In case you need to distract yourself

October 29, 1268 -
16-year old Conradin, the Duke of Swabia, the last legitimate male heir of the German Hohenstaufen dynasty of Kings and Holy Roman Emperors, was executed along with his best friend, Frederick I, Margrave of Baden by Charles I of Sicily.

But what the hell do you care, Halloween is in two days and general election is in 5 days.

I bet if you dig around in any purses in your house (assuming someone in your house has a purse,) you could find some individual altoid mints to give out to the neighborhood kids should they come to your house treat or treating this year. Or better yet, look through your office desk for some unused Post-it pads.


October 29, 1955 -
The Looney Tunes short, Red Riding Hoodwinked, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Tweety Bird and Sylvester the Cat, was released on this date.



This is the last cartoon to credit Friz Freleng as "I. Freleng" in the credits. He would be credited as "Friz Freleng" starting from Roman Legion-Hare.


October 29, 1960 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Trip for Tat, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Tweety Bird and Sylvester the Cat, was released on this date.



Paisano Construction Company, seen on a placard outside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, might have been a wink at Paisano Productions, that was behind the popular TV series Perry Mason.


October 29, 1964 -
The still shocking noir classic film, The Naked Kiss, directed by Sam Fuller and starring Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante and Virginia Grey premiered on this date.



Samuel Fuller wrote in his autobiography that Constance Towers actually shaved her head for the opening scene, "without any qualms." However, Towers denied this in an interview, and her bald cap can be clearly seen in some shots.


October 29, 1966 -
? and the Mysterians song 96 Tears hit #1 in America on this date.



This song was written by "?," the band's frontman who wanted to be anonymous (he's listed on the composer credits as (Rudy Martinez). At one point he referred to the individual band members only by three-letter names (at one point, the band was known as XYZ). The mystery helped market the group, who wore dark glasses to add to the intrigue.


October 29, 1970 -
One of the last films directed by Billy Wilder, and scripted with his long time collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and starring Robert Stephens, Geneviève Page, Colin Blakely, and Christopher Lee, opened on this date.



According to Billy Wilder, since because of schedule conflicts, he couldn't supervise the bowdlerization of the picture demanded by the Studios, he entrusted the task to Editor Ernest Walter. Nevertheless, Wilder supposedly strongly disliked the cuts made by Walter, and couldn't re-edit the movie because all of the deleted scenes were lost or thrown away. Some of those scenes are available today, but never with both the audio and the video intact.


October 29, 1973 -
John Lennon's fourth solo album, Mind Games, was released by Apple, on this date.



The single Mind Games was the only single released from the album, which was a modest success but nowhere near as popular as his Beatles output. This song has held up well, getting significant airplay on a variety of radio formats. In a 1998 interview with Uncut, Yoko Ono posited that the song may have been ahead of its time. "I think that people didn't quite get the message because this was again before its time," she said. "Now, people would understand it. I don't think in those days people knew that they were playing mind games anyway."


October 29, 1974 -
Rhoda and Joe got married on this date.



The Rhoda's Wedding episode, which was a crossover episode with the Mary Tyler Moore Show, broke records for ratings when it aired.


October 29, 1984 -
Frankie Goes to Hollywood release their debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome, in the UK, on this date.



Trevor Horn discovered Frankie Goes To Hollywood shortly after creating his record company ZTT when he saw the band performing Relax and Two Tribes on a Channel 4 show called The Tube. Chris Squire (of the band Yes) commented, "This band looks really interesting. Why don't you sign them up?" Horn didn't think much about them until months later when he heard them again on BBC Radio 1 DJ David Jensen's radio show. When Horn contacted them to sign them, he was unaware that the band was on the brink of breaking up because they felt unsuccessful.


October 29, 1993 -
The first Got Milk commercial - the iconic Aaron Burr ad premiered on this date.



The commercial was directed by a recent film graduate of the Art Center College of Design, Michael Bay (yes, Transformers Michael Bay).


October 29, 1999 -
Spike Jonze's surreal comedy, Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman, and starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich, and Charlie Sheen premiered on this date.



John Malkovich claimed that he approached the character of "John Malkovich" as he would any other fictional role, and that the only thing about his real life that was reflected in the film is his wardrobe.


October 29, 1999 -
The largest grossing Japanes film of 1997, the Ghibli Studio's anime classic Mononoke-hime, was released in the US as Princess Mononoke, with new voice over work by Claire Danes, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver, and Billy Bob Thornton, on this date.



When it was announced that the Miramax/Buena Vista region-1 DVD would only contain the English-language dialogue track adapted by Neil Gaiman, there was enough fan protest to convince Miramax to delay the release in order to include the original Japanese-language dialogue.


Another little known Monopoly card


Today in History :
October 29, 1618 -

The day before (back in 1618), Sir Walter Raleigh was a fairly forgotten figure in English History. Sir Walter, famous explorer and favorite of Queen Elizabeth I had been languishing in prison for years on some murky charges of plotting against King James I. He was left to languish in the Tower of London until 1616. While imprisoned, he wrote many treatises and the first volume of The Historie of the World, about the ancient history of Greece and Rome. His son Carew was conceived and born while Raleigh was legally 'dead' and imprisoned in the Tower of London (1604).



In 1616, Sir Walter was released from the Tower of London in order to conduct a second expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado. In the course of the expedition, Raleigh's men, under the command of Lawrence Keymis, sacked the Spanish outpost of San Thome on the Orinoco. During the initial attack on the settlement, Raleigh's son Walter was struck by a bullet and killed. On Raleigh's return to England, the outraged Diego Sarmiento de Acuoa, the Spanish ambassador, demanded that King James reinstate Raleigh's death sentence. The ambassador's demand was granted.

Raleigh was beheaded at Whitehall on this date in 1618. "Let us dispatch," he asked his executioner. "At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear." After he was allowed to see the axe that would behead him, he mused: "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries". It's been said that Sir Walter final words (as he lay ready for the axe to fall) were: "Strike a match man, strike!"



The corpse was to be buried in the local church in Beddington, Surrey, the home of Lady Raleigh. "The Lords," she wrote, "have given me his dead body, though they have denied me his life. God hold me in my wits". After Raleigh's execution, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She carried it with her in a velvet bag until she decided she didn't like the smell.



Gentlemen, remember either to keep your head firmly in place upon your death or ask your wife to invest in a lot of room deodorizer.


October 29, 1891 -
Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn't get serious with people. They don't expect it from you, and they don't want to see it. You're not entitled to be serious, you're a clown.



Fanny Brice, popular and influential American comedienne, singer, theatre and film actress and entertainer, was born on this date.


October 29, 1899 -
Akim Tamiroff, Georgian born actor (was the first Golden Globe Award-winning actor for Best Supporting Actor) was born on this date.



While Tamiroff may not be a household name in the present day, his malapropistic performance as the boss in The Great McGinty inspired the cartoon character Boris Badenov,



the male half of the villainous husband-and-wife team Boris and Natasha on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.


October 29, 1901 -
Leon Czolgosz was convicted and sentenced to death for the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley on September 23, 1901 in a brief trial that lasted eight and a half hours from jury selection to verdict. Upon returning to Auburn Prison, he asked the Warden if this meant he would be transferred to Sing Sing to be electrocuted and seemed surprised to learn that Auburn had its own electric chair.

He was executed by electrocution, by three jolts at 1700 volts each, on October 29, 1901, in Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York. His brother Waldek and his brother-in-law Frank Bandowski were in attendance, though when Waldek asked the Warden for his brother's body to be taken for proper burial, he was informed that he "would never be able to take it away" and that crowds of people would mob him, so the body had to be buried on prison grounds.



His last words were "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people - the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime." As the prison guards strapped him into the chair, however, he did say through clenched teeth, "I am sorry I could not see my father." Sulfuric acid and lye were thrown into his coffin so that his body would be completely disfigured, and to aid in its decomposition. His letters and clothes were burned.



The scene of the crime, the Temple of Music, was torn down in November 1901. A stone marker in the middle of Fordham Drive, a residential street in Buffalo today marks the approximate spot where the event occurred. Czolgosz's revolver is on display at the Pan-American Exposition exhibit of the Erie County Historical Society in Buffalo.


Today is the anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash in 1929 that signaled the beginning of the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world.

Few people saw it coming except for Joseph P. Kennedy and Charlie Chaplin who had cashed out of the volatile market weeks early and preserved their fortunes. The stock market had been booming throughout the 1920s. Brokerage houses had been springing up all over the country, to take advantage of everyone's interest in investment. There were stories about barbers, messenger boys and prostitutes who'd gotten rich off of overheard stock tips. Americans who ordinarily couldn't afford to invest their money were taking out loans to buy stock so they wouldn't miss out (shades of the sub prime mortgage market.)

The front-page story in The New York Times on the next day read, "Wall Street was a street of vanished hopes, of curiously silent apprehension and of a sort of paralyzed hypnosis. Men and women crowded the brokerage offices, even those who have been long since wiped out, and followed the figures on the tape. Little groups gathered here and there to discuss the fall in prices in hushed and awed tones."

The stock market didn't do so well in September of 1929, but nobody really noticed anything was wrong until October 23, when 2.6 million shares were sold in the closing hour of trading. It looked as though the selling would continue on Thursday, October 24, but a group of the most influential American bankers in the country pooled their money and began to buy up the declining stocks, supporting the market. By the end of that day it seemed like everything would be all right.



But on this day in 1929, the bottom fell out of the market. Three million shares were sold in the first half-hour. Stock prices fell so fast that by the end of the day there were shares in many companies that no one would buy at any price. The stocks had lost their entire value.



It was the most disastrous trading day in the stock market's history (until now). The stock market lost $30 billion dollars, more than a third of its value, in the next two weeks.


October 29, 1932 -
Three years to the day after the stock market crash, the French liner Normandie was launched in front of 200,000 spectators. The ship was often called the greatest ocean liner ever built



Normandie's career as a passenger liner was cut short by the outbreak of World War II. At the end of her 139th Atlantic crossing, she arrived in New York on August 28, 1939, and would never sail again.


October 29, 1964 -
The Star of India, the famous golf-ball-sized stone was stolen, along with several other stones including the Eagle Diamond and the deLong Ruby from the American Museum of Natural History, in NYC, on this date. The thieves unlocked a bathroom window during museum open hours, climbed in that night, found that the sapphire was the only gem in the collection protected by an alarm -- and the battery for that was dead. So they raked up the stones, and fled the same way they came in.



Within two days, the notorious cat burglar, smuggler, and one-time surfing champion Jack Murphy (known as Murph the Surf) was arrested along with two accomplices, later receiving a three-year sentence. The uninsured Star of India was recovered in a locker in a Miami bus station. However, the Eagle diamond was never recovered.


October 29, 1969 -
The first computer-to-computer message transmission (ARPANET), the basis of today's internet, was established between UCLA and Stanford on this date.



Apparently, the two computers were looking for porn.


October 29, 2012 -
Most people on the East Coast were battening down the hatches, waiting for Sandy to hit landfall.



By the next day, New York harbor had risen to over 13 feet at the Battery, over two million New Yorkers has lost power, and 44 New Yorkers had lost their lives.



And so it goes

Cartoons are tiny little lifeboats

Today is International Animation Day. First observed in 2002, the day commemorates the first public performance of Emile Reynaud’s Theatre Optique at the Grevin Museum in Paris in 1892.



So Kids make sure you grab a bowl of the sugary breakfast cereal and watch your favorite cartoons.


October 28, 1944 -
The Merrie Melodies short, The Old Grey Hare, directed by Bob Clampett, and starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, was released on this date.



Musical Director Carl W. Stalling's name appears in a newspaper article Elmer Fudd reads at the beginning of this cartoon. The headline reads, "Smellevision Replaces Television" followed by the byline, "Carl Stalling sez, 'It Will Never Work!'"


October 28, 1947 -
An overlooked yet still powerful film-noir, Nightmare Alley, was directed by Edmund Goulding, and starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, and Helen Walker went into general release on this date.



The film did not initially do well, as the public found it difficult to accept Tyrone Powell as the bad guy. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck found this movie so generally distasteful that he eventually took it out of circulation, but it was theatrically re-released in 1956-1957, did good business, particularly in the drive-in circuit, and received wide distribution.


October 28, 1950 -
The eternally 39-year old Benjamin Kubelsky (who was actually 56 at the time,) transitioned his successful radio program to television on this date when The Jack Benny Show premiered on CBS-TV.



Most of Jack Benny's original radio cast appeared on television with him, including Don Wilson, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Dennis Day, and his real-life wife Mary Livingstone made several guest appearances. In one episode, Jack dreamed that he and Mary (his platonic friend on the show) were married and had a teenage daughter. Their daughter was played by their real daughter, Joan Benny.


October 28, 1950 -
The Looney Tunes short, Pop 'Im Pop! , directed by Bob McKimson and starring Sylvester the Cat, was released on this date.



The curious looking object behind Sylvester that's seen when he's first talking to his son is an old fashioned home incinerator. Back in the day, folks simply burned their rubbish in such a structure. Escaping sparks were commonly seen when it was in use.br />

October 28, 1956 -
Elvis Presley made his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, (Ed Sullivan had sufficient recovered from his near fatal auto accident to resume host the program,) on this date.



On the show besides Hound Dog, Elvis performed, Don't Be Cruel, Love Me and Love Me Tender.



Elvis also received a polio vaccination backstage that evening on the Ed Sullivan Show. This single event is credited with raising immunization levels in the United States from 0.6% to over 80% in just six months.


October, 28, 1957 -
Federico Fellini's Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) opened in the US on this date. (A good friend of mine named her daughter after Giulietta Masina. )



Federico Fellini cast film editor Leo Catozzo as the "man with the sack" and wanted to keep that sequence in the release print over the objections of producer Dino De Laurentiis. De Laurentiis thought the scene slowed the film down, finally had to resort to stealing the scene from the editing room. According to DeLaurentiis, about 5-7 years after its original release, Fellini rang him, and begged to get the scene back, so he could restore it. As Cabiria had now achieved a classic status, the producer agreed.


October 28, 1962 -
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson third attempt at frightening children with Supermarionation - Fireball XL5 premiered in the UK, on this date. Remember to stick around for the end credits to sing along with the theme!



Although Supercar had been shown in syndication, this was the first Gerry Anderson' Supermarionation series to appear on US network television (NBC, on Saturday mornings, between 1963 and 1965). This was their last black and white puppet TV series.


October 28, 1972 -
Stevie Wonder released his 15th studio album Talking Book on this date.



The album's first track, You Are the Sunshine of My Life, hit No.1 on the Billboard charts, and earned Wonder his first Grammy Award. The album featured a guest appearance of Jeff Beck on the track Superstition.


October 28, 1978 -
The group KISS, may have thought that they had dodged a huge career bullet when they turned down appearing in the disasterous BeeGee's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band fiasco, due to being contractually obliged to star in another feature. Karma though had other thoughts - The Hanna-Barbera produced KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park premiered on NBC-TV on this date.



All four members of KISS deeply regret that they acted in it. They hate the movie and still despise it being created.


October 28, 1989 -
Janet Jackson started a four week run at No.1 on the US album chart with Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 on this date.



As was the case with many of her hits of this era, Janet Jackson wrote Rhythm Nation with the songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. The trio got the idea for the song after seeing news stories about the Stockton playground murders, when Patrick Purdy shot up a school playground in California and killed five children before turning the gun on himself. They wanted to write a positive song focusing on the "Nation" of people they came across in New York dance clubs. These people came to the clubs from many different backgrounds and were united in their love for the music.


Another episode of ACME's Little Known Animal Facts


Today in History:
October 28, 4004 BC -
You never call, you never write - God.



According to Biblical calculations by our pal, Archbishop James Ussher,



God created Adam and Eve five days after finishing the rest of the universe.


October 28, 1886 -
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated at Liberty Island, New York, by President Grover Cleveland on this date. The statue weighs 225 tons and is 152 feet tall. It was originally known as Liberty Enlightening the World. Lady Liberty, as she came to be called, quickly become a symbol of America, partly because she was such a striking visual symbol of our national reverence for liberty, partly because of the five-dollar hot dogs and ten-dollar plastic replicas sold at her feet.

The statue's inscription was written by poet Emma Lazarus, and attributes the following exhortation from Lady Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!



(Certain former misinformed administrative officials misunderstand exactly for whom the light of liberty shines. May I humbly suggest the light shines directly for certain former administration officials to be shown the entrance to prison.)


Exactly thirty-three years later, in 1919, Congress passed a law prohibiting alcohol (The Volstead Act.)



Ultimately, it resulted in toxic, bootlegged alcohol that killed more people than legal alcohol had. With alcohol outlawed, only outlaws had drinks and the atmosphere fosters Mafia encroachment into legitimate businesses. Fortunately there were an awful lot of them and they overturned the law as soon as they were sober enough to vote.


October 28, 1922 -
King Victor Emmanuel III, with the assistance of the Catholic Church, handed over power to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, on this date.



Pope Pius XI declared Mussolini is a man sent by divine providence. In return for this endorsement, the silly dictator would go on to sign the Lateran treaty, restoring papal sovereignty over the Vatican.

But at least the trains ran on time.


October 28, 1943 –
The supposed ‘Philadelphia Experiment,’ involving teleportation or invisibility by the US Navy, took place with the destroyer escort ship, the USS Eldridge.



The US Navy maintains that no such experiment occurred and details of the story contradict ‘well-established facts about the Eldridge.’


October 28, 1948 -
The Nobel committee announces that Swiss chemist Paul Müller had won the 1948 chemistry prize on this date.



He discovered the unusual insecticidal properties of 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2- bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane. Thanks to Mueller, the world embraces the phenomenal bug-killer... until somebody discovers that the hydrocarbon, popularly known as DDT, also excels at causing cancer.


October 28, 1955 -
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle on this date. With the world uneasiness, Bill's agressive can recycling has helped him deal with his drop from the number five position to number six (as of yesterday) on Forbes' world billionaire list. I believe he is holding his own with the 1%ers.



Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Bill Gates had all, at least once during their lives, been the richest man in the world. They shared one thing in common – a father named William.


October 28, 1962 -
The Cuban Missile Crisis officially ended when Nikita Khrushchev formally agreed to dismantle the Soviet missiles and remove them from Cuba. In exchange, the US agreed not to invade Cuba and respect its sovereignty.



The world breathed a sigh of relief as the tense situation that almost caused a nuclear war came to an end.


October 28, 1963 -
A New York DJ, Murray Kaufman, played a song from a little known British group on this date.

It is believed that Murray the K's playing of She Loves You by The Beatles on this date, was the first time a Beatles song was played on an American radio station.


October 28, 1965 -
Pope Paul VI issued a decree, Nostra Aetate, which among other things, absolved Jews of collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

I can chart my moral decline to this date. When informed of this a few years later, I told my seventh grade religious teacher, "Gee, that was awfully big of him."


October 28, 1965 -
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, the tallest memorial in the US, was completed on this date. The famous arch, designed by architect Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel, is 603 feet (about 184 meters) tall and 630 feet (about 192 meters) wide.



The memorial was built as a monument to Thomas Jefferson and all those pioneers for whom St. Louis was the Gateway to the West.


October 28, 1971 -
Little remembered today but the first British (and only British made and launched) satellite, Prospero, went up this date, (after the announcement of the cancellation of the British Space program just months earlier.)



Britain becomes the sixth nation with its satellite launched into orbit by a Black Arrow rocket from Woomera, Australia. The mission of the Prospero, a Black Knight 1 satellite, is to test solar cells and other technologies experiments.


And on a personal note:

Happy Birthday Olivia



And so it goes

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder

Today is National American Beer Day - but please follow along as this will get confusing:

National Beer Day,is celebrated on April 7.
International Beer Day,is celebrated on the first Friday in August5.
National Drink Beer Day,is celebrated on September 28, celebrated around Octoberfest, which is celebrated in Munich.



While beer is not my go to beverage of choice, I'm happy to down a frosty cold one or two.


October 27, 1954 -
"... It was all started by a mouse."

Walt Disney's first TV show, Disneyland, premiered on ABC-TV on this date.



All of the ABC episodes were filmed in color, even though they aired in black and white. In general, ABC did not broadcast in color until the mid 1960s. During the years on ABC, the show went by the title of Disneyland, with one of four weekly sub titles, either Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland or Tomorrowland, depending on the category of that week's show.


October 27, 1955 -
The quintessential 50s movie (although quite startling at the time,) Nicholas Ray's masterful, Rebel Without a Cause, was released on this date.



Natalie Wood was first considered too young for the role of Judy. Even though she was the same age as the character, she was at least 5 years younger than all the other candidates except Margaret O'Brien. She adopted a mature woman's hairstyle, started wearing heavy eye makeup and eventually attracted the notice of director Nicholas Ray, 43, who began an affair with the 16-year-old and gave her the part.


October 37, 1956 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Wideo Wabbit, directed by Bob McKimson, and starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, was released on this date.



The second time in which Bugs disguises himself as an usher to send someone into a show that involved Indians and then trick his enemy into a hunter/sportsman related show was in People Are Bunny. Only that time, the victim of Bugs' trick was Daffy Duck.


October 27, 1964 -
Another Paddy Chayefsky scripted classic from the 60s (although unappreciated), The Americanization of Emily, starring James Garner and Julie Andrews, premiered on this date.



Producer Martin Ransohoff removed director William Wyler from this movie, as Wyler wanted to change Paddy Chayefsky's script. It was a rare instance in which a producer supported a screenwriter over a director, particularly one of Wyler's caliber. As Chayefsky was known to have guarantees written into his contracts protecting his scripts, Ransohoff may have had no choice but to replace Wyler with Arthur Hiller.


October 27, 1966 -
The Star Trek episode, Miri, where the Enterprise discovers an exact duplicate of Earth, where the only survivors of a deadly plague are the planet’s prepubescent children, premiered on this date.



The girl held by Kirk as he rushes to the lab with his newly-recovered communicator is played by William Shatner's daughter Melanie Shatner. Leonard Nimoy was asked to allow his children to appear as extras but Nimoy refused to let his children be involved in show business. His son, Adam Nimoy, did grow up to become a television director, including a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.


October 27, 1966 -
The third Charles Schultz Peanuts special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, (directed again by Bill Melendez,) premiered on this date.



This is the only special where Pig Pen is shown wearing glasses. You can see them when he is with the other kids at the Halloween party around the apple tub just before Lucy bobs for an apple.


October 27, 1982 -
Prince's fifth album, 1999, was released on this date. It becomes his breakthrough, selling well over 5 million copies worldwide, thanks to Little Red Corvette and the title track.



The album helped propel him to superstar status, a title he lived up to with electrifying live shows and a startlingly prolific output of material, including music, movies and videos.


October 27, 1988 -
U2's film Rattle And Hum, received its world wide premiere in the group's hometown of Dublin on this date.



One of the band's goals with this film was to recognize its musical roots, which is shown by the large number of homages: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Van Morrison, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimi Hendrix are all alluded to directly or indirectly (and the studio recording sessions included further homages to Presley, Dylan, and The Righteous Brothers).


October 27, 1995 -
One of the least happiest films ever made, Leaving Las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis and starring Nicolas Cage, and Elisabeth Shue went into limited release in the US on this date.



Author John O'Brien, on whose novel this movie is based, committed suicide two weeks after the movie went into production. Director Mike Figgis contemplated abandoning the project, but decided the film would make a good memorial for O'Brien.


October 27, 1998 -
R.E.M. appeared on The Jools Holland Show, Later, which was recorded at BBC TV Centre on this date.



Two days earlier, R.E.M. played almost the identical concert for BBC Radio 1 at the Radio Theater at Broadcasting House in London for an audience primarily consisting of fan club members and contest winners.


Another moment of Zen


Today in History:
On October 27, 312, on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision assuring him of victory in the name of the Christian God.



As emperor, Constantine served as a patron for the church, contributing to its rapid growth in the fourth century. (So just that I have this right - if sunglasses had been invented and he didn't have sun glare in his eyes, most of the world would still be engaged in wanton sodomy.)


October 27, 1553 -
Michael Servetus, noted theologian, was honored in Switzerland for his discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood, on this date by being burned at the stake just outside Geneva with what was believed to be the last copy of his writing chained to his leg. Historians record his last words as: "Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me."

John Calvin is given a good deal of credit for having arranged these honors, which may have had something to do with his own gratitude to Mr. Servetus for having raised an important theological question.

Throughout history, such important theological questions have caused almost as much bloodshed as important theological answers. That doesn't mean theology's an especially bloody field - there's been just as much carnage from philosophy, politic



It's probably all that blood that puts the 'human' in the humanities or as one of my faith readers put it, the 'hard' in hard science.


October 27, 1682 -
The City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was founded on this date. In 1681, as part of a repayment of a debt, Charles II of England granted William Penn a charter for what would become the Pennsylvania colony. Penn's ship anchored off the coast of New Castle, Delaware, on October 27, 1682, and he arrived in Philadelphia (which did not exist at the time, if you are following along, the Lenni Lenape Indians certainly didn't call this place Philadelphia) a few days after that.



He expanded the city west to the bank of the Schuylkill River, for a total of 1,200 acres. Streets were laid out in a gridiron system. Except for the two widest streets, High (now Market) and Broad, the streets were named after prominent landowners who owned adjacent lots. And no cheese steaks were involved.


October 27, 1858 -
Rowland H. Macy opened R.H. Macy Dry Goods on the corner of Sixth Ave. and 14th St. in New York City on this date.

First day sales were $11.06 but by the end of the first year, sales totaled almost $90,000. By 1877, R.H. Macy and Co. had become a full-fledged department store occupying 11 adjacent buildings.


October 27, 1904 -
The first underground segment of the New York City Subway officially opened on this date, running from City Hall in lower Manhattan to Broadway in Harlem.



The fare was a nickel and on the first day the trains carried over 150,000 passengers. Today it is one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world. And with any luck, they will extend the Q line to 125th Street within my lifetime.


October 27, 1939 -
John Cleese, actor, writer and all around funny guy was born on this date. (Oh yeah, I think he was in a comedy group in the late 60s, early 70s.)



I hope John continues being funny and stops giving his opinion on how terrible it was to have been in Monty Python.


October 27, 1950 -
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.



Frances Ann Lebowitz, author, social commentator and famous curmudgeon, was born on this date.


October 27, 1962 -
The British comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringe, written by and starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett opening in NYC on this date.



This show is often seen as the beginning of the British satirical comedy of the 60s and many of the members Monty Python found this show highly influential.


October 27, 1964 -
In a private ceremony, Sonny and Cher exchanged rings in Tijuana (on this date) and told others they were married,



they were not legally married until 1969.


October 27, 2013 -
I'm an artist and that means I can be as egotistical as I want to be.



Music legend (and general major pain in the ass) Lou Reed died on this date.



And so it goes