The Friday Irregular

Volume 7, Number 7
24 January 2003

TFIr #163

Edited by and copyright ©2003 Simon Lamont
tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

TFIr ONLINE

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Who is the Editor? So far as we know there's no Malkovichian portal into his brain, but there is the Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) file, the UndeadCam and the Film/TV/CD archive lists (the latter are now only available as a zip or tarball due to their size):

 

WORKS IN PROGRESS

The Irregular Archive Project - all issues of The Lamont Times through TFIr plus goodies, on a CD-ROM with an HTML/raytraced graphical interface (which may bear a superficial - and purely coincidental - resemblance to a onetime-real office):

Missing Lamont Times #5, Irregular #12 and TFIr #3.09.
Graphical interface: development status page last updated 2 October 2002
http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/wip/archive/office/

Text adventures:

All at Sea: - planned release: Spring 2003 but don't hold your breath ;)
The Night Before Christmas: - planned release: Winter 2003 (by which time we should have finally got the Linux switchover finished and been able to get on with it...)

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 24 January   -   Caligula died, AD41. Ernst Heinkel, builder of the first rocket-powered aircraft, born, 1888. Humphrey O'Sullivan patented the rubber heel, 1899. First canned beer sold, 1935. Elsa the lioness died, 1961. Winston Churchill died, 1965. San Francisco 49'ers won their first Super Bowl, 1982. Happy birthday to: actress/Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton (35), actress Nastassja Kinski (44), musician Jools Holland (45), former Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers (53), singer Neil Diamond (62), actor Ernest Borgnine (86).
 
Saturday 25 January   -   Poet Robert Burns born, 1759. In New York Alexander Graham Bell telephoned Thomas Watson in San Francisco, 1915. League of Nations, forerunner of the UN, founded, 1919. First Emmy awards handed out, 1949. Happy birthday to: actress Mia Kirshner (27), TV presenter Emma Freud (41), actress Anita Pallenberg (59), director Tobe Hooper (60). Burns Night in Scotland. Saint Paul Carnival held, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
 
Sunday 26 January   -  

Hong Kong proclaimed a British sovereign territory, 1841. General Douglas MacArthur born, 1880. General Charles Gordon killed at Khartoum, 1885. Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman married, 1940. India became a republic, 1950. Happy birthday to: actress Rebecca Ritters (19), actress/presenter Anneka Svenska (27), former Wham! guitarist Andrew Ridgeley (40), ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky (42), actress/comedienne Ellen DeGeneres (45), actor Paul Newman (78). Republic Day in India. Douglas MacArthur Day in Arkansas. Admission Day in Michigan (26th state, 1837)

 
Monday 27 January   -  

Mozart born, 1759. Charles Dodgeson (Lewis Carroll) born, 1832. Edison patented the eletric incandescent lamp, 1880. John Logie Baird held the first public demonstration of television, 1926. Siege of Leningrad ended, 1944. First tape recorder sold, 1948. Happy birthday to: actor Alan Cumming (38), actresses Bridget Fonda (39) and Mimi Rogers (47), Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed (70). Australia Day.

 
Tuesday 28 January   -   Henry VII, reigned 1485-1509, born, 1457. Henry VIII, reigned 1509-47, died, 1547. Sir Francis Drake died at sea, 1596. Body snatcher William Burke executed, 1829. Walter Arnold became the first man fined for speeding (8mph in a 2mph area). Artist Jackson Pollock born, 1912. First bananas arrived in Britain since WW2, 1946. Happy birthday to: hobbit Elijah Wood (22), musician Sarah McLachlan (35), actress Harley Jane Kozak (46), actress/former Playmate Barbi Benton (53), actor Alan Alder (67)
 
Wednesday 29 January   -  

Victoria Cross instituted, 1856. W.C. Fields born, 1880. Nonsense poet Edward Lear died, 1888. Carl Taylor patented the ice-cream cone rolling machine, 1924. BBC Radio broadcast the first edition of Desert Island Discs, 1942. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward married, 1958. Happy birthday to: actresses Sara Gilbert (28) and Eliza Szonert (29), presenter Oprah Winfrey (49), actor Tom Selleck (58), writer/broadcaster Germaine Greer (64). Admission Day in Kansas (34th state, 1861)
 
Thursday 30 January   -  

Charles I executed, 1649. Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany, 1933. Mahatma Gandhi assassinated, 1948. The contraceptive pill went on sale in Britain, 1961. Vietcong captured the American Embassy in Saigon, 1968. "Bloody Sunday" in Londonderry, 1972. Gerald Durrell, writer/naturalist, died, 1995. Happy birthday to: actor Christian Bale (29), actress Daphne Askbrook (37), actress/comedienne Brett Butler (45), actor/musician Phil Collins (52), actress Vanessa Redgrave (66), actor Gene Hackman (73)

 

THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Lord Macaulay:

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

 

TOTALLY TRIVIAL

This week, something we take for granted (unless it involves marketers) - the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was originally a teacher of deaf children, and originally conceived the telephone as a hearing aid for his deaf wife and mother, applying for the patent on Valentine's Day, 1876. Bell also set a world water speed record of 70mph in a boat he designed - he was 72 years old at the time. Until the first coin-operated telephone was developed in 1889 by William Gray, pay telephone users were required to give their money to an attendant. Today we hardly ever speak to a telephone operator, but originally all exchange switching was done manually, with the first operators being men, until Emma M. Nutt was employed by Boston's Telephone Dispatch Company on September 1, 1878. If you think long-distance and international calls are expensive today, the first commercial service between New York and London, established in 1927, cost $75 for the first three minutes. Want to find a phone number? The first telephone book - containing a massive 50 names, was published by the New Haven Telephone Company in 1878, or you could ask the operator - San Francisco's Old Chinese Exchange, established in 1909, employed operators who had to be proficient in English and five dialects of Chinese, as well as remember the numbers of each of their 2,400 clients as Chinese belief considered it rude to refer to people as numbers. The telephone network has long been a source of amusement and exploration by hackers (in the true sense of the word), including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who earned money while in college by selling "blue boxes" which enabled free calls from pay phones and John Draper, nicknamed "Captain Crunch" after he found that he could generate the required switching tones with a plastic whistle from a box of Captain Crunch cereal. With 70,000 miles of telephone lines, more than 200,000 phone calls a day are made from the Pentagon building, although the President did not have a personal telephone in his White House Oval Office until 1929.

[Want us to find trivia on a particular subject? Let us know via the usual address - we can't promise to use your suggestion, but if we do, you'll be credited.]

 

FILM QUIZ

An urban collection of quotations this week to celebrate the release of Sim City 4. Answers next week or from the regular address.

Last issue's mortal quotations were:

WEIRD WORLD NEWS

Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...

DUMB CRIMS... In the annals of Dumb Crimdom there seems to be an especially large number of dumb bank robbers, joined this week by 61-year-old Edward Butler Blaine of Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The actual hold-up went off smoothly, and Blaine left the bank with a "large amount" (according to Police Capt. Scott Moser) of cash in a bag and his pockets, but things started to go wrong when he found that he had locked himself out of his car. He tried to smash the window with a nearby log but failed, and threw the log at a pickup truck parked nearby in frustration. The truck's owner, nearby store owner Emmett Lowe, saw this, and - together with friend Larry Aguilar - went to confront Blaine. After they went back inside, bank staff who had been watching phoned Lowe to tell him what Blaine had done, so Lowe grabbed a gun and he and Aguilar went back out, chasing Blaine for about 150 yards - with $100 bills flying out of the man's pockets - only managing to tackle him to the ground after Lowe shot him in the leg. Blaine tried to shoot at Lowe and Aguilar, but shot himself in the same leg instead. Meanwhile in Cleveland John Mullen Jr made a call to a sex chat line and immediately launched into an explicitly pornographic tirade. Unfortunately for him, he had misdialled and got through to the home of police chief Guy Turner, who used another line to have colleagues trace the call. Just to show that not all dumb crims are American, British police spotted 60-year-old Barbara Byrne veering across the A1 dual-carriageway at 40mph. When they eventually brought her to a halt the officers found that she had 27 dogs in her Renault Laguna estate car, five of which were unrestrained, and she was smoking and holding a can of drink between her thighs. Byrne, a former care worker - told them that she had been driving over 100 miles from her home to take her dogs for a walk on Skegness beach. She was subsequently banned from driving for a year, fined UKP59 and ordered to pay UKP75 costs. Finally, and returning to dumb bank jobs, a 21-year-old German bank robber was traced and arrested after he left his ID card at the scene of the crime.

THE SPIRIT OF DAN QUAYLE... Six candidates in city elections in Charleston, West Virginia, couldn't even spell their party names correctly on official forms, four Democrats claiming to be either "Democart" or "Democrate" candidates and two Republicans who thought they were either "Repbulican" or "Repucican" Both Republican Al Carey and Democrat Dana Griffith attributed their mistakes to rushing in a tight time frame rather than carelessness. Four years ago Fred Pettry spelled his party's name as "Democart" and went on to win a council seat. He made the same mistake again this year.

A WINTER'S TALE WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE APPROPRIATE... A Norwegian theatre company is staging forty-six productions, including Hamlet, in a roofless 26-foot-high, 112-foot-wide theatre modelled on Shakespeare's Globe, but made out of ice in Jukkasjaervi, in northern Sweden. Rehearsals took place in temperatures as low as -31C (-23F). Performances run until April when, we presume, all will melt away and leave not a rack behind.

WHY PETS SHOULDN'T WATCH CARTOONS... A dog that had been let off its lead in Newton Abbot, England, was chasing a tortoiseshell cat when both fell about ten feet into the river Teign and had to be rescued by firemen. "We often get animals in the river," said Devon Fire and Rescue Service assistant divisional officers Tony Heywood, "but rarely do we get them together. [..] The dog was just about holding his own in about three feet of water while the cat was physically clinging to the bank." After being rescued the dog required no treatment, but the cat is recovering well at a Kingsteington veterinary practice.

DEMOCRACY? BAH! Despite the, er, best efforts of Bush and Blair, not everybody wants a "free" world. 52-year-old Romanian factory worker Constantin Simion, who lived most of his life under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, applied for political asylum in Iraq last year, saying that "If Iraq says no, I'll try my luck with Libya or Cuba, anything that is a totalitarian regime. I'm sick of democracy."

STORIES WHICH ALSO CAUGHT OUR EYE THIS WEEK: Romania's planned Dracula theme park "not viable" according to consultants. South African police searching for prisoner who escaped from hospital wearing nothing but handcuffs. Wisconsin Pick 'n Save clerk demands ID from a 76-year-old veteran buying a non-alcoholic beer. Deceased accordion player Sir Jimmy Shand voted second best Scottish musical act of all time, beating Runrig, Texas, Travis and The Proclaimers (but not Wet Wet Wet). Cristo and Jeanne-Claude to drape 23-mile orange fabric sculpture in New York's Central Park. Kentucky bible college fighting to change its phone number because of 666 prefix. Chinese couples can hire a best man and bridesmaids for their wedding. Manchester radio station fined for running sweepstake on the time of Moors murderer Myra Hindley's death. Indian family planning clinic offering men a UKP20 bicycle if they undergo vasectomies. Chilean woman win lottery jackpot twice in a fortnight after playing the same numbers for 50 years. New theory: wings evolved by dinosaurs running up slopes. BND (Germany's equivalent of Britain's MI6 spy agency) publishing recipe book - other merchandise including "For Your Eyes Only" underwear to follow.

 

ENTERTAINMENT BRIEFS

RIAA defeat Verizon in DMCA-based case that the ISP should reveal identity of music-downloading customer; Verizon to appeal. Hilary Rosen to step down as CEO of RIAA. Norwegian authorities to appeal against acquittal of "DVD Jon" Johansen. Barry & Robin Gibb will continue to collaborate but will never perform again as The Bee Gees. London's Marquee Club up for sale. Next Tomb Raider game, Angel of Darkness, delayed again; now planned for April at the earliest (surely nothing to do with Tomb Raider 2 movie opening in the summer?) Six new "Mr Men" characters due this year. Irregular Editor has to be dragged away from playing Sim City 4 to write this issue. Rumours: William ("It's music, Jim, but not as we know it") Shatner recording another album. Both Friends and Frasier to end after 2003-4 season. Obits: actress/singer Nell Carter (54), thriller writer Gavin Lyall (70), actor Richard Crenna (76), editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin (81), silent movie pianist Joseph C. Ellis (98), caricaturist Albert Hirschfield (99)

 

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK

It's a little known fact that the Editor is a fan of Maxis' Sim games, particularly Sim City and The Sims. This week's site is another of those self-questionnaire things, where you can find out which Sims persona type you are - the Editor is apparently either an Entertainer or an Innovator Sim...

http://gprojects.web.aol.com/tso/quiz_standalone.html

 

THE AMAZING NOT-QUITE-RANDOM LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Madame Jennifer, our in-house psychic predicts the following numbers will be lucky:

5, 32, 26, 39, 41, 47

You can consult Madame Jennifer online at the TFIr homepage (needs a javascript-enabled browser):

http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/li/tfir/

 

AND FINALLY...

An Irishman, a Mexican and a blond guy were doing construction work on scaffolding on the 20th floor of a building. Eating lunch one day, the Irishman said, "Corned beef and cabbage. If I get corned beef and cabbage one more time for lunch I'm going to jump off this building."

The Mexican opened his lunch box and exclaimed, "Burritos again! If I get burritos one more time I'm going to jump off, too."

The blond opened his lunch and said, "Bologna again. If I get a bologna sandwich one more time, I'm jumping too."

The next day the Irishman opened his lunch box, saw corned beef and cabbage and jumped to his death.

The Mexican opened his lunch, saw a burrito and jumped too.

The blond guy opened his lunch, saw the bologna and jumped to his death as well.

At the funeral the Irishman's wife was weeping. She said, "If I'd known how really tired he was of corned beef and cabbage, I never would have given it to him again!"

The Mexican's wife also wept and said, "I could have given him tacos or enchiladas! I didn't realize he hated burritos so much."

Everyone turned and stared at the blond's wife. "Hey, don't look at me," she said, "He makes his own lunch."

...end of line