It's Phileas Fogg Wager Day. This unofficial holiday celebrates the wager that set out one of the world's most famous adventure in motion.
October 2, 1955 -
Revenge, the very first story on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show premieres on this date.
Alfred Hitchcock drew the silhouette of himself featured in the opening credits. He began his film career as an illustrator of title cards for silent movies.
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
The scene where Mike Ferris becomes trapped in the telephone booth was based on an incident that happened to Rod Serling. Serling recounted that he was at an airport making a phone call when he heard the boarding call for his flight over the intercom. Hastily trying to get out of the booth, he started pushing on the door, forgetting in his panic that phone booths are opened by *pulling* on the door handle. Serling waved down a passerby for help, and the man kicked in the door. Though Serling found his mental lapse humiliating, he incorporated it into this episode.
October 2, 1976 -
Try with a little help from my friends
John Belushi came out on stage with Joe Cocker while he was performing on Saturday Night Live on this date.
October 2, 1985 -
... They all went to heaven in a little row boat.
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.
It was Zach Braff who suggested using the song Superman by Lazlo Bane as the show's theme after listening to the lyrics and finding them in mood with the pilot.
Today's moment of Zen
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, California after a battle with AIDS on this date.
And so it goes
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