Dr. Hunter S. Thompson designed his funeral plans with his friend, the artist Ralph Steadman, in the 1970s: he wanted his ashes to be fired from a cannon along with red, white, and blue fireworks. Further, the cannon was to sit atop a 150-foot-tall replica of his Gonzo logo: a two-thumbed clenched fist holding a “peyote button.”

Thompson committed suicide on February 20, 2005, and friends including Johnny Depp (a fellow Kentucky native who portrayed Thompson in film and became a friend) saw to it that his final wishes were granted. Depp largely financed the fifteen-story tower.

On this date in 2005, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes were fired into the Colorado sky with “Spirit in the Sky” playing and former presidential candidates, senators past and present, actors, and journalists in attendance. (Video featuring Steadman and Thompson and the event itself below the jump.)
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Eight hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union declared themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency” and pronounced themselves the new government of the USSR twenty-five years ago today. The “Gang of 8” staged a coup d’état in which they ordered the nation’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to be prevented from returning to Moscow from his holiday retreat and then took over the country’s airwaves and held a press conference in Moscow.

At the press conference, the members of the self-declared provisional government looked somewhere between fear and tears. The coup lasted two days but appeared near collapse through the entire ordeal. The event was the Soviet Communist party’s last gasping claw for power as it felt power slip away. And it was Boris Yeltsin’s debut on the international stage. (In the photo above, he is the figure on the left with papers in hand.)
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