Author Archives: dcaligari

ACME Eagle Hand Soap’s brief history of All Hallow’s Eve: Ancient Romans celebrated a holiday called Feralia on February 21. At first it was a simple day off to recover from the holiday of February 20 (Salvia Divinorum), and to take care of last minute shopping before the holiday of February 22 (Salta Boca). ItContinue reading “A mask tells us more than a face”

October 30, 1937 – A good early Looney Tunes Halloween treat, The Case of the Stuttering Pig, was released on this date. When the picture of Uncle Solomon is shown, it’s a drawing of Oliver Hardy as a pig.

Surprise, surprise, it’s National Candy Corn Day today. The famous candy is said to have been invented in the United States by George Renninger a candymaker at the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia, in the 1880s and it was originally made by hand. Nowadays, it’s mass produced by Jelly Belly® using a recipe unchanged sinceContinue reading “Please don’t remind Lewis Black about this”

October 30, 1938 – The War of the Worlds was the Halloween episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed by the wunderkind Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898). Welles’s adaptation is arguably the most well-knownContinue reading “The War of the Worlds’ broadcast”

October 30, 1943 –A very funny war-time Bugs Bunny Cartoon, Falling Hare, was released on this date. In the early 1940s, Walt Disney was developing a feature film based on Roald Dahl’s book Gremlin Lore, and asked the other studios to refrain from producing gremlin films. While most of the studios complied, Warner Bros. alreadyContinue reading “Falling Hare premiered”

October 30, 2002 –Warren Zevon was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman as the only guest for the entire hour, on this date. Zevon performing several songs and spoke about being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Kids, “…enjoy every sandwich.”

The grooved lines on a stretch of the eastbound Route 66, near Tijeras, New Mexico, just east of Albuquerque, will sing for you. On this quarter-mile section of the highway, the rumble strips have been engineered to sound like the song America the Beautiful. But they won’t croon their patriotic tune for anyone with aContinue reading “Hurry up to check it out, before it’s gone”

Today is the anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash in 1929 that signaled the beginning of the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world. Few people saw it coming except for Joseph P. Kennedy and Charlie Chaplin who had cashed out of the volatile market weeks early and preservedContinue reading “The 1929 Stock Market crash”

October 29, 1618 – The day before (back in 1618), Sir Walter Raleigh was a fairly forgotten figure in English History. Sir Walter, famous explorer and favorite of Queen Elizabeth I had been languishing in prison for years on some murky charges of plotting against King James I. He was left to languish in theContinue reading “Sometimes it’s not so good being a world famous explorer”

October 29, 1993 –The first Got Milk commercial – the iconic Aaron Burr ad premiered on this date. The commercial was directed by a recent film graduate of the Art Center College of Design, Michael Bay (yes, Transformers Michael Bay).