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The Maundy Monday Newsletter - This Week in History October 6 - October 12.
Do you have friends who extend their birthday celebrations far beyond reason? I have a few friends who celebrate their “birthday month,” and I have heard of others who invented half-day birthdays in the summer because their actual birthday falls in the dead of winter.
As someone who isn’t nearly as annoying when it comes to birthdays other than branding it as a national holiday, I find it funny to see the American sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live”, which premiered on October 11, 1975, spend the entire year celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Lorne Michaels is a Canadian television and film producer who came to the United States and began writing and producing sketch comedy shows, which caught the attention of comedian Lily Tomlin. In 1975, NBC hired him to create a show called Saturday Night, and a year later, it became Saturday Night Live, when Howard Cosell had his show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, canceled.
Performed before a live studio audience, SNL has become a staple of American culture. It has launched the careers of many aspiring actors and actresses, from Bill Murray to Eddie Murphy to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, to name a select few.
The show is hosted by someone promoting something big, either a movie or a music tour. There is a musical guest, and the show begins and ends way past my bedtime.
I’m not sure how you feel about it, but I’ve never been an SNL die-hard. It can have moments, and the structure clearly works as it remains on the air. But as the 51st season began this weekend, we saw with the cold opening how unoriginal and stale it can be, especially recently, with yet another desperate attempt at political satire of President Trump.
I could pen an entire essay just on that, but instead, I say happy official birthday, SNL!
Okay, let’s highlight what else happened this week. As a reminder, these events celebrate their anniversary, ending in 5 or 0. Here’s what I got:
1. Aviator Laura Ingalls completed a solo transcontinental flight across the United States on October 9, 1930. This Laura Ingalls was a distant cousin to the Laura Ingalls who wrote Little House on the Prairie. This Ingalls was a Brooklyn native who completed a nine-stop, east-to-west coast trip from New York to California. In 1940, she was a member and speaker for the America First Committee, and a year later, she was arrested for being an agent of Nazi Germany. After being convicted and serving time in prison, she was rejected twice for a presidential pardon. You should go back and reread this with the theme music from the Little House on the Prairie television show.
2. Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane on October 11, 1910. The 26th President of the United States had only been out of office for about a year when, traveling to Missouri to campaign for local Republicans, he decided to hop on an airplane made by the Wright Brothers company. He flew for three minutes and covered about three miles. After he got off the plane, he told 10,000 onlookers, “That was the bulliest thing I have ever done.” That’s saying something.
3. 17 U.S. sailors were killed in a terrorist attack on the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000. The USS Cole is a guided missile destroyer, named after Marine Corps Sergeant Darrell S. Cole, who was a machine-gunner killed in action on Iwo Jima in 1945. The USS Cole was refueling in Yemen’s Aden harbor, when at lunchtime, two members of the terrorist organization, Al-Qaeda, raced their boat carrying C4 into the port side of the ship. The explosion hit the ship’s mechanical galley, and fire tore up the decks, killing seventeen sailors and injuring dozens more. In 2007, a federal judge ruled that the Sudanese government was responsible for the deaths of the sailors and ordered them to pay $8 million in damages to the families. Over the weekend, President Trump babbled on about how he told everyone to be aware of Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, and it wasn’t the opening monologue of an SNL show.
Here’s another major birthday celebration:
Instagram was launched by two guys named Kevin and Mike on October 6, 2010. On its first day, it gained 25,000 followers who loved the photo and short film sharing capabilities. Within two months, it had 1 million users and caught the eye of Facebook, which purchased it for $1 billion in 2012. Fifteen years later, it remains one of the most powerful social media platforms.
The Gram is now used in 33 languages, and I use it to watch a lot of videos of golden retrievers. I only recently started using it again for OKH.
I apologize for not delivering an essay this past Friday. Work was a little more overwhelming. You probably have experienced this—spending hours untangling a mess you didn’t make.
It’s always fun and such a great use of attention, time, and energy! Anyway, I have most of the essay finished, so I expect it to be ready this week! Thanks for understanding.
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I hope the work week is easier and you have some time to notice the changing seasons and how great it is that the Cleveland Guardians at least won the division – and hey, how about those Florida Gators?!
See you soon!
Okay,
Chris
SNL is an amazing show and cold opens are the best - you blaspheme, lol.