The name November comes from the Latin "novem" which is the Latin for the nine. In the early Roman calendar, it was the ninth month. According to the Gregorian calendar, November is the eleventh month of the year. Go figure.
(In England it's the first day of the fox-hunting season. Oscar Wilde called fox-hunting ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’. About 30,000 foxes die each year. Just in case this comes up in conversation.)
November comes between the fall and winter months. The leaves are almost completely gone from the trees, and the rest have lost most of their color. The Anglo-Saxons referred to November as the 'wind month' and the 'blood month' - probably because this is the month they killed their animals for food.
Lots of activities come to a halt in November. The crops have been harvested and either put in storage, or sent to processing plants or mills. Farmers already know if their year has been successful or not. Football is the main sport of the month. The weather is usually beautiful for this kind of sport.
November is:
Adoption Awareness Month,
Alzheimer's Disease Month,
Apple Month,
Aviation History Month,
Change the Batteries In Your Vibrator Month,
Impotency Month,
Christmas Seals Month,
Denounce your local Rotarian Month,
International Dental Dam Month,
Epilepsy Month,
Hospice Month,
Native-American Heritage Month,
Peanut Butter Lovers Month,
Real Jewelry Month (and not Real Jewry Month)
and Uvula Cleaning Month.
Oh yeah, Thanksgiving occurs during November as well.
Today is also All Saints Day, the feast celebrated on November 1 in Western Christianity, honoring all the saints, known and unknown.
The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and relatives who have died. The celebration occurs on the 1st and 2nd of November, in connection with the Catholic holy days of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.
November 1, 1938 -
The Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanished, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave premiered in the US on this date.
Charters and Caldicott (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) proved to be such popular characters that they were teamed up in other films. They reappeared in Night Train to Munich (also starring Margaret Lockwood) and Millions Like Us, two films also written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, the screenwriters of The Lady Vanished.
November 1, 1967 -
Warner Brothers released one of Paul Newman's signature films, Cool Hand Luke on this date.
A Southern prison camp was built for this movie just north of Stockton, California. A dozen buildings were constructed, including a barracks, mess hall, warden's quarters, guard shack, and dog kennels.
November 1, 1994 -
The first Nirvana album released following the death of Kurt Cobain, MTV Unplugged in New York was released on this date.
The following week, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold 310,500 copies, which was the highest first-week sales of Nirvana's career.
Today in History:
November 1, 1512 -
Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) finally stops milking the job and the Sistine Chapel ceiling was finally exhibited to public.
Thus ended the largest padding of a rehab bill since the building of the Taj Mahal.
This was a very big day for William Shakespeare.
On November 1, 1604, his tragedy Othello was first presented.
On November 1, 1611, his romantic comedy The Tempest was first presented.
Unless, Edward DeVere wrote these plays. Then it would have been a big day for him.
November 1, 1800 -
President John Adams became the first US leader to move into the Executive Mansion, which later was called the White House, on this date.
Construction began on the White House in 1792, and it took eight years to complete. And as it has been observed, it wasn't trade unionist who built it.
November 1, 1870 -
In the United States, the Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) made its first official meteorological forecast -
darkness approaching as night falls with a gradual increase of daylight as dawn comes on in the morning.
November 1, 1896 -
A picture showing the unclad (bare) breasts of a (Zulu) woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time,
November 1, 1918 -
The worst accident in the history of the New York subway system - the Malbone Street wreck of 1918, which killed at least 93 people, occurred on this date. Motormen of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers went on strike against the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, the forerunner of the BMT. BRT officials decided to keep the trains running, using nonstriking workers to drive them.
An inexperienced strikebreaker drove a train too fast and the train derailed in tunnel underneath Malbone Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, shearing off the sides and roofs of four of the five cars. Dozens of passengers died immediately, many of them decapitated or impaled by shards of wood and glass. Rescuers rushed to the station, to help the dazed and injured and to carry away the dead. The power failure in the tunnel posed a problem for rescuers that was partially solved when automobiles pulled up near the entrance to the station to illuminate the ghastly scene.
November 1, 1939 -
The first animal, a rabbit, was conceived by artificial insemination on this date.
History does not record why anyone felt that rabbits needed any help in the procreation department.
November 1, 1950 -
Two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola tried to assassinate President Harry Truman while he was residing at the Blair House while the White House underwent renovations on this date. The two assailants were able to walk right up to the front door and open fire.
The President and his wife were upstairs and were not harmed. Torresola was killed by the US secret service during the unsuccessful attack, and Collazo was sentenced to life in prison after President Truman commuted his death sentence.
November 1, 1951 -
Your tax dollars at work in 1951 - Participation was not voluntary and served both to train and indoctrinate.
November 1, 1952 -
The United States successfully detonated the first large hydrogen bomb, codenamed “Ivy Mike,” in the Eniwetok Atoll of the Marshall Islands, on this date. The bomb has a yield of ten megatons, a force a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Eighty million tons of soil were kicked into the air by the blast. The “mushroom” cloud rose to 135,000 feet and would eventually spread to 1,000 miles in width. It was the first time fusion occurred on Earth.
November 1, 1975 -
Italian film director, screen writer, essayist, poet, critic and novelist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was violently murdered on this date.
And so it goes.
Before you go - My happy place song isn't about drinking today, I heard an interview with members of the bank The Frightnrs, a New York based rocksteady band. Listen to their song, Nothing More to Say -
And now read about their rush to finish this album
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