Today in History - January 30 | Deliberately annoying mascot results in pizza shop workers held at gunpoint
The proliferation of one of the most popular advertising mascots of the 1980s resulted in a bizarre and frightening encounter on January 30, 1989.
The Noid was created for Domino's Pizza as an animated villain.
The 1986 character was associated with the tagline "Avoid the Noid".
The claymation character was so successful that Domino's developed a Saturday morning cartoon and computer game themed around The Noid.
But a mentally ill man named Kenneth Lamar Noid believed the character was created to deliberately antagonise him.
Armed with a .357 magnum, Noid held two employees at a Georgia Domino's hostage for five hours.
He demanded $100,000 and a white limousine in exchange for the hostages, followed by a copy of a novel called The Widow's Son.
Getting hungry, he ordered his hostages to make him a pizza.
As he sat and ate it, the hostages escaped.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalised.
Contrary to popular belief, Domino's did not discontinue the character because of the hostage situation.
The Noid has been used in advertising campaigns in the US as recently as 2021.
As a joke prize after winning a Test series against Australia, the England cricket team were presented with a tiny urn on January 30, 1883.
The urn contained the ashes of a bail used on the third Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground that week.
The ashes were the culmination of a series of remarks following a mock obituary published in the Sporting Times the previous year.
After England suffered an embarrassing defeat to Australia, the newspaper declared the death of English cricket.
"The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia," the notice read.
England captain Ivo Bligh vowed that on their next tour to Australia, he would "bring back those ashes".
It would be 20 years before "The Ashes" became commonly associated with the great sporting rivalry.
Pictures of liberated slave Wilson Chinn shocked the American North when they were published in Harper's Weekly on January 30, 1864.
Photographs taken of Chinn showed the various torture devices used to keep slaves in terror and suffering in the South.
Chinn was photographed wearing a punishment collar, a device which would prevent him from resting his head when lying down.
He is also seen holding manacles and paddles used to beat slaves.
Perhaps most confronting is the letters branded across his forehead VBM.
The letters were the initials of his owner Volsey B. Marmillion, who branded many of his slaves that way to mark his ownership.
The photographs became some of the most widely circulated of the US Civil War, which was still raging at the time.
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