The Roman Senate elected to name the eleventh month for Tiberus Caesar and since Augustus time, it has had only 30 days. Originally, there were 30 days, then 29, then 31. This is what comes from too much of a good time - poor calendar making.
(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,
National Fun with Fondue Month,
Epilepsy Month,
Hospice Month,
Native-American Heritage Month,
Peanut Butter Lovers Month,
Real Jewelry Month (and not Real Jewry Month)
and Movember.
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.
All Saints Day is a Holy Day of Obligation. So if you are being observant, put you ass in a pew.
November 1, 1938 -
The Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave premiered in the US on this date.
The plot has clear references to the political situation leading up to World War II. The British characters, originally trying their hardest to keep out of the conflict, end up working together to fight off the jack-booted foreigners, while the lawyer who wishes to negotiate with the attackers by waving a white flag gets his just desserts.
November 1, 1967 -
Warner Brothers released one of Paul Newman's signature films, Cool Hand Luke on this date.
Originally, the scene where Luke plays Plastic Jesus as an ode to his mother was scheduled for the beginning of the shoot, but after Paul Newman insisted on learning the instrument, director Stuart Rosenberg delayed it a few weeks. When they tried it, and the playing was unsatisfactory, it was bumped until the next-to-last day of production. Newman and Rosenberg had a shouting match after Newman still couldn't get it down. In what George Kennedy remembered as a "tense, electrically charged, quiet" place, Newman tried again. When he finished, Rosenberg called "Print." Newman insisted he could do better. "Nobody could do it better," Rosenberg replied. Harry Dean Stanton (who is listed only as "Dean Stanton" in this movie's opening credits) taught Paul Newman how to play Plastic Jesus.
November 1, 1968 –
George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, on this date, becoming the first Beatle to release a solo album.
It’s a soundtrack to the psychedelic movie Wonderwall. The songs which were mostly Harrison instrumentals, featured Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and an unaccredited banjo contribution by Peter Tork of The Monkees.
November 1, 1969 –
Elvis Presley single Suspicious Minds went to No. #1 on the Billboard Charts on this date. It was his last #1 hit in his lifetime.
This was a big comeback song for Elvis, who hadn't had a US #1 hit since Good Luck Charm in 1962. He had been making a series of unexceptional movies, and his music had lost its luster. Suspicious Minds brought him back to #1 in November 1969, and he was off and running, launching a tour in 1970 (his first in nine years) and becoming a star attraction in Las Vegas.
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's moment of Zen
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, 1941 -
Photographer Ansel Adams took a picture of a moonrise in the half-light between sunset and dark that would become one of the most famous images in the history of photography, on this date.
While driving through the countryside, Adams pulled off to the side of Route 84 when he saw a church and cemetery near Hernandez, New Mexico. Desperate to capture the image in the fading light, he, his son and another passenger scrambled to set up the tripod and camera, knowing that only moments remained before the light was gone. He only managed to produce one exposure before the sunlight lifted from the gravesite’s crosses at 4:49 pm.
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, 1955 -
Jack Gilbert Graham planted a time bomb aboard a United DC-6 airplane, killing all 44 people on board, above Longmont, Colorado, on this date. Graham planted the bomb in his mother's suitcase in an apparent move to claim life insurance money.
After arresting Graham federal agents learned that it was not in fact a federal crime to blow up an airplane. Colorado instead charged the man for the single murder of his mother. Graham was executed in the gas chamber Jan 11, 1957. Remember kids, the wages of sin is death.
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
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