UFOs the last couple of months? The subject is being discussed on websites like Scientific American and BBC, in the pages of publications like the New York Times, and even in the corridors of power in in Washington, D.C., where a while back Congress demanded that the Pentagon produce a report on the subject. Donald Trump and Barack Obama have talked about it. Retired Nevada Senator Harry Reid even went so far as to say that weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin may have fragments of a crashed UFO in its possession.

All we have to say is here we go again. We know a lot of people really believe in the existence of alien UFOs, but here’s when we’ll believe: when one arrives, an alien climbs out and says. “Greetings, Earthling. Take me to your leader. We ask because we couldn’t figure out which of you is in charge of this clusterfuck.” Let us be clear. We aren’t

UFO agnostics. Agnostic would be to neither believe nor disbelieve—in other words to cop out. We’re UFO atheists. When the only alleged evidence consists of hearsay, anecdotes, blurry photos of pie tins on strings, and indistinct FLIR footage, we feel safe saying they don’t exist.

The idea of UFO sightings being legit hinges upon numerous assumptions. That aliens have the ability to come to our vicinity. That they have the ability to come to our vicinity and want to observe us. That they want to observe us and prefer to do it up close rather than from a vast distance. That they want to observe us up close rather than from a vast distance and aren’t interested in disguising themselves. That they aren’t interested in disguising themselves and don’t care what effect that might have on us. And that their up close methods of observation would be detectable to us in the first place. Think stealth or nanotechnology. We human doofuses already have the basics of those figured out. Aliens would have the capability to observe us by using machines the size of gnats, a far more likely option than soaring around the sky chased by F-35s.

The list of assumptions UFO believers gloss over goes on, but the biggest problem, in our view, is that aliens could learn far more about us from our broadcasts and data emissions than in person. Even our detection and defense capabilities, assuming

they wanted to understand those, would be easier to learn from intercepting and decrypting the code through which they operate, rather than with field encounters. And surely none of us think super-advanced aliens wouldn’t be able to break military encryptions?

They could also, from millions of miles away, decipher our languages, observe our many warring cultures, ponder our crazy taboos, note our hundreds of fanciful religions, puzzle over our destruction of the very environment we need in order to survive, be horrified over our caste systems based on the presence of a pigmenting chemical in our skin cells, and be astounded over the fact that most of the above is true because we’ve created a global system that elevates and rewards ruthless, dangerous people. All the major tribes of Earth (U.S., Russia, China, et al) are led by people prone to violence. Would aliens really want to bother with creatures like that?

So while we keep up with UFO reporting—as required by our status as a pulp website—we don’t believe aliens are the cause. If they’re anything, they’re advanced drones. But the alien UFO stories will keep coming. We think humans, or at least some humans, will believe even the most outlandish fantasy if it makes them feel good, or makes them feel frightened or outraged. If you doubt that the latter is true, just ponder the epochally sad fact that fantasies about a pedophile ring in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor have had an indelible effect on American politics. In short—people are amazingly gullible. Despite anything Harry Reid says, we don’t think Lockheed has alien UFO bits in a top secret warehouse.

All that said, we also do not believe humans are alone in the cosmos. Scientifically, the assumption that we’re alone makes no sense. Plus wouldn’t that be utterly depressing, the idea that we’re the smartest creatures in the universe? We’re hanging off a cliff edge like Indiana Jones, groping for a stray tree root to save us as our sacks of gold threaten to pull us to our doom. If nuclear war and global heating don’t send us hurtling into the abyss, resource depletion and social collapse will. The system we put in place to deliver prosperity is now eating the foundations that enabled it to stand in the first place. We can’t be the smartest beings in the universe. We think aliens exist—but immeasurably far across the cosmos. And if we’re wrong, and they’re actually among us, all we can say is: reveal yourselves, and please help.

UFOs, sci-fi

Mondo Bizarro

May 13 2021

A HEAD OF ITS TIME

Authenticity test on horrifying Ecuadorean artifact reveals that it's a horrifying Ecuadorean artifact.

We ran across a story today that touched on an occasional Pulp Intl. subject—that of shrunken heads, those macabre delights found in the dusty basements of museums and the arcane libraries of mysteriously missing anthropologists. Vintage men’s magazines such as this issue of Man to Man often contained features on shrunken heads, usually written by adventurers who claimed to have narrowly escaped losing their own. This occurred mainly in the Amazon regions of Ecuador and Peru where a people called the Jivaro live. When white men weren’t available, the Jivaro used the heads of slain enemy warriors, shrinking them via an exacting, multi-step process meant to trap the spirit of the unfortunate victim so that their supernatural power could be utilized. The practice died out decades ago but old shrunken heads are scattered about the world because they were highly sought after curios, a demand that also led to the manufacture of numerous fakes.

Researchers at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia had a shrunken head sitting around that had been acquired by a recently deceased university staffer during a 1942 trip to the Ecuadorean Amazon. They announced Monday that the head is indeed the genuine item. They reached this conclusion by subjecting it to numerous tests, among them CT scans, and of course the angry spirit test, which involves ridiculing the head then waiting to see if your hind quarters wither and fall off. This particular head is especially pulpworthy because it has a

cinema history. It was used as a prop in the 1979 film Wise Blood, John Huston’s adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel of the same name. In the movie it was placed on a fake body, as you see just above. Mercer University plans to repatriate the head to Ecuador, continuing the recent practice of some museums and universities returning cultural items looted or bought for a pittance by artifact hunters.

We agree that stolen artifacts should go back to where they came, assuming the original possessors ask for them, which they increasingly have been doing. This means there will be fewer shrunken heads in circulation, which in turn means the process for making them that we shared a few years ago is more timely than ever. Like a Julia Child recipe for boeuf bourguignon, the classics never go out of style. In fact, we think the horrible shrunken head market is about to blow up like Bitcoin. So if you feel the need to shrink the head of… we don’t know, anyone ranging from your current boss to the so-called friend who stole your hopeless crush back in college, feel free to get a sense of the process from our post. It’s a bit messy, but satisfying and amazingly empowering. So we hear. Just remember that you can’t make a shrunken head without a decapitated head, and that’s another messy business entirely.

Ecuador, Wise Blood, John Huston, Flannery O'Connor, cinema, literature

Mondo Bizarro

May 6 2021

FOR THE LOVE OF GODDESS

Treat your mummy special every day.

When we see the word “mummy” in a news story we pay extra attention. Even more so when the mummy has nothing to do with Egypt. Late last week police in Moffatt, Colorado arrested seven members of a ragtag cult called Love Has Won after they were found in possession of a mummified body. The body was once Amy Carlson, above, the leader of the sect. She was known to the cultists as Mother God, and believed that she was the 534th avatar of God on Earth and had revoked the free will of humanity. Mummy Carlson was posed in a shrine, wrapped in a sleeping bag festooned with Christmas lights, and decorated about her eyeless face with glitter make-up. The cult members were charged with, among other things, abuse of a corpse.

Abuse? Do the police have no idea how expensive the top make-up brands are? L’Oréal’s best eye shadow, the shimmery Avant Garde Azure, which is so good it de-emphasizes the fact that you don’t even have eyes, costs a small fortune. Maybelline’s Superstay lipstick, which makes lips so kissable even a death rictus won’t stop an admirer from going in for some tongue action, runs a pretty penny too. And Guerlain’s Fève Délicieuse parfum is so intoxicating it masks even the charnel stench of death. Don’t get us started on that. The point is, this was no abused corpse. Love Has Won adherents spared no effort or expense transforming their rattling husk of a mummy-goddess into a glamour queen that turned heads wherever she went.

And no wonder they treated her so well, considering they believed she’d lived hundreds of lives, both male and female—and we assume non-binary too, if she was really on her game. They thought she’d been Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, and who knows what other historical personages. You ever notice people who live past lives were never mid-level sanitation workers in some plague-wracked medieval town? Or some young male virgin sacrificially beheaded atop a Mayan pyramid in the year 450? Or a little girl who got trampled flat by a mammoth? Seems to us you’d remember being all those things.

But it’s always Joan of Arc for some reason, or Cleopatra. Mother God even claimed to have been Marilyn Monroe, and that’s going too far in our book, because Monroe was a real goddess. We can prove it because every time we see those early nudes of hers things start to miraculously rise around here. Anyway, we suspect that the seven

detained Love Has Won cultists—you see them above, plus a stand-in for Mother God, the beef jerky version, because we couldn’t find a photo—are looking at some years under the care of the state of Colorado. That’ll be followed by a sprint through the talk show circuit, public repudiation of their bizarre beliefs, blaming it on trauma in childhood and meth usage as adults, finally capped off with careers as self-help gurus. And to think Mother God said humanity has no free will. It does, and we’re going to use ours right now by choosing to “worship” Monroe for a bit. Don’t expect us back today.

Hi, Mother God here. I command thee: Bring me a glass of the sacramental wine.

Colorado, Amy Carlson, mugshots, cults

Mondo Bizarro, Sex Files

April 28 2021

ABOUT TO BLOW

Hello, police? I'd like to report an explosive orgasm.

Earlier this week in Germany, outside the town of Passau on the Austrian-Czech border, a jogger was running through the forest and came across a bag that seemed to have items inside. Perhaps hoping to find something useful or valuable, the jogger investigated this discarded sack and saw that it contained what looked like a World War II-era hand grenade. Though the war has been over for seventy-plus years, live grenades are still found in the forests of Europe, and everyone there knows that, so it’s no surprise the jogger called the police.

Eventually a German bomb squad slogged out into the woods to investigate, and noticed that the bag also contained a tube of sex lubricant called Aquaglide and some condoms. The anti-climax must have been tremendous.

“Horst, your camera feed is bad. What the hell am I seeing there? Is that a tube of accelerant? Something explosive? Over.”

“No sir, it’s lube. Over.”

“It’s what?”

“Sex lube, sir. Sex lube for the cockenspiel. Over.”

At that point the bomb squad deduced that the grenade was actually a rubber sex toy. But looking at it, we’re unsure how it’s meant to be used. We poked around online, in the process

turning our browser history into a sexual free-for-all, and finally found the item you see in the second photo. But we’d be lying if we said that cleared things up for us. It’s a hand pump of some sort, or possibly some unisex inflatable insertable, but considering the Passau photo also shows what looks like a power brick and a usb cable, we remain mystified. We’re calling the German discovery the grenade of ecstasy.

Even though we don’t know exactly how the grenade of ecstasy was meant to be used, we know what it’s being used for now. The Passau bomb squad is taking turns pranking each other with it. Bomb squads have a lot of down time. The grenade has already turned up at the bottom of someone’s bowl of kartoffelsuppe. And for sure it’s been delivered by a bomb disposal robot to someone on the toilet. But the absolute best was throwing it into the dayroom while screaming, “Grenate! Alles runter! Alles runter!” followed by someone charging in, throwing himself on top of it, and ripping a massive pilsener fart. You gotta love those bomb guys.

Interestingly, because bomb squads are used to facing death, the Passau guys never cleaned the grenade of ecstasy. It’s still got forest mulch and dried human fluids all over it. That’s what makes the kartoffelsuppe gag funny. But bomb squads tire quickly of even the most thrilling diversions, and eventually they’ll discard their new toy just like the person who dumped it in the woods. At which point they’ll turn their attention to the Aquaglide. We recommend smearing it on someone’s bomb disposal tools. That’ll make the next bomb emergency dangerous and slippery. Pure fun for all involved.

Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Passau, World War II

Mondo Bizarro

January 24 2021

DOMESTIC STABBY

Jealousy leads to near-fatal attack. But hey, that's marriage for you.

You know the adage curiosity killed the marriage? An interesting story came across the wire from Sonora, Mexico that falls into the mondo bizarro category. Leonora N. (whose real name has been withheld by authorities) stabbed her husband Juan N. (real name also withheld) multiple times after finding photos on his phone of him with a younger woman. The problem is the younger woman was her. Not-his-real-name, in an act of love that could bring tears to your eyes, scanned and uploaded some old photos of Not-her-real-name to keep on his phone, but she, in an act of anger that would definitely bring tears to your eyes, found the photos, went straight for the knife drawer, and came out cutting. Not-his-real-name was saved only thanks to a neighbor who heard his screams and rescued him.

Now you may think this is pretty clear cut, so to speak. Good man, evil woman. Pulp in its most basic form. But in our view, you can’t really fault a wife for failing to recognize her younger self, because men who’ve been married for a long time no longer recognize their wives either. Inside we mean. Many great minds have observed that, over time women are guaranteed to change, while men are guaranteed to try like bloody hell not to. If there’s phone checking going on, Not-his-real-name should check Not-her-real-name’s phone. You know what he’d find? Love poems. And he’d think she’d been hooking up with some young stud, before realizing with a shock that they’re his old poems she painstakingly texted into her own phone. Because she doesn’t recognize him anymore either. That guy’s long gone.

So we think Not-his-real-name needs to forgive Not-her-real-name because, ultimately, it was his fault. If the guy who wrote poetry were still around maybe the young minx he married would still be around too, and none of this would have happened. We know what you’re thinking. She stabbed him. That’s unforgivable. Well maybe. But wives are always thinking of stabbing their husbands, at least a little. We don’t mean a little as in time spent thinking about it. We mean they are constantly thinking of stabbing their husbands, but lightly. Hourly, but non-fatally. So we come down firmly on the side of Not-her-real-name. Hubby fucked up. And our opinion has nothing to do with the fact that the Pulp Intl. girlfriends read our site.

Mexico, Sonora

Mondo Bizarro, Sex Files

January 13 2021

DICULOUS DILEMMA

Sexplay goes south in a big way for cock cage gamesters.

Everything—truly everything—is going digital. We’re thrilled to inform you that they finally upgraded the cock cage. We’re surprised we missed this tech bombshell when it happened a while back, but finding out late is better than never. Longtime readers will know right away why we had to write about this, because they’ll remember the Pulp Intl. cock cages. For newer visitors, back when we bothered putting ads on our website, for a few months we accepted the filthy but spendable lucre of a manufacturer of cock cages. They’re metal devices designed to keep your junk trunked, and the idea is to prevent erections, bdsm style, for purposes of denial or punishment. Fun, right?

Now it seems there’s a digital version, remotely controlled, compatible with the internet of things. The device, seen above, is called the Cellmate. It’s from China-based manufacturer Qiui, and basically you slide this puppy on, lock it, and give someone else the code—and the power over whether to unleash your kraken. This is a quantum leap in sexual discomfort. Back during the analog cock cage days you’d whine to your master or mistress in person to set your peehole free. Now you text them. Maybe send them a frowny emoticon. And somewhere, near or far, they tap a code into their phone and it’s sweet release for you.

Except some cheeky hacker found a security flaw and kept an unknown number of unlucky willies locked up against their will. What can you say? Hackers gonna hack, right? And they weren’t content just to harass and terrify. They also demanded bitcoin ransoms, and sent messages to the effect of, “Your cock is mine now.” We don’t know how many dismayed consumers lost their digital innocence through this scam, nor how many—if any—paid the ransom, but we would. Fuck yeah we would. We’d pay plenty. But we’re happy to say it could never happen. The only people who keep our cocks locked up are the Pulp Intl. girlfriends.

Analog cock cage with cheap dime store lock.

Digital cock cage with encrypted security. Which would you choose?

China, bdsm

Mondo Bizarro

November 24 2020

2020: A SHEEP ODYSSEY

Mysterious monolith found in desert. Local wildlife now walking upright and demanding better mobile coverage.

Someone cue Also sprach Zarathustra. In Utah a helicopter pilot from the Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau was counting bighorn sheep in a remote part of the state when he overflew a strange object, and upon turning back for a second look was astounded to sight a metal monolith planted in the desert. Estimated at ten to twelve feet (about three meters) high, the object is shiny, silvery, rectangular, and appears to be man-made. Appears to be. Advanced metalwork is assumed to be a solely human ability, but that’s just an assumption. We also thought we were the only species that masturbated until we saw dolphins do it.

The slab story has taken on a mostly humorous life of its own, as observers reference 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie which appears to have inspired the creator of the rectangle. The film’s monolith triggers a quantum leap in human evolution, which in 2020 we could really use, but since modern culture is little more than a seven-billion-person rugby scrum in which nobody has noticed the ball got lost decades ago, we don’t think a comparable evolutionary leap is coming. Anyway, there’s

nothing out there in the desert but sheep, so maybe it wasn’t made for humans at all. Everyone should keep close watch on those bighorns. Maybe they’ll make an evolutionary leap and, like in the film, start using old femurs to break heads. Sheepherders beware.

For our part, there’s little doubt the slab is actually just a piece of guerrilla art, planted in the wilderness years ago, where it has patiently waited for discovery. As a publicity stunt it’s ingenious. Once authorities inevitably remove and examine the piece, they’ll most likely find some identifying mark, and at that point the artist will come forward or be identified. People are already speculating it was made by deceased monolith master John McCracken. However it turns out, we think it’s appropriate that this discovery, one of the most confounding in recent memory, was inspired by 2001, one of the most baffling films ever. The desert slab will eventually be explained to most people’s satisfaction. The movie? Never.

Update: the monolith has vanished. Its next probable sighting will be in a barren wilderness near you.

Utah, 2001: A Space Odyssey, John McCracken, sci-fi

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 5

1945—Hollywood Black Friday

A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.

October 4

1957—Sputnik Circles Earth

The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.

October 4

1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses

American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.

October 3

1908—Pravda Founded

The newspaper Pravda is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles living in Vienna. The name means “truth” and the paper serves as an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991.

October 3

1957—Ferlinghetti Wins Obscenity Case

An obscenity trial brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the counterculture City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reaches its conclusion when Judge Clayton Horn rules that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry collection Howl is not obscene.

October 3

1995—Simpson Acquitted

After a long trial watched by millions of people worldwide, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson subsequently loses a civil suit and is ordered to pay millions in damages.

October 2

1919—Wilson Suffers Stroke

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed. He is confined to bed for weeks, but eventually resumes his duties, though his participation is little more than perfunctory. Wilson remains disabled throughout the remainder of his term in office, and the rest of his life.