The Eight Pains: Executed Today’s Eighth annual report

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Yesterday’s post, the 2,922th consecutive day we’ve filled in these implacable annals, completed our eighth revolution around the sun since this here site was born on Halloween way back in 2007.

When looking back on this project, whenever it should come to an end, it will be very difficult to account for how it’s managed to shamble along all this time without going all to pieces. Life has changed quite a bit in that time, but death seems to hold maddeningly consistent.

I have been lucky, no doubt, to have that margin (if sometimes barely that margin) of health and income and time to maintain, and luckier still for the collaboration and support of many others who have contributed to this site and without whom it would have died a fool’s death long ago. The surest thing I can credit to myself is the obstinance just to stack up the next post, day upon day, whether I want to or not. As Steinbeck wrote of the onerous birth of The Grapes of Wrath.

I’ll get the book done if I just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.

Books, at least, have ends to go with their beginnings and middles. We are eight years in, the figure for the infinite and a number that’s starting to get too big for the numerological sport. It’s a goddamned bloody history of tragedy and horror that we’ve slogged through and the fact of the matter is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of enterprise: if anything, the surface has scratched us.

Growth Chart

  • 15.25 million pageviews
  • 24,509 Twitter updates to (at present) 4,235 followers
  • The Ted Bundy post has 7,666 comments

Typical daily traffic has dipped a bit and is now more in the 6,000-7,000 neighborhood than former heights of 7,000 and even 8,000.

Traffic

As we’ve noted in some past incarnations of this accounting, the register of Executed Today’s most-trafficked posts all-time has become fairly ossified by dint of the enormous first-mover advantage that the oldest posts on the site enjoy. 2015’s top 40 is basically 2014’s top 40, with some minor jostling around the order; the only new additions vis-a-vis 2014 are Soviet partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, one of the earliest posts on this site and a regular top traffic earner around the lower fringes of these posts, and — a truly new addition — our September 2014 treatment of Nigerian gangster Ishola Oyenusi.

1. Ted Bundy (January 24, 1989)
2. Eleven from the Stutthof concentration camp (July 4, 1946)
3. Pargali Ibrahim Pasha (March 15, 1536)
4. Hideki Tojo (December 23, 1948)
5. Rainey Bethea (August 14, 1936)
6. Mohammad Najibullah (September 27, 1996)
7. Karl Hermann Frank (May 22, 1946)
8. Samuel K. Doe (September 9, 1990)
9. Jesse Washington lynched (May 15, 1916)
10. Prince Mustafa (Oct. 6, 1553)
11. Eugen Weidmann (June 17, 1939)
12. Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni (July 19, 2005)
13. Green Tea Hag (March 4, 1771)
14. Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis (July 8, 1999)
15. Fou Tchou-li (April 10, 1905)
16. Thomas Cromwell (July 28, 1540)
17. The rapists of Maggie dela Riva (May 17, 1972)
18. Nguyen Van Lem (February 1, 1968)
19. Pvt. Eddie Slovik (January 31, 1945)
20. James Corbitt (November 28, 1950)
21. Eva Dugan (February 21, 1930)
22. Pulitzer Prize-winning firing squad photograph from the Iranian Revolution (August 27, 1979)
23. Hamida Djandoubi (September 10, 1977)
24. Three partisans in Minsk (October 26, 1941)
25. Charles Starkweather (June 25, 1959)
26. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (June 19, 1953)
27. Robert-Francois Damiens (March 28, 1757)
28. Claus von Stauffenberg (July 21, 1944)
29. Princess Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud (July 15, 1977)
30. Ishola Oyenusi (September 8, 1971)
31. Eight July 20 anti-Hitler plotters (August 8, 1944)
32. Amon Goeth (September 13, 1946)
33. Karla Faye Tucker (February 3, 1998)
34. Dhananjoy Chatterjee (August 14, 2004)
35. 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. (June 16, 1944)
36. Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin (December 11, 1962)
37. Stephen Morin (March 13, 1985)
38. Mohamed Oufkir (August 16, 1972)
39. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (November 29, 1941)
40. John Bennett (April 13, 1961)

The two posts falling off the top 20, Ruth Snyder’s illicitly photographed electrocution and the stoning of Soraya M., come in at nos. 41 and 42, respectively.

Most Popular Posts Within the Past Four Years

To get a view of what new content is actually hitting, we took a look last year at the top posts by lifetime pageviews that were actually written within the past four years. Even this view skews to the earliest; 10 of those posts from last year automatically roll off in an updated snapshot for being written before Halloween of 2011 — just as most of the posts in this moving window date from 2012.

1. Ishola Oyenusi (September 8, 1971)
2. 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. (June 16, 1944)
3. The Münster Rebellion leaders (January 22, 1536)
4. Boonpeng Heep Lek, the last public beheading in Thailand (August 19, 1919)
5. Kehar Singh and Satwant Singh, assassins of Indira Gandhi (January 6, 1989)
6. German soldiers for cowardice (Uncertain/various dates, 1945)
7. Pin Peungyard, Gasem Singhara, and (twice) Ginggaew Lorsoungnern (January 13, 1979)
8. Amelia Dyer, baby farmer (June 10, 1896)
9. Daniel Pearl (February 1, 2002)
10. The kid brother of the outlaw Cartouche (July 31, 1722)
11. Leo Echegaray (February 5, 1999)
12. The Dachau Massacre (April 29, 1945)
13. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party coup (July 22, 1979)
14. Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre (March 29, 1946)
15. Johnny Frank Garrett (February 11, 1992)
16. Anna Antonio (August 9, 1934)
17. Clarence Ray Allen (January 17, 2006)
18. Mary Hamilton, lady in waiting (March 14, 1719)
19. Eva Braun’s brother (April 28, 1945)
20. Sehzade Beyazit (September 25, 1561)

Dead Draw

A years’-long white-whale project somehow came to fruition this year thanks to the inestimable design prowess of Tom Eykemans. As a result, it’s now possible to have the dead man’s hand comprised of actual dead men. (And women.)

You can have these in time to creep out your poker buddies for a pittance of a tip to your friendly executioner. (We promise not to do you like Monmouth.)


Buy this on Selz

Guest Posts

As usual, many of the site’s best posts are the products of guest authors. Does one even consider Meaghan Good a “guest author” at this point? She’s logged about six months’ worth of content over the years, with numerous more in the hopper pending future publication. Every year I try to find a different way to say that Meaghan rocks … but man, does she rock.

Meaghan Good

Robert Elder

David Graham-Scott

Amelia Fedo

Emma Goldman

Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon

Harry Brodribb Irving

Michael DeHay

Sabine Baring-Gould

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2 thoughts on “The Eight Pains: Executed Today’s Eighth annual report”

  1. like your site, when the time comes please do yang jia, tsutomu miyazaki, and jonathan green.

  2. ET is a unique site, and without equal, in my view. The range of information brought to these pages is staggering. You gave the thinkers of this world something wonderful to contemplate, Jason, on the day this site was created.

    May it stretch far, far into the future…

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