It's Phileas Fogg Wager Day. This unofficial holiday celebrates one of the most famous wagers that set out one of the world's most famous adventure in motion.
October 2, 1955 -
Revenge, the very first story on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show premieres on this date.
Most people who have seen this series, remember Alfred Hitchcock's opening and closing narratives for the series. However, for each episode, more than one opening and closing was filmed, as Hitchcock's famous jibes at the sponsors were unappreciated in the European markets. So for each episode, Hitchcock filmed two openings and two closings: one would be for American viewings (jokes about sponsors) and the second would be for European showings (jokes about Americans, and not about sponsors). For most of the third season, Hitchcock even did the opening and closings in French and German, as he spoke both languages fluently.
October 2, 1957 -
The World War II drama The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean, and starring William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa, premiered in Britain, on this date.
During shooting, Alec Guinness continued to have doubts about his performance, and the direction he was getting from David Lean. To put Guinness at ease, Lean decided to show him a rough cut of certain sequences. One night, Lean ran over an hour's worth of footage for Guinness, with his wife and son also attending. During the screening, nothing was said. At the end, the Guinness family thanked Lean and promptly walked out, leaving Lean without a clue as to what to think of their reaction (or lack of). Later that night, Lean received a visit from Guinness, who told him that he and his family had decided that Nicholson was the best thing that Guinness had ever done.
October 2, 1959 -
...a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind....
Where is Everybody? the first episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone premiered on this date
The series will become one of the most influential programs in the history of television, establishing numerous story conventions and devices, the best known of which will be the unexpected twist that concludes each episode. The series will run for 156 episode over five seasons.
October 2, 1976 -
Try with a little help from my friends
John Belushi came out on stage with Joe Cocker while he was performing on Saturday Night Live on this date.
October 2, 1985 -
... you wave your hand and they scatter like crows.
Island Records released Tom Waits' phenomenal eighth studio album (wherein he found his truest voice,) Raindogs, on this date (It's also been reported that it was release on September 30. Whichever day it was released, it's still a damn fine album.)
October 2, 2001 -
In the long line of medical series, Scrubs, starring Zach Braff, premiered on NBC-TV on this date.
The show's medical advisers (in the credits) include Dr. Jonathan Doris, Dr. Jon Turk, and Dr. Dolly Klock, serving as the basis for the names of Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Heather Graham's characters.
Another failed ACME product
Today in History:
Three of the past century's finest comedians were born on October 2:
Groucho Marx (1890),
Bud Abbott (1895),
and Mahatma Gandhi (1869).
Groucho and Abbott were funny enough, but they pale beside the towering comic greatness of Gandhi. "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, " he once quipped: "but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always."
That a humorist capable of such scathing sarcastic wit should have sullied himself with politics is regrettable, but not much worse than Jesus having gotten into religion.
It should also be remembered that for most of Gandhi's life the Indian subcontinent was occupied by the British, and that for the first few formative decades of his existence the British were ruled by a queen who was famously unamused. Gandhi went to extraordinary lengths to amuse Queen Victoria. It was only decades after her death that his genius came to full flower, however, and one can only hope she was amused posthumously.
(Eventually the British realized they didn't get Gandhi's jokes and withdrew from India to develop Monty Python.)
October 2, 1925 -
Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed Stooky Bill on this date. (“Stooky” being slang for someone who moves woodenly and a colloquial term for the plaster cast used to immobilize bone fractures.)
Almost immediately, Logie Baird wanted to test his invention on a living, breathing human being. Baird went downstairs and grabbed an office bot, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised.
October 2, 1935 -
The Hayden Planetarium in New York, (the fourth planetarium in the U.S.,) opened on this date.
October 2, 1950 -
The comic strip Peanuts, created by Charles Schulz, debuted in nine newspapers with the characters of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Patty and Sherman. It is still the most-read comic strip in the world.
October 2, 1968 -
10 days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police officers and military troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest of the government occupation at the National Polytechnic Institute, on this date. Initially, the government tried to claim the students began shooting first, but this later was proved false.
Hundreds of protesters, many of whom were women and children, were killed, in what has became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. The Olympics, shamefully continued as planned, as the violence wasn't targeted at the games.
October 2, 1985 -
I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.
Rock Hudson died at his home in Beverly Hills, California after a battle with AIDS on this date.
And so it goes
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2 comments:
One of the tracks on the Rain Dog album is called "9th and Hennepin" which is a real intersection in downtown Minneapolis. We frequent that neighborhood to see plays at the refurbished Orpheum Theatre. Favorite line from that song: "All the donuts around here have names that sound like prostitutes."
And why wouldn't you have whorish sounding pastries!
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