Women Arrested for Smoking, a King’s Blood Frenzy, and the Car Too Slow for Time Travel #WDMorning
A woman was jailed for lighting a cigarette, a crowd rushed to taste a king’s blood, and the world’s most famous movie car could barely hit highway speed.
History doesn’t always make sense — and sometimes, it’s far stranger than anything fiction could dream up. Today’s stories connect across centuries and continents, weaving together moments of absurdity, horror, and unexpected irony. From laws designed to control women’s behavior to the dark frenzy that followed a royal execution, and from the quiet miracle of medical science to a sports car that became famous for something it couldn’t actually do — these are the stories that prove reality has a twisted sense of humor.
THE MORNING WEIRD DARKNESS
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Welcome to the Morning Weird Darkness — a darker way to start your day. It’s Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. This morning: women got arrested for smoking, a crowd got way too excited about a beheading, and we’ll find out why Doc Brown really should have picked a faster car.
Grab your coffee and stick around — it only gets weirder from here.
NEW YORK CITY MADE IT ILLEGAL FOR WOMEN TO SMOKE — IT LASTED 15 DAYS
On this date in 1908, New York City attempted to solve what it perceived as a growing moral crisis: women smoking cigarettes in public.
The city’s Board of Aldermen passed what became known as the Sullivan Ordinance, named after Alderman Timothy “Little Tim” Sullivan, making it illegal for women to smoke in any public place within the five boroughs. The ordinance didn’t target smoking itself — men could puff away wherever they pleased. It specifically criminalized the act of a woman lighting up where others might see her do it.
The reasoning behind the ordinance tells you everything you need to know about early twentieth-century attitudes. Supporters argued that women smoking in public was not merely unladylike but actively corrupting to public morals. One alderman reportedly claimed that the sight of a woman with a cigarette would “degrade the community” and set a dangerous example for young girls. Another suggested it was the first step toward complete social collapse.
The penalty for violation was a fine of up to twenty-five dollars — a significant sum in 1908, equivalent to roughly eight hundred dollars today. The ordinance also carried the possibility of up to ten days in jail. Restaurant owners, hotel managers, and proprietors of public establishments were warned that allowing women to smoke on their premises could result in the revocation of their business licenses.
The ordinance went into effect immediately upon passage, and enforcement began with considerable enthusiasm. On the very first day, a woman named Katie Mulcahey became the first person arrested under the new law. Police found her smoking a cigarette on a street corner in the Bowery. When brought before a judge, Mulcahey was reportedly defiant. She told the court that she had been smoking since she was old enough to hold a cigarette, that she had never heard of any law against it, and that she had no intention of stopping regardless of what the Board of Aldermen thought about it.
The judge fined her five dollars. Mulcahey, who did not have five dollars, was sent to jail.
Her arrest made national headlines. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, and editorials ran the gamut from enthusiastic support to outraged condemnation. The New York Times covered the ordinance’s passage with measured neutrality but couldn’t resist noting the irony that several of the aldermen who voted for it were known to frequent establishments where women of “questionable virtue” smoked quite openly.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union praised the ordinance as a victory for decency. Suffragettes condemned it as yet another example of men controlling women’s bodies. Tobacco companies, predictably, said nothing publicly while privately calculating potential lost sales.
The ordinance’s reign, however, was remarkably brief.
Mayor George McClellan Jr. — yes, the son of the famous Civil War general — had been out of town when the Board of Aldermen passed the Sullivan Ordinance. Upon his return, he reviewed the legislation and found it legally problematic, poorly written, and fundamentally unenforceable. On February 4th, 1908, just two weeks after the ordinance took effect, McClellan vetoed it.
His veto message was surprisingly straightforward. The mayor argued that the city had no legal authority to regulate personal behavior that did not directly harm others. He noted that smoking, while perhaps unpleasant to some observers, was not in itself a crime, and making it one based solely on the gender of the smoker was discriminatory in a way the city charter did not permit.
McClellan also pointed out a practical consideration: the ordinance was essentially impossible to enforce consistently. Were police supposed to stand on every street corner checking the gender of every smoker? What about women who smoked in carriages — were those “public” spaces? What about the windows of private residences that happened to face the street?
The Board of Aldermen did not have enough votes to override the veto, and the Sullivan Ordinance died quietly. Katie Mulcahey, presumably, went back to smoking on whatever street corner she pleased.
The whole episode lasted exactly fifteen days.
What makes the Sullivan Ordinance particularly fascinating is not that it passed — moral panics about women’s behavior were common enough in that era — but how quickly it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. The gap between the aldermen’s confidence that they were protecting public morals and the mayor’s recognition that they were merely embarrassing themselves was measured in days, not years.
Within a decade, women smoking in public would be commonplace. By the 1920s, cigarette advertisements would specifically target female consumers. The moral catastrophe that Timothy Sullivan and his fellow aldermen predicted never materialized — or at least, if it did, it had nothing to do with women smoking cigarettes.
The Sullivan Ordinance demonstrates that legislative bodies have been passing laws about women’s bodies for a very long time, and that the arguments used to justify those laws have always sounded more compelling to the people making them than to anyone else.
THE FIRST TEST-TUBE TRIPLETS WERE BORN ON THIS DAY
Also on this date, but seventy-six years later, the first test-tube triplets in British history were born in London.
On January 21st, 1984, a couple whose names were kept private at the time welcomed three babies — a girl and two boys — all conceived through in vitro fertilization. The birth was hailed as a medical milestone, coming just six years after Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, was born in Oldham, England.
The procedure that created these triplets was still considered experimental in 1984. IVF had only been performed successfully a handful of times, and multiple births were relatively common because doctors typically implanted several embryos to increase the chances that at least one would survive. The birth of three healthy babies from a single IVF cycle was considered remarkable.
The attending physicians at the London hospital — the specific facility was not disclosed to protect the family’s privacy — described the delivery as “textbook.” All three infants were healthy, and the mother recovered without complications. The medical team noted that while multiple IVF births carried additional risks, this particular case had proceeded exactly as hoped.
What made the British triplets significant beyond the headline was what they represented for the future of reproductive medicine. In 1984, IVF was still controversial. Religious groups condemned it as “playing God.” Bioethicists debated whether children conceived in laboratories would be psychologically damaged by knowledge of their origins. Some physicians worried that the technology was moving faster than the medical community’s ability to understand its long-term effects.
The triplets’ healthy birth was cited repeatedly in arguments for continuing and expanding IVF research. If the technology could produce not just one healthy baby but three simultaneously, advocates argued, then perhaps the concerns about the procedure were overblown.
Today, IVF is so commonplace that the announcement of triplets conceived through the procedure would barely merit a mention in a local newspaper, let alone international coverage. The controversy that surrounded the technology in 1984 has largely evaporated. The children born through IVF in those early years are now adults with children of their own — some of whom were also conceived through the same technology.
The British triplets born on this date in 1984 are now forty-two years old. Whether they know the historical significance of their birth is unclear; the family maintained their privacy throughout the children’s upbringing. But they entered the world as medical pioneers, proof that a technology once considered dangerously unnatural could produce perfectly ordinary, healthy human beings.
Seventy-six years separated two January 21st events that, on the surface, have nothing in common. One was an absurd attempt to regulate women’s behavior through legislation. The other was a breakthrough that would eventually give millions of women reproductive options their grandmothers could never have imagined.
But both, in their own way, were about control — about who gets to decide what women can and cannot do with their own bodies, and how society adjusts when those decisions don’t turn out the way anyone expected.
THE CROWD RUSHED TO TASTE THE BLOOD OF A BEHEADED KING
On January 21st, 1793, the blade of the guillotine fell on the neck of Louis XVI, ending the reign of the last Bourbon king of France. The execution itself was a spectacle of revolutionary justice, carefully orchestrated to demonstrate that no one — not even a king — was above the will of the people.
But what happened in the moments after the blade fell has haunted the historical record ever since.
The Place de la Révolution — today known as the Place de la Concorde — was packed with spectators that cold January morning. Estimates of the crowd range from ten thousand to twenty thousand people, though accurate counts were impossible. They had come to witness something unprecedented: the death of a monarch at the hands of his own subjects.
Louis had been conveyed to the scaffold in a carriage, accompanied by a priest who heard his final confession along the way. The king reportedly remained calm throughout the journey, reading psalms aloud and praying. When he arrived at the platform, he attempted to address the crowd.
“I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge,” Louis began. “I pardon those who have occasioned my death, and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.”
He intended to say more. But Antoine Santerre, the commander of the National Guard, ordered a drum roll to drown out the king’s words. Whatever else Louis XVI wanted to say to the French people was lost to history, buried beneath the sound of drums.
The executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, and his assistants then secured Louis to the bascule — the tilting board that positioned the condemned beneath the blade. Sanson had been France’s chief executioner for decades, but he had never killed a king. Later, he would claim that Louis died bravely, without struggle or complaint.
At 10:22 in the morning, the blade fell. Sanson’s assistant lifted the severed head and displayed it to the crowd.
And this is where the accounts begin to diverge from official history into something darker.
Multiple eyewitnesses reported that immediately after the head was raised, a man broke through the line of guards and rushed toward the scaffold. Some accounts identify him as a citizen named Jean-Baptiste Janvier. Others give no name at all, describing only “a man from the crowd.” What happened next, however, is consistent across multiple sources.
The man dipped his handkerchief into the blood pooling beneath the guillotine. Some accounts say he dipped his hands directly into the blood and smeared it on his face. Others claim he collected enough to soak several pieces of cloth. As he did this, he reportedly shouted something to the crowd — some witnesses heard him cry “Long live the Republic!” while others claimed he was chanting in a language they did not recognize.
The crowd, rather than recoiling in horror, surged forward to join him.
Guardsmen who were present later described scenes that bordered on frenzy. Citizens pushed past the military cordon to reach the scaffold, fighting each other for the chance to touch the king’s blood. Some dipped scraps of paper or fabric into the crimson pool. Others reportedly tasted it. The execution platform, designed to be a symbol of rational justice, had become something far more primitive — an altar of blood sacrifice where the crowd participated in a ritual that seemed to belong to an earlier, darker age.
Sanson himself, in his memoirs, described the scene with evident discomfort. He had performed hundreds of executions over his career, and crowds often reacted with enthusiasm. But this was different. The executioner wrote that the people seemed possessed by something he could not name — a collective madness that had nothing to do with political ideology and everything to do with something far older.
The blood-soaked relics collected that morning became objects of veneration and horror in the years that followed. Handkerchiefs allegedly stained with Louis XVI’s blood circulated throughout Europe. Some were treasured by royalists as sacred relics of a martyred king. Others were kept by republicans as trophies of revolutionary victory. A few were reportedly used in rituals by groups whose beliefs fell outside any mainstream tradition.
In the decades after the execution, strange stories began to attach themselves to these relics. Families who possessed them reported unexplained phenomena: objects moving on their own, voices in empty rooms, a persistent smell of copper that no cleaning could remove. Whether these accounts were genuine experiences, psychological effects of possessing such a morbid artifact, or simply legends that grew up around notorious objects, it is impossible to say.
But the stories persisted.
One account, recorded by a collector of revolutionary memorabilia in the mid-nineteenth century, describes a handkerchief that had passed through several families since 1793. Each family reported similar experiences: nightmares involving a headless figure, the sensation of being watched, and an overwhelming feeling of dread whenever the handkerchief was handled directly. The collector eventually donated the object to a historical society, noting in his papers that he was “glad to be rid of it.”
What actually happened in those moments after the blade fell? The historical record is clear enough about the basic facts: people did rush forward, blood was collected, and the crowd’s behavior shocked even the revolutionaries who had orchestrated the execution. Whether anything supernatural occurred is, of course, unprovable.
But the execution of Louis XVI marked a rupture in the fabric of European society. For more than a thousand years, French kings had ruled by divine right, their authority flowing from God through the sacred act of coronation. To kill a king was not merely murder — it was sacrilege, a crime against the cosmic order itself.
The revolutionaries who sent Louis to the scaffold believed they were creating a new world based on reason and the rights of man. Perhaps they succeeded. But something was released in the Place de la Révolution that cold January morning — something the rational men of the Enlightenment had not anticipated and could not control.
The guillotine would claim nearly seventeen thousand heads over the next eighteen months, including Queen Marie Antoinette‘s that October. Many of those executed were revolutionaries themselves, victims of the very system they had helped create. Sanson continued his grim work throughout the Terror, growing increasingly disturbed by what he witnessed.
In one of his final letters, written shortly before his retirement in 1795, Sanson reflected on the execution of Louis XVI. “I have performed my duty,” he wrote, “but I cannot escape the feeling that something was awakened that day. Something that hungered. And we have fed it ever since.”
The Place de la Révolution was renamed the Place de la Concorde after the Terror ended, a deliberate attempt to bury the memories of what had happened there. The guillotine was removed. The bloodstains were scrubbed away. But for years afterward, visitors to the plaza reported unease they could not explain — a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, a sense that they were being observed.
Some said they could hear drums.
WHY JANUARY 21ST WANTS YOU IN SWEATPANTS GIVING HUGS
Today is January 21st, which means it’s National Hugging Day — the one day a year when invading someone’s personal space is not only acceptable but actively encouraged. The holiday was created in 1986 by a man named Kevin Zaborney from Caro, Michigan, who believed that Americans were too emotionally distant from each other. His solution was to designate a specific day when people would feel obligated to embrace relatives, friends, coworkers, and potentially complete strangers.
The placement in late January was deliberate. Zaborney reasoned that by this point in the winter, people were at their lowest emotionally — the holidays were over, the weather was miserable, and everyone was quietly breaking their New Year’s resolutions. A mandated day of physical affection, he believed, would lift everyone’s spirits.
Whether it actually works is unclear. Hugging does release oxytocin, the so-called “bonding hormone,” which can improve mood and reduce stress. On the other hand, forcing people to hug each other when they don’t particularly want to probably creates as much stress as it relieves. The holiday occupies that strange middle ground where you’re supposed to participate enthusiastically while secretly hoping no one takes it too seriously.
It’s also International Sweatpants Day, which feels like it should have been invented in 2020 but actually dates back to 2010, when two schoolteachers in Austria decided they wanted one day a year when wearing comfortable pants to work wouldn’t result in disapproving looks from their colleagues. The holiday has grown considerably more popular in recent years, for reasons that probably don’t need to be explained to anyone who spent significant time working from home.
The philosophy behind International Sweatpants Day is simple: comfort should occasionally take precedence over professionalism. Proponents argue that no one actually does better work while wearing uncomfortable clothing, and that dress codes exist primarily to make management feel like they’re in control of something.
Critics of the holiday — and apparently there are critics of International Sweatpants Day, which suggests that some people really need better things to worry about — argue that allowing sweatpants in professional settings creates a “slippery slope” toward complete sartorial collapse. These critics have apparently never worked in a tech startup.
If sweatpants aren’t enough comfort for you, today is also National Cheesy Socks Day. This is not a celebration of socks that smell bad — though that interpretation would certainly make the holiday more interesting — but rather a day to wear your most ridiculous, loudest, or most embarrassing socks with pride.
The origin of National Cheesy Socks Day is somewhat murky, which is true of approximately ninety percent of these novelty holidays. What’s clear is that it encourages people to dig into the back of their sock drawer and retrieve those gifts from well-meaning relatives — the ones covered in cartoon characters, inspirational quotes, or patterns that seem to have been designed by someone who was actively trying to cause migraines.
The underlying message of Cheesy Socks Day is that life is too short to wear boring socks. This is objectively true. It’s also true that most people will never see your socks unless you make a point of showing them, which means wearing ridiculous socks is essentially a private rebellion against conformity that only you know about.
And finally, some observe today as National Disc Jockey Day, honoring the people who introduced us to new music, kept the hits coming, and convinced us that the weather forecast was somehow interesting.
The role of the disc jockey has changed dramatically over the decades. In the 1950s and 60s, DJs wielded enormous cultural power — they could make or break a song simply by choosing whether to play it. Today, most radio stations run on pre-programmed playlists determined by algorithms and corporate committees, and the DJ’s job has been reduced to reading weather updates and promoting station contests between songs someone else selected.
Still, there’s something nostalgic about the idea of the DJ — that voice coming through your speakers who seemed to understand exactly what you wanted to hear, even when you didn’t know it yourself. National Disc Jockey Day invites you to appreciate that tradition, even if the tradition itself has largely disappeared.
So there you have it: January 21st is a day to hug people while wearing sweatpants and ridiculous socks, ideally while listening to the radio. If that sounds like a strange combination of activities, well, that’s the kind of thing that happens when you stack multiple novelty holidays on top of each other.
THE DELOREAN WAS TOO SLOW TO ACTUALLY TIME TRAVEL
On this date in 1981, the first DeLorean DMC-12 rolled off the assembly line at a factory in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. The car would go on to become one of the most recognizable vehicles in cinema history, thanks to its starring role in “Back to the Future.” But there’s a delicious irony about the DeLorean that most people don’t know.
In the movie, Doc Brown explains that the DeLorean needs to reach exactly 88 miles per hour to activate the flux capacitor and travel through time. This became one of the most quoted lines in film history. Kids who grew up in the 1980s can probably recite the entire sequence from memory: “When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious stuff.”
The problem: the actual DeLorean could barely reach that speed.
The DMC-12 was powered by a 2.8-liter V6 engine that produced approximately 130 horsepower — modest even by 1981 standards. The car was heavy, thanks to its stainless steel body panels and gullwing door mechanisms, and its performance suffered accordingly. Independent tests conducted at the time found that the DeLorean could reach a top speed of around 110 miles per hour under ideal conditions, but actually getting it there required a very long stretch of road and a great deal of patience. Something you’re not going to be able to do in a shopping mall parking lot.
Acceleration was even more embarrassing. The DeLorean took approximately 10.5 seconds to reach 60 miles per hour — slower than most family sedans of the era. Pushing it from 60 to 88 required significantly more time and distance. Car magazines of the early 1980s noted diplomatically that the DeLorean’s strengths lay in its styling rather than its performance.
The car chosen to travel through time by hitting 88 miles per hour was one of the slowest sports cars on the market. Doc Brown would have been better off installing his flux capacitor in a Corvette.
The filmmakers were apparently aware of this irony. In early drafts of the script, the time machine was supposed to be built into a refrigerator, not a car. When director Robert Zemeckis decided to use a vehicle instead, the DeLorean was selected primarily for its futuristic appearance — those gullwing doors and brushed steel panels looked like something from tomorrow, even if the engine was firmly rooted in yesterday.
During filming, the production team actually had to modify the DeLoreans used on set to make them perform adequately for action sequences. The car that appears to accelerate dramatically toward the clocktower in the film’s climax was aided by hidden tow cables and clever camera angles. The real DeLorean couldn’t have achieved that kind of acceleration on its own.
John DeLorean, the maverick automaker who founded the company bearing his name, probably wouldn’t have appreciated this assessment. He had envisioned the DMC-12 as a revolutionary vehicle that would change the automotive industry. Instead, his company produced fewer than nine thousand cars before collapsing amid financial troubles and a drug trafficking scandal that saw DeLorean arrested by the FBI in 1982.
The irony deepened when celebrities began receiving early DeLoreans as promotional vehicles. Johnny Carson, host of “The Tonight Show” and one of the most famous people in America at the time, was given one of the first production models.
It broke down almost immediately.
The exact details vary depending on who’s telling the story. Some accounts say Carson’s DeLorean died within miles of the delivery location. Others claim it made it home but refused to start the next morning. What’s consistent across all versions is that Carson did not become a DeLorean enthusiast. The car that was supposed to revolutionize the automobile industry and symbolize American innovation couldn’t make it through a week of normal use.
Carson, being Johnny Carson, probably got some comedy material out of the experience. The rest of us got a cautionary tale about the gap between marketing and reality.
Today, original DeLoreans in good condition sell for significant money — not because they’re particularly good cars, but because of their connection to “Back to the Future.” The film gave the DMC-12 an immortality its creator never achieved. John DeLorean died in 2005, having never fully escaped the shadow of his company’s failure and his own legal troubles.
But his car lives on in the popular imagination, forever frozen in that moment when Marty McFly floors the accelerator, the speedometer climbs toward 88, and the impossible suddenly becomes possible.
Of course, if you tried that in an actual DeLorean, you’d probably just end up frustrated by the side of the road, wondering why your sports car is being passed by minivans.
The movies lie to us sometimes. That’s what makes them movies.
CLOSE
And that’s your Morning Weird Darkness for Wednesday, January 21st, 2026.
So we covered women getting arrested for smoking, kings getting decapitated, and sports cars that couldn’t outrun a determined jogger. Just another Wednesday, really.
If any of this put you in the mood for something darker — and let’s be honest, at this hour, what else would — I’ll be back tonight with a full-length episode of Weird Darkness. And if you want some company while you listen, join me and the rest of the weirdo family for our nightly Live Chat Video Premiere on YouTube. We post tonight’s podcast episode and hang out in the chat starting at 10 p.m. Eastern, 9 Central, 8 Mountain, 7 Pacific. Just head to WeirdDarkness.com/YouTube and come be weird with us.
In the meantime, enjoy your hugs, your sweatpants, and your cheesy socks. Just don’t try to do all three at 88 miles per hour — you’ll never get there anyway.
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