Some of our favorite historical figures—including six U.S. presidents—were born in the month of October. We couldn’t possibly name them all, but here are just a handful whose lives we’ll be celebrating.

1. BUSTER KEATON: OCTOBER 4, 1895

Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was a pioneer of film production. He was an acclaimed comedic actor in many silent films of the 1920s, but he also wrote and directed them—developing a number of filmmaking techniques as he went along. Many became industry standards, like the chase scene, breaking the fourth wall, and appearing as multiple characters in the same scene. Keaton also did all his own stunts, like in the 1928 movie Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which a 4,000-lb. front wall of a house nearly falls on him. He survives in the movie—and in real life—by being in the exact spot where an open window falls around him, but if the actor had stood two inches to the left or right, he would have been crushed.

2. JOHN LENNON: OCTOBER 9, 1940

John Lennon formed a skiffle band in Liverpool, England, when he was only 15 years old, recruiting another teen named Paul McCartney to join in. The pair soon enlisted 14-year-old George Harrison and they, along with a handful of other classmates, formed The Quarrymen. A few years later the three three broke off on their own, changed their named to The Beatles, recruited drummer Ringo Starr, and played their way into the history books. Lennon was also a composer, poet, author, and antiwar activist, but one thing few people know is that he also loved cats. He owned at least 16 of them over the years before his death in 1980.

3. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: OCTOBER 11, 1884

She was the wife of one president and the niece of another, but Eleanor Roosevelt left a lasting mark on history with her own accomplishments. She championed racial equality and women’s rights, and was an advocate for war refugees and children. Roosevelt led volunteer support programs during World War II, wrote a monthly magazine article and a daily newspaper column, and addressed the country with a regular radio address. She was appointed as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where she served on the Human Rights Commission. On top of that, she raised five children (one of her six died in infancy). Roosevelt’s many activities included years as a pitchman for all kinds of products. She didn’t need the money, and her fee went to charities and humanitarian projects. You can see her first TV ad, for margarine, in a previous post.

4. MOLLY PITCHER: OCTOBER 13, 1754

“Molly Pitcher” is a moniker used for an unidentified woman—or possibly several women—who aided soldiers during the American Revolution. While some consider her more folklore than fact, she is widely believed to have been either Margaret Corbin or Mary Ludwig Hayes, who was born on October 13, 1754. When her husband enlisted in the Continental Army, Mary joined him at Valley Forge (which was a common practice), and volunteered—cooking, carrying water, and tending to wounded men. The name Molly Pitcher comes from the fact that women would make repeated trips to fill pitchers with water to bring back for soldiers to drink, or to pour over hot cannons to cool them down. During the Battle of Monmouth in June of 1778, legend has it that Mary took over her husband’s post at a cannon after he collapsed. She kept it firing until the Americans had won the battle, and even emerged unscathed after an enemy cannonball reportedly flew between her legs. She was later awarded a pension of $40 annually from the state of Pennsylvania for her service—44 years after the war ended. 

5. BELA LUGOSI: OCTOBER 20, 1882

The Hungarian actor is best remembered for his indelible portrayal of Count Dracula in the 1931 film, but when he made his Broadway debut in 1922, he barely spoke a word of English. To play the role of Fernando in the play The Red Poppy, Lugosi met with a tutor and was able to memorize and properly deliver every last line, even though he didn’t understand a word of it. He pulled it off and eventually became a horror movie star, and even though he grew to resent the typecasting that followed Dracula, Lugosi was eventually buried in the Count’s signature cape. 

6. PABLO PICASSO: OCTOBER 25, 1881

Picasso was an experimental artist best known for co-founding the Cubist art movement, but he explored many art genres throughout his life and left a catalog of works that displayed classicism, symbolism, realism, and surrealism. If that wasn’t enough, he also helped to develop the art of the collage. Picasso’s full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. His last name at birth was Ruiz, but he took his mother’s Italian maiden name because he thought it was more interesting.

7. MAHALIA JACKSON: OCTOBER 26, 1911

The “Queen of Gospel” began singing when she was just four years old, at the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in New Orleans. Later on in Chicago, she sang with the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir and the Johnson Gospel Singers, and worked as a beautician, laundry worker, and florist before her recording career took off in 1947. She went on to perform at Carnegie Hall, tour Europe, and sing at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Jackson was also a noted Civil Rights activist, and performed at the March on Washington in 1963, just before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

8. TEDDY ROOSEVELT: OCTOBER 27, 1858

Theodore Roosevelt was only 42 years old when he became president following the assassination of President McKinley, which makes him the youngest U.S. president so far. Years later, he was unhappy with the tenure of successor William Howard Taft (whom Roosevelt had supported in the 1908 election), so he decided to run again. At a campaign stop in Milwaukee, a man named John Schrank shot Roosevelt right in the chest, but the bullet was slowed by the 50-page speech folded in the candidate’s pocket. Roosevelt was wounded, but—as he wasn’t coughing up blood—decided to go on with his speech. He told the crowd, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Woodrow Wilson won the election later that year.      

9. SYLVIA PLATH: OCTOBER 27, 1932

Poet Sylvia Plath won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems, but her most famous work is her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which was published in the United Kingdom only a month before her death in 1963. Plath declared that she was writing a “potboiler” to appeal to the public’s interests, and even wrote in her journal, “Must get out Snake Pit [a popular 1946 novel about a mental illness]. There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.” The Bell Jar contained characters based on real people as well as details that mirrored Plath’s own life, like the protagonist’s stint at a mental hospital. While the author surrogate seems to be in recovery at the book’s close, similar treatment didn’t help Plath. She suffered from depression her entire life, and committed suicide at age 30.

10. EMILY POST: OCTOBER 27, 1872

Born into high society, Emily Post (neé Price) began writing after her divorce from banker Edwin Main Post in 1905. Etiquette was just one of many subjects Post wrote on, but her 1922 book Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home became a runaway hit. Its popularity was attributed to American immigrants and working class people who were chasing the American Dream and aspired to fit in with society folk. She then wrote a syndicated newspaper column on decorum for decades, and founded The Emily Post Institute, which tells the world how to behave to this day. (After all, her original etiquette advice is a little outdated now.) Following Post’s death, her work was taken on by her grandson’s wife, Elizabeth Post. When Elizabeth retired, her daughter-in-law Peggy Post—along with a few other members of the Post clan—became the go-to for modern manners.

In 2013, Kano launched a Kickstarter to create a computer that someone with no technology experience—even a young kid—could build on their own. The resulting computer and screen kit let you build a computer and screen like you would a LEGO structure, with step-by-step instructions. Now, the company is adding more fun to the mix with a Kickstarter for three new hardware kits that let you build a speaker, a camera, or an LED pixel grid. Each kit allows you to program the hardware to respond to sound, motion, or other data inputs.

The camera kit contains a camera roughly on par with the one found in an iPhone 5S, a built-in microphone, and fun additions like a tripwire sensor to track movements and a flashing LED ring. The pixel kit is a grid of lights that you can program to flash in different patterns and in response to different inputs, like noise picked up by the microphone, or motion picked up by the tilt sensor or joystick. If you connect it to a network, you can stream tweets or weather information from online. The speaker kit has a microphone, an LED audio visualizer, and a gesture sensor.

Each kit comes with suggested projects like setting up your motion-sensing camera to take a picture every time someone opens the door to your room, turning your speaker into an alarm clock, or visualizing your music on the LED pixel grid.

They’re simple enough that it’s relatively easy to see how you might put them to work on projects in the physical world, unlike the more complicated coding kits like littleBits, which, frankly, can give you so much freedom that if you’ve never done any programming or engineering, it’s a little daunting to figure out where to start.

With the Kano kits, when you hook up your pixel kit to your computer, you drag-and-drop puzzle-shaped pieces of code with initial tutorials that show you exactly what to put and where. Once you complete the tutorial, you can begin to play around with the code to create different reactions, taking some of the deer-in-the-headlights confusion out of seeing a blank page or wondering “what am I supposed to do with this blank LED grid?”

The computer and screen kit, previously necessary to dig into any of Kano’s coding tutorials, costs a steep $284. While you can, technically, work with a screen or monitor you already have, the computer itself is still $150. The new kits present a slightly lower entry point into the company’s learning system, at just $99 each.

Even better, the Kano World community and tutorials are accessible to anyone, and you don’t need a Kano computer to play around with the platform. You can do it from your desktop, and simply watch the changes on a digital version of the kit in question. Or you can make digital drawings and games, like you would on the Kano computer.

Much like the Kano hardware kits are LEGO-like in their step-by-step process, letting you connect all the components yourself, all the coding tutorials feature enough guideposts that you don’t get frustrated, at least at first. The tutorial tells you exactly what to type, though you’re using real programming languages to do it.

I’ve told myself I would learn to do some basic coding countless times, and I almost inevitably give up halfway through the first or second tutorial. But the simple way the Kano Code platform walks you through the steps makes me want to try more lessons, even though I don’t have any of the kits myself. It’s not going to turn me into a coding whiz—especially since it’s hard to figure out what programming language you’re even working in by just looking at the tutorials—but it’s a frustration-free way to feel a little more comfortable manipulating the digital world.

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Sometimes we all just need to slow down. When that happens, I like to pull up this calming video in which Matthew McConaughey stares at the rain, sips coffee, and contemplates life.

A little backstory first, though. This video is several layers deep in remix culture. The original source was a 30-second TV commercial for the Lincoln MKZ entitled “Diner.” As the MKZ ads go, it’s unremarkable; the main event is when the rain stops and McConaughey gets to open his sun-roof.

Then things got weird.

The Auralnauts took it upon themselves to make a five-minute version of the ad, extending every shot to the extreme, adding ambient music, adding new narration (by Jon Bailey), and turning the thing into what they dub McConaughey’s “existential crisis.” It’s brilliant.

Finally, that five-minute video turned into an hour-long masterpiece by YouTuber AmbientPopstar. It’s the kind of thing you can (and should) play as background sound while you work. Or, heck, play it at your next party. It is an hour long, after all. Enjoy, and “look at all that rain.”

CALM, HOUR-LONG VERSION

This is the “slow video” you’ve been looking for.

EXISTENTIAL CRISIS VERSION (5 MINUTES)

For reference, here’s the cut by the Auralnauts. Don’t drink while watching this, you’ll do a spit-take.

The Czech village of Lukova is proud of their ghosts—after all, they helped save a local church.

Locals in Lukova, about 125 miles east of Prague, have long believed their Kostel svatého Jiří (St. George’s Church) is haunted, according to Atlas Obscura. Built in 1352, the building was plagued by fires and general disrepair for centuries, but the kicker came in 1968 when part of the roof fell down during a funeral service. That seemed to confirm what villagers had long suspected: the church was infested with malevolent spirits.

After that, the building was abandoned. The congregation held mass outside instead of stepping foot inside the structure. As if that wasn’t bad enough, during the Communist era the church suffered further decay, vandalism, and theft—even their bell was stolen.

Once the Soviet era ended, locals wanted to restore the church, but lacked the cash. Enter Jakub Hadrava, a sculpture student at the University of West Bohemia, who did what artists do best: brought our worst fears to life (in artistic form, that is). Hadrava created an installation featuring 30 life-size plaster “ghosts,” modeled on fellow students wearing raincoats. These days, the ghosts bring tourists from as far away as Australia. According to the Daily Mail, their donations have helped build a new roof and stabilize the structure. The worshippers pray indoors now.

The ghosts are more than a tourist draw—they also reflect some of the dark history that haunts the region. Some say Hadrava’s figures represent the German-speaking people who once lived in the area and who were expelled after World War II. However, others say the figures are best understood as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life itself.

You can see more of the church in the video below:

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

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