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Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, known then as weird fiction. Lovecraft’s major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: the notion that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. He has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities.

Lovecraft’s works were quite pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christian humanism. Although, his readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20^th century. Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror fiction. His writing, particularly, the Cthulhu Mythos, has influenced fiction authors all over the world, and Lovecraftian elements can be found in novels, movies, music, comic books, and cartoons.

Many modern horror writers, including Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale and Neil Gaiman, cite Lovecraft as one of their primary influences. His stories made it into the pages of prominent pulp magazines like Weird Tales but not many people knew his name. Lovecraft corresponded regularly with other contemporary writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth. In 1936, he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and died on March 15, 1937 in Providence.

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The Hungerford Massacre occurred in Hungerford, Berkshire, England on August 19, 1987. Michael Robert Ryan, a 27-year-old unemployed local laborer, was armed with two semi-automatic rifles and a hand gun. He shot and killed 16 people, including his mother, and wounded 15 others, then fatally shot himself. It remains, along with the Dunblane massacre, one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.

Ryan was an only child and reportedly bullied at school. Press biographies stated his fondness for, and possibly even an obsession, with guns. They also claimed his possessed magazines about survival skills and firearms, like Soldier of Fortune, and was a fan of First Blood, the first Rambo film (this was later revealed to be untrue). The first shooting occurred seven miles to the west of Hungerford in Savermake Forest in Wiltshire in the afternoon of August 19. Fifteen minutes later, he returned home and shot and killed his mother. He set fire to the house with gasoline that he bought earlier in the day.

On foot, Ryan injured and killed several people before taking refuge at the John O’Gaunt Community Technology College, which was closed and empty for summer holidays. Police surrounded the building and negotiators made contact with him. At 7 p.m., Ryan shot himself in the school. The massacre led to the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, which banned the ownership of semi-automatic center-fire rifles and restricted the use of shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two rounds.

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Urbain Grandier was a French Catholic priest who was burned at the stake after being convicted of witchcraft. He served as priest in the church of Sainte Croix in Loudon, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Poitiers. Ignoring his vow of celibacy, he is known to have had sexual relationships with a number of women.

In 1632, a group of nuns from the local Usurline convent accused him of having bewitched them, sending the demon Asmodai, among others, to commit evil acts with them. Grandier refused to become the spiritual director of the convent, unaware that the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, had become obsessed with him. It is claimed that Jeanne, enraged by his rejection, instead invited Canon Mignon, an enemy of Grandier, to become the director. Jeanne then accused Grandier of using black magic to seduce her.

Grandier was arrested, interrogated, and tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal, which acquitted him. However, he gained the enmity of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu after a public verbal attack against him. Richelieu ordered a new trial and Grandier was re-arrested and the possibility of appealing to the Parliament of Paris was denied to him. The Judges, after torturing the priest, introduced documents purportedly signed by Grandier and several demons as evidence that he had made a diabolical pact. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Despite torture, Grandier never confessed to witchcraft and was burned alive at the stake.

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Laird Hamilton is an American big-wave surfer and co-inventor of tow-in surfing. He is married to Gabrielle Reece, celebrity women’s’ professional sports competitor and fashion model. Hamilton grew up in a location that is known as one of the greatest surfing regions in the world, the north coast of Oahu and helped along by the surfing greats of the modern surfing era who were his father’s friends and customers.

By the age of 20, Hamilton had already become an accomplished surfer but competitive contests never appealed to him. In late 1992, Hamilton with two of his close friends, big wave riders Darrick Doerner and Buzzy Kerbox, started using inflatable boats to tow one another into waves which were too big to catch under paddle power alone. The technique, which would later be modified to use jet skis, was a revolutionary innovation. Tow-in surfing, as it soon became known, pushed the confinements and possibilities of big wave surfing to a whole new level.

Using tow-in surfing methods, Hamilton quickly learned how to survive 70-foot waves and carving arcs across walls of water. It was Hamilton’s death-defying drop into Tahiti’s Teahupo’o break on the morning of August 17, 2000 which became the measure of his surfing career to date, and firmly established his reputation as the greatest and bravest big wave surfer in the recorded history of surfing. Hamilton dropped into what is widely considered to be the most dangerous wave ever ridden, due to the sea “sucking down” into a huge well and forming an enormous mass of moving water.

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Arica is presently located within Chile but the city was originally a part of Peru from the country’s inception until the later part of the 19th century when the War of the Pacific broke out. At the time of the 1868 tsunami, Arica still belonged to Peru. On August 16, a magnitude 8.5 earthquake stuck the area of the Peru-Chile Trench located just off Peru’s extreme southern coast.

The large earthquake reduced the port of Arica to rubble and generated a huge trans-pacific tsunami that struck Arica shortly after the earthquake ended. Several minutes after the quake, the first tsunami wave arrived at Arica as a rapid rise of water, followed by a fierce withdrawal. The second wave estimated 90 feet and its advance dashed Fredonia to pieces on the rocks of a harbor island, killing all but two crew members. The tsunami was disastrous for the port of Arica where an estimated 25,000 people died as a result. The waves literally swept the low-lying parts of the town clean, removing all traces, including the foundations, of the structures.

In total, the 1868 tsunami caused an estimated 300 million dollars in damage, and killed as many as 70,000 people along the South American coast. Other Peruvian cities damaged by the tsunami killed over 600 additional people. Hawaii was hit particularly hard with the sunup reaching 4.5 meters at Hilo causing severe damage to the waterfront. It even flooded the harbor of Yokohama in Japan.

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Tivoli Gardens is a famous amusement park and pleasure garden in Copenhagen, Denmark. It opened on August 15, 1843 and is one of the oldest amusement parks that has survived intact to the present day. The amusement park was first called “Tivoli and Vauxhall” alluding to the Jardin de Tivoli in Paris and to the Vauxhall Gardens in London, England.

Tivoli’s founder was Georg Carstensen who obtained a five-year charter to create the park with the use of roughly 15 acres of the fortified glacis outside Vesterport. From the beginning, Tivoli included a variety of attractions: buildings in the exotic style of an imaginary Orient: a theater, band stands, restaurants and cafes, flower gardens, and mechanical amusement rides like a merry-go-round and a primitive scenic railway. After dark, colored lamps illuminated the gardens.

In 1943, Nazi sympathizers attempted to break the Danish people’s spirit by burning many of Tivoli’s buildings, including the concert hall, to the ground. Undaunted, the Danes built temporary buildings and the park was back in operation after a few weeks. Tivoli is always evolving without abandoning its original charm or traditions. Walt Disney, during a trip overseas with his wife Lily, visited Tivoli Gardens. Disney was so impressed with the Danish amusement park that he immediately decided that Disneyland should try to emulate its happy atmosphere.

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Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is a Venezuelan-born leftist revolutionary and terrorist. After several bungled bombings, Ramirez Sanchez achieved notoriety for a 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, resulting in the deaths of three people. For many years, he was among the most wanted international fugitives. He is now serving a life sentence in Clairvaux Prison in northeast France.

Ramirez Sanchez was the given the nom de guerre Carlo when he became a member of the leftist Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Carlos was given the “Jackal” moniker by the press when the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day of the Jackal was reportedly found among his belongings. In 1973, Carlos was associated with the PFLP and he tried and failed to assassinate Jewish businessman and vice-president of the British Zionist Federation, Joseph Sieff. Carlos also admitted responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London and car bomb attacks on three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings.

Carlos participated in the planning for the attack on the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna. In December 1975, he led the six-person team that assaulted the meeting of the OPEC leaders and took over 60 hostages. He was subsequently expelled from the PFLP and formed his own group. Three days after minor surgery in the Sudan, his own bodyguards tranquilized and tied him up, and then handed him over to French agents on August 14, 1994.

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The Battle of Britain is the name given to the sustained strategic effort by the German Luftwaffe during the summer and autumn of 1940 to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force (RAF). The name derives from a speech made in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

The Battle of Britain was the first major campaign to be fought entirely by air forces. It was the largest and most sustained bombing campaign attempted up until that date. The failure of Nazi Germany to destroy Britain’s air defense or to break the country’s morale is considered its first major defeat. Adolf Hitler believed it possible to carry out a successful amphibious assault on Britain until the RAF had been neutralized.

Secondary objectives were to destroy aircraft production and ground infrastructure, to attack areas of political significance, and to terrorize the British people into seeking an armistice or surrender. The main attack upon the RAF’s defenses was code-named “Eagle Attack” and was delayed because of weather until August 13, 1940. The raids appeared to show British radars were difficult to knock out for any length of time. The failure to mount follow-up attacks allowed the RAF to get the stations back on the air, and Luftwaffe neglected strikes on the supporting infrastructure could have rendered the radars useless.

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Samuel Fuller was an American film director, screenwriter and producer born in Worcester, Massachusetts. At the age of 12, he began working in journalism with his first newspaper job as a copyboy. He became a crime reporter in New York City at age 17, working for the New York Evening Graphic. Fuller wrote pulp novels and screenplays from the mid-1930s onwards.

During World War II, he joined the United States Army infantry and was assigned to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. Fuller saw heavy fighting and was involved in landings in Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. For his service, he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart. He used his wartime experiences as material in his films. Hats Off (1936) marked Fuller’s first credit as screenwriter. He accomplished the move to direction by being approached to write three films and offered to do so if he would be allowed to direct them, with no extra fee.

His first film was I Shot Jesse James (1949). Fuller’s third film, The Steel Helmet, established him as a major force. It was one of the first films about the Korean War. He was sought after by the major studios to join them and signed a contract with 20th Century Fox for seven films. Pickup on South Street (1953) remains his most well-known film. Fuller’s work throughout the 1950s and early 1960s followed a basic format: lower-budget genre films that explored controversial topics.

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Peter Cushing was an English actor known for his many appearances in Hammer films, in which he played Baron Frankenstein and Dr. Van Helsing, amongst many other roles, often appearing opposite his close friend Christopher Lee. Cushing was born in Kenley, Surrey, England. After working in repertory theater, he left for Hollywood in 1939, but returned in 1941 after roles in several films.

In the 1950s, he worked in television, most notably as Winston Smith in BBC’s 1954 adaptation of the George Orwell novel, 1984. His first appearance in his two most famous roles were in Terrence Fisher’s films The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). Cushing will always be associated with playing Victor Frankenstein and Van Helsing in a long string of horror films produced by Hammer Horror. These provided him with 20 years of steady employment. Cushing was often cast opposite the actor Christopher Lee, with whom he became best friends.

In the mid-1960s, he played the eccentric Dr. Who in two films based on the TV series Doctor Who. Cushing also played Sherlock Holmes many times, starting with Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). In 1976, he was cast in Star Wars and appeared as one of his now most recognized characters, Grand Moff Tarkin despite having originally been considered for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. After Star Wars, Cushing continued appearing in films and TV sporadically, as his health allowed. He died in 1994 from cancer in a Canterbury hospice.

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