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United States by George Renninger a candymaker at the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia, in the 1880s and it was originally made by hand.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

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