Monday, October 2, 2017

Good Evening

October 2, 1955 -
Revenge
, the very first story on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show premieres on this date.



Walt Disney refused to allow Alfred Hitchcock to film at Disneyland in the early 1960s, because Hitchcock had made "that disgusting movie Psycho." Hitchcock's intended project is unidentified at this time, but it may have been for an episode of his television series.


October 2, 1957 -
The World War II drama The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean, and starring William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa, premiered in Britain, on this date.



The elephants employed in helping build the bridge would take breaks every four hours and lie around in the water--whether the crew wanted them to or not.


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 invited viewers to submit a script. He was flooded with over 14,000 scripts, and he actually got around to reading 500 of them. However, only two were any good, and he couldn't use them because they didn't fit the format of the show.


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 -
... The captain is a one-armed dwarf. He's throwing dice along the wharf.



Island Records released Tom Waits' phenomenal eighth studio album (wherein he found his truest voice,) 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.



During any episode where J.D. is not the narrator, he must usually make physical contact with the person who will be the narrator to pass off the responsibility. When narration is passed back to J.D. at the end of the episode, the former narrator must contact J.D. to give it back to him.


Word of the Day


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.

And yet, Charlie still hasn't kicked that damn football.

Once again, this year, you can use the Charlie Brown holiday postage stamps.


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


1208

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