The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout Yahoo! Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going houyhnhnm a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company… Continue reading

Dylan Thomas, who was born on October 27 in 1914, would have found it dramatic and moody that the Boston Red Sox won their first world series since 1918 on this day in 2004. Do not go gentle into that doomed championship series, he might have said. When the Red Sox committed four errors in… Continue reading

October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 1800s the most notable might have been the completion of the Erie Canal in 1821. It was a very big deal back in the day; a 363-mile-long waterway connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It meant that you could… Continue reading

Today is the birthday of John Francis Dodge, one of the founders of the Dodge Brothers Company — you can still see their name on cars today. But their first efforts in the automobile industry weren’t in building cars. When they started the company in Detroit in 1900, they only made parts. They were pretty… Continue reading

In 1929, October 24 was Black Thursday, the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed by 11 percent. Then on October 24, 2008, it was Black Friday, the day most of the stock exchanges around the world crashed by 10 percent or more.  You might say the value of stocks those days dropped like a… Continue reading

If the weather is accommodating wherever you happen to be today, it’s a good day to venture outside, find a patch of grass or forest, lean down, and say loudly, directly into the ground, “CONGRATULATIONS!” The sound will carry through the earth and with luck, will be appreciated by some tiny, burrowing mammals. Because today… Continue reading

We only have one day before the anniversary of the Great Disappointment. Although to everyone except the one group that at least claimed to be disappointed, the rest of the population generally continues to be not disappointed at all over how things turned out.  It all goes back to October 22, 1844, in Low Hampton,… Continue reading

In the early days of exploring and settling North America, several European nations claimed territories or colonies or areas as “property” of a sort. The territories were generally consolidated into independent countries: Canada, the US, and Mexico. But France still has a North American territory. Not everyone knows about the Overseas Collectivity of Saint Pierre… Continue reading

Depending on how you arrange the digits of a date, today is either 20-10-2024 or 10-20-2024. Statistically speaking, it’s 10-20-2024 for about 88.5% and 10-20-2024 for the 11.5% of the world that puts the month in the first position.  In both positions, though, October 20 sometimes represents World Statistics Day in about 49.5% of the… Continue reading

Vivian Hubert Howard Green was Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Quite a proper gentleman, he lectured on ecclesiastical history at St. Augustine’s College in Canterbury before his position at Lincoln College. At St. Augustine’s he was asked if he would consider sitting for the ordination exams. He declined, explaining that as the ecclesiastical lecturer he… Continue reading