If you've got it, haunt it.

Happy Halloween

But remember, Halloween: it's a large secret East Coast syndicate backed primarily by Big Sugar and Dental Schools.



This year I will suggest you go as - the defendants in the Georgia election case - some of them appear to be far scarier that brain eating zombies.



I'd have written more but I'm way behind in adding dead mice and ground glass into kids candy bags.



(For all you parents - if your kids went trick or treating, sort your kids candy later tonight. It is not a crime to save all the good chocolate for yourself. Tell'em you have to test it for the corona virus.)


October 31, 1912 -
The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Elmer Booth, Lillian Gish, Clara T. Bracy and Walter Miller, premiered in the US on this date. The film is thought to be the first film about organized crime.



In a street sequence, a young girl can be seen staring at the camera. This was not a mistake; D.W. Griffith had noticed that, in documentary films, people tended to stare at the camera, and felt that having her do just that would make the scene feel more realistic.


October 31, 1942 -
The Merrie Melodies short, The Hare-Brained Hypnotist , directed by Friz Freleng and starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, was released on this date.



The earlier Bugs appears here, with his more pronounced, wisecracking demeanor, New York City-esque accent, and pinker ears. But he still manages to kiss his enemy, something he'd do throughout his career - along with breaking the fourth wall.


October 31, 1945 -
René Clair's adaptation of Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery And Then There Were None was released in the US on this date.



In recent years it has come to light that much of Agatha Christie's plot appears to have been inspired by a little-known 1930 play by Owen Davis titled The Ninth Guest, which utilized the same framework of people being brought together by an unknown host who proceeds to kill them one-by-one. Columbia Pictures' atmospheric 1934 movie version, The Ninth Guest, has never been released on home video, but is now in the public domain.


October 31, 1949 -
Cecil B. DeMille's wonderfully campy (although not intentional) version of Samson and Delilah, starring Hedy LaMarr and Victor Mature premiered on this date.



For the scene in which Samson kills the lion, Victor Mature refused to wrestle a tame movie lion. Told by Producer and Director Cecil B. DeMille that the lion had no teeth, Mature replied, "I don't want to be gummed to death, either." The scene shows a stuntman wrestling the tame lion, intercut with close-ups of Mature wrestling a lion skin.


October 31, 1953 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Catty Cornered, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, was released on this date.



This cartoon features a forerunner of the Rocky and Mugsy duo.


October 31 1959 -
The Looney Tunes short, A Witch's Tangled Hare, directed by Abe Levitow and starring Bugs Bunny and Witch Hazel, was released on this date.



This was the final Looney Tunes short to star Bugs Bunny and Witch Hazel.


October 31, 1970 -
Led Zeppelin started a four week run, on this date, at No.1 on the Billboard album chart with Led Zeppelin III, the bands second US chart topper.



Although critics were typically confused over the change in musical style and gave the album a mixed response, Led Zeppelin III has since been acknowledged as representing an important milestone in the band's history and a turning point in their music.


October 31, 1986 -
Roland Joffé's powerful historical drama, The Mission, starring, Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Aidan Quinn, and Liam Neeson, premiered in the US on this date.



The film was released four years after its uncredited source book The Lost Cities of Paraguay by Father C. J. McNaspy was published. McNaspy also acted as a historical consultant to the film, which was loosely based on McNaspy's work.


October 31, 1992 -
The Boyz II Men single End Of The Road was the #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 for the 12th consecutive week, on this date, breaking the record held by Elvis Presley's two-sided Don't be Cruel/Hound Dog, which was #1 for 11 weeks in 1956.



Boyz II Men's bass singer, Michael McCary, got a spoken interlude on this song where he tells the girl he knew she was cheating but stayed with her anyway because he loved her so much. This section is an homage to vocal groups of the '50s and '60s that would often give their bass singer a similar spoken part.

Don't forget to tune in to a special Halloween edition of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour today.


Today in History:
Oct 31, 1517 -
The papacy was earning a good income by the indulgences system that allowed Christians to purchase remission from penance in purgatory. Appalled at the indulgences system, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Thesis to the door of the Wittenberg Palace All Saints’ Church, on this date.



Although he was a terrible anti-semite, Luther was one of history’s most significant figures, rocking the religious world when he penned a document attacking the Catholic Church’s corrupt practice of selling “indulgences” to absolve sin. His writing signaled the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Protestantism in general, shattering the external structure of the medieval church and at the same time reviving the religious consciousness of Europe.


October 31, 1926 -
Harry Houdini died in room 401 of Grace Hospital in Detroit on this date.



The escape artist was killed by diffuse peritonitis, after having undergone an emergency appendectomy.



Contrary to popular belief, the fatal appendicitis could not have been caused by a punch to the stomach.


October 31, 1941 -
The carving of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota, USA was completed on this date after 14 years of construction by Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum and 400 stone masons.



The total cost of the project was $989,992.32, and 85 percent of that cost was funded by Congress. Despite the dangerous nature of the job, none of the crew died during construction.


October 31, 1950 -
I thought to myself, Join the army. It's free. So I figured while I'm here I'll lose a few pounds.



John Franklin Candy, the great Canadian comedian and actor, was born on this date.


October 31, 1956 -
Humans set foot at the South Pole for the first time since Captain Robert F. Scott and his team in 1912, when a party led by Admiral George J. Dufek of the US Navy landed there in an R4D-5L Skytrain aircraft, on this date.



The purpose of the flight was to survey the South Pole for the construction of a scientific research station there.


October 31, 1963 -
On Halloween night, hundreds gathered to watch the Holiday on Ice show at the Indianapolis State Fairgrounds Coliseum on this date. (Perhaps not how I would be spending my evening, but to each his own.)



In the final minutes of the show, a leaking 100-pound propane tank exploded beneath a seating area. The blast sent spectators and large pieces of debris flying into the air. Seventy-four people were killed and more than 400 were injured. It definitely put a crimp in their evening.


October 31, 1963 -
The Beatles returned to London today in 1963 from a short tour of Sweden, their first outside England. They were greeted at Heathrow airport by photographers, journalists, and hundreds of screaming fans, adding to the growing evidence that Beatlemania was going to be around for more than a few weeks.



Ed Sullivan was there headed back to the States after a vacation, and was impressed. He was fully aware that he had missed out on being the first to put Elvis Presley on television and determined not to repeat the mistake, had his people look into getting them on his show.


October 31, 1984 -
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was not having a good day. Daughter of Nehru, the first prime minister of the newly independent India and fashion plate of the 60s, Mrs. Gandhi was running late for an interview with Peter Ustinov, who was filming a documentary for Irish television. Two Sikh members of her bodyguard, annoyed with her involvement in the storming of the Golden Temple (The holiest of Sikh sites) took this moment to express their vexation with their boss and assassinated her on the spot.



This sparked Hindu-Sikh clashes across the country. Four days of anti-Sikh rioting followed in India. The government said more than 2,700 people, mostly Sikhs, were killed, while newspapers and human-rights groups put the death toll between 10,000 and 17,000.

Once again, people should be checking the references of their bodyguards more carefully.


October 31, 1993 -
Federico Fellini, considered as one of the most influential and widely revered film-makers of the 20th Century, passed away on this date.



An apocryphal story at the time was that River's last words were supposedly, "No paparazzi, I want anonymity", although the quote has become something of an urban legend. In fact, according to witnesses, River stumbled out of the nightclub and fell hard, face-first, onto the sidewalk (experts believed he likely died at that moment) before spasming violently against the pavement for eight minutes, never having uttered a word.


October 31, 1993 -
The young phenom River Phoenix had an unfortunate time at the Viper Room in West Hollywood on this date.



An apocryphal story at the time was that River's last words were supposedly, "No paparazzi, I want anonymity", although the quote has become something of an urban legend. In fact, according to witnesses, River stumbled out of the nightclub and fell hard, face-first, onto the sidewalk (experts believed he likely died at that moment) before spasming violently against the pavement for eight minutes, never having uttered a word.


October 31, 1999 -

Jesse Martin of Australia became the youngest person (at age 18) to circumnavigate the globe, sailing solo, non-stop and unsupported.



He sailed from Melbourne, Australia, on December 8, 1998 (at age 17), sailing south of New Zealand, through the South Pacific, around South America, north on the Atlantic, back south past Africa, through the Indian Ocean and back to Melbourne, and returned on this date, taking 327 days 12 hours 52 minutes.


Before you steal all of your kid sister's Halloween candy, remember -



that Diwali is in 8 days.



that Thanksgiving is in 26 days. Huzzah! Keep checking those store flyers for sales on turkey - who klnows if we will still have a free country by then.



There are 34 days until Hanukkah



There are 55 days until Christmas!



But none of that is in comparison to the fact that the general election is in THREE DAYS! Remember to vote.


Oops, I forgot to mention - Don't forget to set your clocks back tonight -



I'm never sure why you need to save daylight anymore, it seems to come whether or not you call.



And so it goes

Please don't hand these out tomorrow

Surprise, surprise, it's National Candy Corn Day today. The famous candy is said to have been invented in the United States by George Renninger a candymaker at the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia, in the 1880s and it was originally made by hand.



Nowadays, it's mass produced by Jelly Belly® using a recipe unchanged since about 1900. Candy corn is made from bottom to top. The yellow bit is the top and the white is the bottom.



But remember, I believe they stopped production sometime after the end of World War I and just continued to recycle the remaining uneaten supply. And what ever you do - please don't remind Lewis Black about this.


October 30, 1937 -
A good early Looney Tunes Halloween treat, The Case of the Stuttering Pig, directed by Frank Tashlin, and starring Porky Pig, was released on this date.



When the picture of Uncle Solomon is shown, it's a drawing of Oliver Hardy as a pig.


October 30, 1942 -
Rene Clair's second Hollywood film, the delightful romantic comedy, I Married A Witch, starring, Veronica Lake, Fredric March, Susan Hayworth, and Robert Benchley, premiered on this date.



Dalton Trumbo was a contributing writer, but left because his interpretation of the novel differed from that of producer Preston Sturges. Sturges also left the production (and declined onscreen credit) because of artistic differences with director René Clair.



October 30, 1943 -
A very funny war-time Bugs Bunny Cartoon, Falling Hare, directed by Bob Clampett, was released on this date.



In the early 1940s, Walt Disney was developing a feature film based on Roald Dahl's book Gremlin Lore, and asked the other studios to refrain from producing gremlin films. While most of the studios complied, Warner Bros. already had two cartoons too far into production - this cartoon and Russian Rhapsody. As a compromise, Leon Schlesinger re-titled the cartoons to remove any reference to gremlins. The original title was Bugs Bunny and the Gremlin.


October 30, 1948 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Daffy Dilly, directed by Chuck Jones and starring Daffy Duck, was released on this date.



Daffy uses "sufferin' succotash!" here, which would become Sylvester the cat's trademark phrase..


October 30, 1954 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Quack Shot, directed by Bob McKimson and starring Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, was released on this date.



Many of the sight gags would be reworked in future Roadrunner and Coyote shorts.


October 30, 1968 -
The wonderfully acted treachery among the 12th Century Royals, A Lion In Winter starring Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins opened in the US on this date.



Although Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole had met several years earlier, and she was a great admirer of his work, she had no intention of putting up with the rather bad behavior he often exhibited on his productions. "You're known to be late", she told him on the first day of work. "I intend for you to be on time. I hear you stay out at night. You'd better be rested in the morning if you're going to work with me."


October 30, 1971 -
Pink Floyd released their sixth studio album Meddle in the US, on this date. The album features One Of These Days and the 23-minute track Echoes which took up all of side 2 on the vinyl record.



The cover image was photographed by Bob Dowling. The image represents an ear, underwater, collecting waves of sound, represented by ripples in the water.


October 30, 1982 -
The first single from Men at Work, Who Can It Be Now?, hits #1 on the Billboard charts, in America.



The song was released in Australia in 1981. It was gradually released around the world, where it got a great reception, but CBS Records in America dragged their feet - they didn't release it in that country until the middle of 1982, by which time the song had already hit #1 in Australia.


October 30, 1987 -
George Michael released his first solo album, Faith, on this date. Packed with hits, the album goes to #1 in both the UK and US, and wins the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.



When the album was released, Michael explained why he chose Faith as the title track, saying: "It represents the way I feel at the moment. It's kind of another word for my hope and optimism. You know, faith to me is just really such a strong word and the more I got into the idea of the song being the single, the more I liked the idea of using it as the title track."


October 30, 2002 –
Warren Zevon was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman as the only guest for the entire hour, on this date.



Zevon performing several songs and spoke about being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.

Kids, "...enjoy every sandwich."


Another unimportant moment in history.


Today in History:
October 30, 1863 -
OK kids, try to follow this ...

Danish Prince Wilhelm was a middle child of very famous siblings.

His older brother was to become the King of Denmark.

His older sister was married to Edward VII, making her the Queen consort of England.

His younger sister was married to the Tsar (czar? csar?) of Russia.

His parents didn't know what to get for him. They thought and thought about it and decided that he should become the King of Greece?



Wilhelm arrives in Athens, changes his name to a good Greek name and assumes his throne as George I, King of the Hellenes, on this date.

As mentioned previously, Wilhelm/ George's grandson was a sailor named Philippos, whose parents were related to themselves and half the other nobility in Europe. Philip had no real prospects of a career, so he did what any blue blooded aristocrat would do with no real prospects, he married up by marrying his second cousin (Elizabeth II of England.)

So remember, Charles is related to all of these people.


October 30, 1888 -
John L. Loud of Weymouth, Massachusetts was granted the first US patent for a ballpoint pen. (US patent 392,046) on this date.

The pen uses a revolving spherical marking point held in place by three smaller anti-friction bearings, which are held in place in turn by a spring-loaded rod.


October 30, 1938 —
The War of the Worlds was the Halloween episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed by wunderkind Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).



Welles's adaptation is arguably the most well-known radio dramatic production in history. Both the War of the Worlds broadcast and the panic it created have become textbook examples of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.



It has been suggested in recent years that the War of the Worlds broadcast was actually a news report of the Red Lectroids invasion of Earth by Orson as fact retracted as fiction. Another conspiracy theory has the Rockefeller Foundation funding the broadcast as a test to gauge the public's reaction.



There has been continued speculation that the panic generated by the broadcast inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, to avoid a similar panic. Indeed, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in 1956, "The [U.S. government's] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous The War of the Worlds broadcast."

It’s also possible, of course, that the aliens hypnotized Welles and caused him to present the broadcast as a drama—when it was, in fact, real.

You never know.


October 30, 1952 -
Clarence Birdseye sold first package of frozen peas on this date.



After his death, Birdeye was not frozen, as you might have incorrectly assumed but cremated and had his ashes were scattered at sea off Gloucester, Massachusetts.


October 30, 1961 -
The Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear device ever created (the Tsar Bomb) on this date. The nuclear test took place on the islands of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.



The bomb was 4,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.

It went BOOM and blowed up real good.


October 30, 1968 -
Silent film star, Ramon Novarro was brutally beaten and left for dead by his assailants, on this date. Novarro's life ended when two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson (if you're a very sick puppy, there are nude photos of Paul on the internet but I'm not going to link to them), whom he had paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex, murdered him.



According to the prosecution in the Novarro murder case, the two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro's house. The prosecution accused them of torturing Novarro for several hours to force him to reveal where the nonexistent money was hidden. They left with a mere twenty dollars they took from his bathrobe pocket before fleeing the scene.

Novarro died as a result of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own blood after being brutally beaten. According to filmmaker and scandal monger, Kenneth Anger, Navarro actually died after suffocating on a wooden (or silver or lead) dildo (a non-existing gift from Rudolf Valentino) the two brothers crammed down his throat.

A very unpleasant end, indeed.


October 30, 1974 -
Muhammad Ali and George Foreman held their Rumble In the Jungle boxing match in Zaire on this date.



Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round of a 15-round bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, to regain his world heavyweight title, that was taken from him for refusing military service. This fight has been voted by sports writers as the greatest sporting event in the 20th Century.


October 30, 1975 -
President Gerald Ford, on October 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”



While Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead,” (though in essence, it's what his speech was about,) those two words would cost him the presidency the following year, after Jimmy Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state.


October 30, 1990 -
Joseph W. Burrus, an aspiring magician, died while attempting a "buried alive" stunt. He was contained inside an acrylic glass clear box,or coffin, of his own construction. Lowered into a hole, his crew began filling the hole with dirt and cement around the coffin.



Apparently, Burrus didn't calculate the correct force the weight of the wet cement had on this coffin - he had only practiced the trick with soil. At some point, the crew realized the concrete had crushed the box, and when they pulled him out, he was dead. Oops (probably non-union help.)

Folks, when you're being buried alive, spend the extra bucks and go labor!


October 30, 2013 -
Norwegian town of Rjukan experienced a winter sun for the first time after giant mirrors were installed around the town on this date. Citizens celebrated by wearing their sunglasses and gathering in the town center



Rjukan, surrounded by mountains, does not get any direct sunlight for about seven months out of the year, and the idea to use mirrors to bring sun to the town center was proposed around one-hundred years previously.


Once again,

It's tomorrow folks, get it together



And the election is in four days



And so it goes

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