- Checklist’s Day
- Create A Great Funeral Day
- Devil’s Night
- Haunted Refrigerator Night
- Mischief Night
- Pumpkin Bread Day
- Candy Corn Day
- King’s Birthday-Cambodia
- On This Day
- 1811 --- Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is published anonymously. A small circle of people, including the Price Regent, learned Austen's identity, but most of the British public knew only that the popular book had been written "by a Lady."
- 1817 --- The independent government of Venezuela was established by Simon Bolivar.
- 1890 --- Oakland, California, enacts a law against opium, morphine, and cocaine. The new regulations allowed only doctors to prescribe these drugs, which, until then, had been legal for cures or pain relief. Reflecting a general trend at the time, Oakland was only one of the jurisdictions across the country that began to pass criminal laws against the use of mind-altering substances.
- 1929 --- It was announced that John D. Rockefeller was buying sound, common stocks to help stem the massive sell-off going on at the New York Stock Exchange. It didn’t help. More than 10.7 million shares had been dumped the previous day and the market was in a free fall. The Great Depression was on and not even a Rockefeller could stop it.
- 1938 --- Orson Welles, known to radio audiences as The Shadow, presented his famous dramatization of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” on CBS’s Mercury Theater. Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to "the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra." Dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that "Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory" had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer's field in Grover's Mills, New Jersey. Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. "Good heavens," he declared, "something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me ... I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it... it ... ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired "heat-ray" weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon "Martian cylinders" landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth. Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn't see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, "New York has been destroyed! It's the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!"
- 1944 --- Born and raised in the same urban, early-20th-century milieu that produced Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin, the great and quintessentially American composer Aaron Copland was trained in the classics but steeped in the jazz and popular Jewish music that surrounded him in childhood. As a young composer, his stated aim was to write music that would "make you feel like you were alive on the streets of Brooklyn." Ironically, it was music that brilliantly evoked the rural American heartland that made Copland famous. One such work—arguably his greatest—was the score for the ballet Appalachian Spring, which became one of the most recognizable and beloved pieces of American music ever written almost immediately following its world premiere 70 years ago. The score for Appalachian Spring was commissioned in 1942 to accompany a ballet being choreographed by a young Martha Graham. Copland would know the work only as "Ballet for Martha" throughout its composition, having no guidance other than that the ballet would have some sort of a "frontier" theme. In fact, the name Appalachian Springand the setting of western Pennsylvania would be decided on only after Copland had completed his score. Yet somehow, without having had any idea of doing so, Copland had composed a work that audiences and critics alike found brilliantly evocative of the specific time and place referenced in the title.
- 1947 --- The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed by 23 nations in Geneva. The Agreement eventually led to the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
- 1964 --- Buffalo Wings were created by Teressa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, for her son and some friends as a midnight snack.
- 1970 --- The Doors Jim Morrison was sentenced to 6 months in jail and fined $500 for exposing himself in Miami, FL.
- 1973 --- John Lennon released the album "Mind Games."
- 1974 --- Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round of a 15-round bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, to regain his world heavyweight title. At 4:30 a.m. on October 30, 60,000 spectators gathered in the moonlight (organizers had timed the fight to overlap with prime time in the U.S.) at the outdoor Stade du 20 Mai to watch the fight. They were chanting "Ali, bomaye" ("Ali, kill him"). The ex-champ had been taunting Foreman for weeks, and the young boxer was eager to get going. When the bell rang, he began to pound Ali with his signature sledgehammer blows, but the older man simply backed himself up against the ropes and used his arms to block as many hits as he could. He was confident that he could wait Foreman out. (Ali’s trainer later called this strategy the "rope-a-dope," because he was "a dope" for using it.) By the fifth round, the
youngster began to tire. His powerful punches became glances and taps. And in the eighth, like "a bee harassing a bear," as one Times reporter wrote, Ali peeled himself off the ropes and unleashed a barrage of quick punches that seemed to bewilder the exhausted Foreman. A hard left and chopping right caused the champ’s weary legs to buckle, and he plopped down on the mat. The referee counted him out with just two seconds to go in the round.
- 1975 --- Prince Juan Carlos becomes Spain's acting head of state after General Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain since 1936, concedes that he is too ill to govern. The 83-year-old dictator had been suffering serious health problems for nearly a year. Three weeks after Juan Carlos assumed power, Franco died of a heart attack. Two days later, on November 22, Juan Carlos was crowned king.
- 1975 --- The New York Daily News headlined, “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, following President Gerald Ford’s initial decision to veto any proposed federal funding for the city of New York then on the brink of fiscal collapse. Ford later recanted and supported the Big-Apple bailout.
- 1984 --- Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, aka The Blues Brothers (Jake and Elwood), hit the two-million-dollar sales mark with their LP, Briefcase Full of Blues.
- 1990 --- Workers digging the rail tunnel under the English Channel linked up between England and France at a point forty meters beneath the seabed. The Chunnel, connecting Folkestone, England, with Calais, France, opened for traffic in May 1994.
- 1991 --- The so-called "perfect storm" hits the North Atlantic producing remarkably large waves along the New England and Canadian coasts. Over the next several days, the storm spread its fury over the ocean off the coast of Canada. The fishing boat Andrea Gail and its six-member crew were lost in the storm. The disaster spawned the best-selling book The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and a blockbuster Hollywood movie of the same name.
- 1995 --- By a bare majority of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, citizens of the province of Quebec vote to remain within the federation of Canada. The referendum asked Quebec's citizens, the majority of whom are French-speakers, to vote whether their province should begin the process that could make it independent of Canada. The French were the first settlers of Canada, but in 1763 their dominions in eastern Canada fell under the control of the British. In 1867, Quebec joined Canada's English-speaking provinces in forming the autonomous Dominion of Canada. Over the next century, the English language and Anglo-America culture made steady inroads into Quebec, leading many French Canadians to fear that they were losing their language and unique culture. The Quebec independence movement was born out of this fear, gaining ground in the 1960s and leading to the establishment of a powerful separatist party—the Parti Québécois—in 1967. In 1980, an independence referendum was defeated by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin.
- 1995 --- David Bowie, Tom Donahue, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Pete Seeger, Jefferson Airplane, Little Willie John, Pink Floyd, The Shirelles and The Velvet Underground are inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.
- Birthdays
- Grace Slick
- Ruth Gordon
- Emily Post
- Ezra Pound
- John Adams (2nd President)
- Irma S Rombauer
- Fred Friendly
- Admiral William Halsey
- Charles Atlas
- Louis Malle
- Kevin Pollack
- Henry Winkler
- 303rd Day of 2014 / 62 Remaining
- Winter Begins in 52 Days
- Sunrise:7:33
- Sunset:6:12
- 10 Hours 39 Minutes
- Moon Rise:1:40pm
- Moon Set:11:31pm
- Moon Phase: First Quarter
- Next Full Moon November 6 @ 2:22pm
- Full Beaver Moon
- Full Frosty Moon
This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.
- Tides:
- High Tide:6;25am/5:19pm
- Low Tide:11:36am/11:55pm