Rosh Hashanah begins on Sunday evening, so we here at ACME are wishing our friends L’shanah Tovah.
October 2, 1955 -
Revenge, the very first story on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show premieres on this date.
The sponsors, who had great influence regarding the presentation of the show, insisted that for the episodes ending with the perpetrator "getting away with a crime", Alfred Hitchcock provide a statement in his closing monologue that would assure audiences that justice was served.
October 2, 1959 -
...a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind....
Where is Everybody? the first episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone premiered on this date
Rod Serling wanted Richard Egan to do the narration because of his rich, deep voice. However, due to strict studio contracts of the time, Egan was unable to. Serling said, "It's Richard Egan or no one. It's Richard Egan, or I'll do the thing myself," which is exactly what happened.
October 2, 1976 -
I'll tell you why.. Because I'm a dancer!
John Belushi came out on stage with Joe Cocker while he was performing on Saturday Night Live on this date.
September 30, 1985 -
... dogs in the rain lose their way home, [because] after it rains, every place they peed on has been washed out.... They go to sleep thinking the world is one way, and they wake up and somebody moved the furniture.
Island Records released Tom Waits' phenomenal eighth studio album, Raindogs, on this date.
October 2, 2001 -
In the long line of medical series, Scrubs, starring Zach Braff, premiered on NBC-TV on this date.
Creator Bill Lawrence has said in interviews that he wanted Scrubs to be almost like a live-action The Simpsons, not only in the style of humor but also with the numerous high-profile guests and a fairly large cast of recurring characters.
Today in History:
Three of the past century's finest comedians were born on October 2:
Groucho Marx (1890),
Bud Abbott (1895),
and Mahatma Gandhi (1869).
Groucho and Abbott were funny enough, but they pale beside the towering comic greatness of Gandhi. "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, " he once quipped: "but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always."
That a humorist capable of such scathing sarcastic wit should have sullied himself with politics is regrettable, but not much worse than Jesus having gotten into religion.
It should also be remembered that for most of Gandhi's life the Indian subcontinent was occupied by the British, and that for the first few formative decades of his existence the British were ruled by a queen who was famously unamused. Gandhi went to extraordinary lengths to amuse Queen Victoria. It was only decades after her death that his genius came to full flower, however, and one can only hope she was amused posthumously.
(Eventually the British realized they didn't get Gandhi's jokes and withdrew from India to develop Monty Python.)
October 2, 1925 -
Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed Stooky Bill on this date.
Almost immediately, Logie Baird wanted to test his invention on a living, breathing human being. Baird went downstairs and grabbed an office bot, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised.
October 2, 1950 -
The comic strip Peanuts, created by Charles Schulz, debuted in nine newspapers with the characters of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Patty and Sherman. It is still the most-read comic strip in the world.
October 2, 1968 -
10 days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police officers and military troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest of the government occupation at the National Polytechnic Institute, on this date. Initially, the government tried to claim the students began shooting first, but this later was proved false.
Hundreds of protesters, many of whom were women and children, were killed, in what has became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. The Olympics, shamefully continued as planned, as the violence wasn't targeted at the games.
October 2, 1985 -
I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.
Rock Hudson died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. after a battle with AIDS on this date.
And so it goes
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