Gloomy Sunday is the name of a popular song composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezso Seress and published in 1933. Also known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’, this song has been the center of many urban myths linking it to the suicide of several people who had listened to the song. In the early ‘40s, the BBC deemed the song “too upsetting” for the public, then later said that only instrumental versions could be played on the radio. Over the years, the song has been recorded by such artists as Billie Holiday, Elvis Costello, Sarah McLachlan and Portishead.
Today is Electronic Greetings Day. So sending your greetings are now just a click away.
November 29, 1940 -
W.C. Fields at his peak - The Bank Dick, premiered on this date.
Mahatma Kane Jeeves (the pseudonym used by W.C. Fields as screenwriter) is a play on words from stage plays of the era. "My hat, my cane, Jeeves!" And in fact, at the end of the film his butler does hand him his hat and his cane.
November 29, 1945 -
Remarkable for it frank portrayal of alcoholism (for it's day), The Lost Weekend, opened in Los Angeles on this date.
Ray Milland actually checked himself into Bellevue Hospital with the help of resident doctors, in order to experience the horror of a drunk ward. Milland was given an iron bed and locked inside the "booze tank." That night, a new arrival came into the ward screaming, an entrance which ignited the whole ward into hysteria. With the ward falling into bedlam, a robed and barefooted Milland escaped while the door was ajar and slipped out onto 34th Street where he tried to hail a cab. When a suspicious cop spotted him, Milland tried to explain, but the cop didn't believe him, especially after he noticed the Bellevue insignia on his robe. The actor was dragged back to Bellevue where it took him a half-hour to explain his situation to the authorities before he was finally released.
November 29, 1950 -
Jean Cocteau's beautifully lyrical, Orphee, opened in the US on this date.
The opening scenes set in the Cafe des Poetes were originally set to be filmed with regular extras. However, Cocteau found them to be too self-conscious and artificial so they were all dismissed. Instead, real bohemians from Paris' real café culture were drafted in. These proved to be so natural and relaxed with the café setting, they actually stayed on for two extra days after filming had finished, just hanging out in the cafés that the film crew had been using.
November 29, 1992 -
U2's first TV special, called U2's Zoo TV Outside Broadcast, aired on Fox-TV on this date.
The show contains footage from their concerts at Yankee Stadium in New York and the Houston Astrodome, earlier that year.
Our first guest holiday programmer.
Today in History:
November 29, 1777 -
José Joaquín Moraga proved that he knew the way to San Jose on this date,
when he established, for Spain, el Pueblo de San Jose de Guadelupe, the first civil settlement in California.
November 29, 1864 -
The Sand Creek Massacre occurred, on this date, when Colorado volunteers led by Colonel John Chivington, in retaliation for an Indian attack on a party of immigrants near Denver, massacred at least 400 Cheyenne and Arapaho noncombatants (mostly children, women, physically- and mentally-challenged, and elders) inside Colorado Territory.
It also generated two Congressional investigations into the actions of Chivington and his men. The House Committee on the Conduct of the War concluded that Chivington had "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the varied and savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty."
The American Government has so much to be proud of with their dealings with the Native Americans.
November 29, 1924 -
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels before he could complete his opera Turandot. Franco Alfano finished it.
His death marked the end of a 300-year tradition of Italian opera.
November 29, 1929 -
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd (on a break from his experiments with frozen vegetables) radioed that he'd made the first airplane flight with pilot Floyd Bennett, over the South Pole: "My calculations indicate that we have reached vicinity of South Pole."
After briefly loitering around the Pole, Byrd and his crew headed back to their home base, Little America and more intense testing of frozen zucchini.
November 29, 1935 –
Once the cat is in the box, do you know if it really alive, or dead? (Don't tell the PETA people about this.)
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger published his famous thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
November 29, 1951 -
The United States set off the first underground nuclear explosion named "Uncle" at Frenchman Flats in Nevada on this date.
It was a great success, except for the giant spiders, ants, grasshoppers and other insects left in the aftermath.
November 29, 1961 -
The US sent the chimpanzee Enos into space, aboard the Mercury Atlas 5 capsule from Cape Canaveral on this date.
Enos returns to earth safely but died less than a year later before he could sign with the William Morris Agency.
November 29, 1972 -
Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was released on this date by Nolan Bushnell (who was also the co-founder of the video game company, Atari.)
Pong is similar to digital tennis or ping-pong, and its great success was a big part of the early beginnings of the video game industry.
November 29, 1986 -
I do not think Cary Grant was a homosexual or bisexual. He just got carried away at those orgies - US congressman Bob Dornan, spoken on the House floor (I love that quote.)
82 year old Archibald Leach, better known as Cary Grant, suffered a major stroke in his hotel room prior to performing in his one man show An Evening With Cary Grant at the Adler Theater in Davenport, Iowa, on this date. He died later that night at St. Luke's Hospital.
November 29, 2001 -
The Beatles will exist without us.
The "quiet" Beatle George Harrison was silenced by cancer on this date.
November 29, 2004 -
Godzilla received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on this date.
In honor of the event, the Toho star was allowed to run rampant through Little Tokyo that afternoon.
And on a personal note:
Oh yeah, millions of years ago (or at least more than half a century ago) the earth cooled and formed a hard crust, huge dinosaurs ruled the land and John was there to see it all. Happy Birthday John.
About a decade later, vast plains with wildflowers sprung up and Mary skipped along them all.
And so it goes
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