As most of you know, the Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year in the US.
I'm not quite sure you're going to get the best deals in the world today,
so why not sleep in (after you finish reading the blog of course.)
While you are still digesting last nights meal, you may have to start getting ready for Friendsgiving -
(whether or not you ask them if they've had their booster shots is between you and them.)
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.
Universal's censors initially objected to W.C. Fields' script and demanded many changes. Director Edward F. Cline suggested that Fields should go ahead and film it their way, ignoring the censors' changes, and that the front office wouldn't notice the difference. They didn't.
November 29, 1945 -
Remarkable for it frank portrayal of alcoholism (for it's day), The Lost Weekend, opened in Los Angeles on this date.
It was only in later years that Billy Wilder discovered that the title of Charles R. Jackson's novel is actually a typo. It was supposed to have been called "The Last Weekend".
November 29, 1950 -
Jean Cocteau's beautifully lyrical, Orphee, opened in the US on this date.
Orphee's obsession with deciphering hidden messages contained in random radio noise is a direct nod to the coded messages that the BBC concealed in their wartime transmissions for the French Resistance.
November 29, 1969 -
The Beatles' double A sided single Come Together/ Something, (their twenty-sixth release in the United States,) went to # 1 on the Billboard charts, on this date. Come Together / Something became the group's 18th US No. 1.
John Lennon was inspired by Timothy Leary's campaign for governor of California titled "Come together, join the party" against Ronald Reagan giving him the idea for the track. Something was the first Beatles song written by George Harrison to appear as an A-side.
November 29, 1975 -
Silver Convention's single Fly, Robin, Fly hits #1 on the Billboard Charts for the first of three weeks. The disco tune has very few lyrics because the German group can't speak English.
This was the first #1 US hit with a species of bird in the title. Rockin' Robin - both the Bobby Day original and Michael Jackson cover - stalled at #2. The next bird song to reach the top was When Doves Cry by Prince in 1984.
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.
Today's guest 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." (He was wrong. )
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, 1944 -
File this under: - Things they didn't tell you in school -
The first open heart surgery was performed at Johns Hopkins hospital, on this date.
A surgical fix for a fetal heart defect, tetralogy of Fallot or blue baby syndrome, was first performed at Johns Hopkins by surgeon Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, a black assistant who actually perfected the procedure. Thomas 'contribution to the lifesaving surgery remained largely unacknowledged, outside of the medical profession.
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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