~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
October 30, 2014

★~ Today’s Quote:  “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”  ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

★~ Mischief Night:

The eve before Halloween is a time to run amok and perform some harmless pranks. A little mischief can be good for the soul — as long as it doesn’t hurt a soul. Switching neighbors’ door mats, Vaseline on a door handle, putting a fake apology sign on a friend’s car . . .

★~ Create a Great Funeral Day:

Because you only get one shot at it.

★~Candy Corn Day:

Candy corn has been around for more than 100 years and has never changed its look, taste, or design.  George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company created candy corn in the 1880s. It was made to mimic a kernel of corn and became instantly popular because of its innovative design. It was one of the first candies to feature three different colors! Today, candy corn is a favorite American treat to enjoy during the Halloween season.

★~ Today in History:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/OlKaVFqxERk[/youtube]

♥~ 1925 – 1925 – If you put everything into it except the kitchen sink, you’d have the TV transmitter that beamed TV to London for the first time. To build the transmitter, John Baird used a tea chest, a biscuit box, darning needles, piano wire, motorcycle lamp lenses, old electric motors, cardboard scanning discs and glue, string and sealing wax.

♥~ 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 at 8 p.m. The show was set up as a music program interrupted by news bulletins saying that Martians had landed near Princeton, New Jersey. Though a disclaimer was broadcast several times throughout the hourlong program, most people did not pay attention to the explanation telling them that the story was fictional and a radio fabrication. Even the newspaper program guides printed the warning. But thousands paid no attention.

♥~ 1964 –  Roy Orbison went gold with his hit single, Oh, Pretty Woman.

♥~ 1976 – The group, Chicago, started its second (and final) week at number one on the pop singles charts with, If You Leave Me Now.

♥~ 1986 –  Discover Magazine reported that almost43 million tons of dust settles on the United States each year.

♥~1991 –  A search began in the Atlantic for the missing fishing boat Andrea Gail, which had left a port in Massachusetts a few days earlier.  The boat and its six-person crew were never found, apparently lost during a severe storm.  The story of the shipwreck inspired the 2000 movie “The Perfect Storm.”

♥~ 1993 – Meat Loaf’s was the #1 album in the U.S. One of the album’s singles, I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That, hit #1 in twenty-five countries)

♥~ 1995 – David Bowie, Tom Donahue, Gladys Knight and The Pips, Jefferson Airplane, Little Willie John, Pink Floyd, The Shirelles, The Velvet Underground, and Pete Seeger were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

♥~ 2013 – Hurricane Sandy, was causing death and destruction along the Atlantic Coast.

★~Born Today:

♥~ 1939 –  Grace Slick (Wing) singer: group: Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Starship: Somebody to Love, White Rabbit, Rejoice, Miracles, Count on Me, Runaway, We Built This City, Sara

♥~ 1945 – Henry Winkler actor: Happy Days, An American Christmas Carol, The Lords of Flatbush; TV coproducer: MacGyver; director: Cop and a Half, Memories of Me, A Smokey Mountain Christmas

♥~ 1957 – Kevin Pollak actor: The Usual Suspects, The Whole Nine Yards, The Whole Ten Yards, Blizzard, Juwanna Mann, The Santa Clause 2, Dr. Dolittle 2, 3000 Miles to Graceland, End of Days, From the Earth to the Moon

★~ Mischief Gallimaufry:

We all know what happens on Halloween, the night that children dress up and (unwittingly) celebrate the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain and All Hallows Eve.

Anyone who has woken up on Halloween morning to find their house egged, their pumpkin smashed or yard toilet-papered, however, is lucky enough to live where a sister tradition that is not quite as old (but a yearly custom all the same) is also practiced with fervor.

The night of Oct. 30, which goes by a variety of names including Devil’s Night in Detroit and Miggy Night in parts of England, sees neighborhood youngsters pull pranks just as diverse as the custom’s monikers, ranging from the innocent to the downright dangerous.

So where did this license to cause mayhem come from?

Mischief Night, as it is most commonly known in the United States, has been around in its present form for at least 50 years, when it became a day for playing “tricks” while Halloween itself was reserved for the little one to gather “treats.” The practice goes back hundreds of years before that, though, to a time when Halloween and misbehavior were inextricably linked.

The most ancient roots of Halloween come from the Celts of Great Britain, who believed that the day before their Nov. 1 New Year was a time when spirits came back to haunt and play tricks. On Oct. 31, people dressed up in scary costumes, played games, lit bonfires and left food out on their doorsteps for the ghosts in celebration of this otherworldly event, which the Celts called Samhain.

When Great Britain was Christianized in the 800s, the ghoulish games of Samhain merged with All Saints Day and All Souls Day, during which the dead were honored with parades and door-to-door solicitation by peasants for treats — usually a bit of food or money.

After the Protestant Reformation, much of England stopped the “treating” side of Halloween because it was connected to Catholic saints, and transferred the trickery to the eve of Guy Fawkes Night, a Nov. 5 holiday celebrating the foiling of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up British Parliament. Mischief Night in England is still celebrated on Nov. 4.

The Irish, Scottish and northern English, meanwhile, kept up much of their Halloween traditions, including the good-natured misbehavior, and brought their ways to North America with the wave of immigration in the 1800s.

Before the 20th century, Halloween mischief in the United States and Canada happened on Oct. 31 and consisted of tipping over outhouses, unhinging farmer’s gates, throwing eggs at houses and the like. By the 1920s and 30s, however, the celebrations had become more like a rowdy block party, and the acts of vandalism more serious, probably instigated by tensions over the Great Depression and the threat of war, historians say.

To stem the vandalism, concerned parents and town leaders tried to ply kids with candy, encouraging the forgotten tradition of trick-or-treating in costume in exchange for sweets, bumping the mischief element from the celebrations of Oct. 31 altogether. It was then that the troublemakers, neighborhood by neighborhood, adopted Oct. 30 as their day to pull pranks.

The custom of vandalism on Oct. 30, oddly, seems to have only developed sporadically, often appearing in some areas but not at all in others nearby.

Nowadays, Mischief Night is especially popular in pockets where Irish and Scottish immigration was common — in northeastern United States but not in the South and West, for example, and in the English-speaking communities of Canada but not the French. Examples of the regional varieties include: Cabbage Night in parts of the northeastern United States the name stems from an old Scottish tradition when, on All Hallow’s Eve, young women would attempt various fortune-telling techniques to identify their future spouses — including bobbing for apples and pulling up cabbages from gardens to examine their stalks, to see if their husbands would be lean or plump. When they were done with the cabbages, they hurled them at their neighbor’s homes, and thus a tradition of projectile vegetables was born. Mat Night in English-speaking Quebec, where pranksters steal doormats and switch them with the neighbors’. Gate Night, in the Midwest, where farmers gates are opened, leaving livestock to roam free. Other popular pranks include the ubiquitous toilet-papering of homes and trees, “soaping” cars and windows and pumpkin smashing.

Though it consists of harmless fun in most places, “Devil’s Night” in Detroit is notorious for its ties to gang culture and random acts of arson. In 1984, more than 800 fires were set there on Devil’s Night, leading to a serious crackdown and an Oct. 30 curfew for minors that persists to this day.

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Mischef. I’m working on it (insert evil grin). But right now I’m off to pick up a pup with my teen and dine on a morning doughnut. We are on a quest to try a doughnut from as many different doughnut places as we can. In the interest of research, of-course. Yesterday, I tried a bite of a butterscotch praline doughnuts from —Firecakes Doughnuts. Interesting. It’s hard to move past my love for glazed donuts and branch out. Especially when I’m not a fan of doughnut filling. However, says she with a long suffering face, in the interest of research and duty I will try a variety of doughnuts.  What research you ask? A blog post of-course. Cole is turning his blog into “all things random during my gap year from college.” And I’m helping!

Make a little mischief today! And enjoy a doughnut!