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.
The sponsors, who had great influence regarding the presentation of the show, insisted that for the episodes ending with the perpetrator "getting away with a crime," Alfred Hitchcock provide a statement in his closing monologue that would assure audiences that justice was served.
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.
The elephants employed in helping build the bridge would take breaks every four hours and lie around in the water, whether the crew wanted them to or not.
October 2, 1959 -
...a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind....
The first episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone, Where is Everybody?, premiered on this date
Rod Serling wanted Richard Egan to do the narration because of his rich, deep voice. However, due to strict studio contracts of the time, Egan was unable. Serling said, "It's Richard Egan or no one. It's Richard Egan, or I'll do the thing myself", which is exactly what happened.
October 2, 1961 -
The medical drama Ben Casey, starring Vince Edwards and Sam Jaffe, premiered on ABC-TV, on this date.
According to director Mark Rydell, Vince Edwards had a gambling problem. Edwards demanded to film all of his scenes first, so that he could leave the set and go to a racetrack. According to Harry Landers, Edwards also constantly asked the cast and crew for money with which to gamble and leave the set for hours at a time.
October 2, 1971 -
The first episode of the weekly series, Soul Train, premiered, on this date.
It featured Gladys Knight and the Pips, Eddie Kendricks, The Honeycone and Bobby Hutton.
October 2, 1971 -
Rod Stewart's single Maggie May/ Reason to Believe hits No. 1 on the Billboard singles charts on this date -
his album Every Picture Tells A Story goes No. 1 on the Album charts on this date as well -
Maggie May was the first big hit of the rock era to feature a mandolin, which was mostly heard in folk music. Stewart first used the instrument on Mandolin Wind, which was one of the first songs he recorded for the album. He liked the results, so he used it on Maggie as well.
October 2, 1976 -
Every night I have the strangest dreams ...
John Belushi came out on stage with Joe Cocker while he was performing on Saturday Night Live on this date.
October 2, 1982 -
John Cougar's (John Mellencamp) single Jack And Diane, a little ditty about two American kids growin' up in the heartland, becomes his first and only #1 hit in America, on this date.
Jack and Diane were a interracial couple in the first version of this song, inspired by the blended couples John Mellencamp saw during his live performances (Jack was black, Diane was white). He took the race part out of it and made Jack a football star after an executive from his record company heard what he was working on and asked him to do so in an effort to make the song more relatable and therefore boost its hit potential. With race removed from the equation, a broader swath of Mellencamp's audience identified with the song, especially in the Midwest. He says that lots of folks have told him that the characters are just like them.
October 2, 1985 -
... All the donuts around here have names that sound like prostitutes.
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, 1994 -
In response to new, stringent censorship laws that were being put in place at the time, The Simpsons episode Itchy and Scratchy Land, was released on the Fox network on this date.
Fox had tried to prevent the inclusion of Itchy and Scratchy cartoons in the show, prompting the writers to make the episode as violent as possible.
October 2, 2001 -
In the long line of medical series, Scrubs, starring Zach Braff, premiered on NBC-TV on this date.
It was Zach Braff who suggested using the song Superman by Lazlo Bane as the show's theme after listening to the lyrics and finding them in mood with the pilot.
Another book from the back shelves of The ACME Library
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.
In the words of Charles Hayden, the planetarium’s mission is to give the public “a more lively and sincere appreciation of the magnitude of the universe… and for the wonderful things which are daily occurring in the universe.” Hayden believes that everyone should have the experience of feeling the “immensity of the sky and one’s own littleness.”
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
3 comments:
Waaay back in the very early 1970s, I played in a pretty crappy rock band. We had gigs in places like Loogootee, Oolitic, Bedford, and Bloomington, IN. Our keyboard player had been in Mellencamp's band briefly (until the keyboardist had to serve a short stint in prison.) He said Mellencamp was a nice guy.
Jim, it will no longer be known as six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon - it will be six degrees of separation from YOU!
Marx, Abbott and Gandhi, indeed.
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