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Issue #462 - 9th February 2018
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| Contents | — – o o O o o – — |
^ WORD OF THE WEEK
bothy |
Friday 9th February - The coronation of Zeno as co-emperor of the Byzantine Empire, 474. Artist Gerrit Dou died, 1675. Activist Thomas Paine born, 1737. The British Parliament declared Massachusetts to be in rebellion, at the start of the American Revolutionary War, 1775. Writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky died, 1881. Actor Ronald Colman born, 1891. The Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, viewed by a record 73 million people across America, 1964. Model Amber Valetta born, 1974. Musician Bill Hailey died, 1981. Saturday 10th February - Margaret II, Countess of Flanders, died, 1280. Admiral & politician William Cornwallis born, 1744. France ceded Quebec and other territories to Great Britain at the end of the Seven Years' War, 1763. Merchant & deviser of the eponymous loading line on ships, Samuel Plimsoll born, 1824. Writer Ellen Wood died, 1887. Edward VII launched HMS Dreadnought, the first dreadnought battleship, 1906. Singer-songwriter Roberta Flack born, 1939. Downed U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers was exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, 1962. Actress & diplomat Shirley Temple died, 2014. Sunday 11th February - Japan was founded by Emperor Jimmu, 660 BCE (Traditional date). Karl von Trier, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, died, 1324. Writer Honoré d'Urfé born, 1568. Mathematician & philosopher René Descartes stopped thinking and ceased to be, 1650. Jesse Fell first burned anthracite on an open grate as an experiment to heat homes with something other than wood, 1808. Egyptologist Auguste Mariette born, 1821. The BBC broadcast the world's first science fiction television programme, a section of Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., notable for the first application of the word 'robot' to describe an automated machine, 1938. Poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide, 1963. Actress Jennifer Aniston born, 1969. Monday 12th February - Shōgun Kujo Yoritsune born, 1218. Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon on his second voyage to India, 1502. Lady Jane Grey, de facto Queen of England & Ireland for 9 days, executed, 1554. Biologist Jan Swammerdam born, 1637. Philosopher Immanuel Kant died, 1804. The Australian gold rushes began with Edward Hargraves' announcement that he had discovered gold in Bathurst, New South Wales, 1851. Lyons' LEO became the first computer used in business when it generated a payroll report, 1954. Cryptographer Phil Zimmermann born, 1954. Singer Al Jarreau died, 2017. Red Hand Day (United Nations). Darwin Day (International) Tuesday 13th February - Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII of England, executed, 1542. Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial by the Inquisition, 1633. Economist Thomas Robert Malthus born, 1766. Work began on covering the Senne in Brussels, 1867. Composer Richard Wagner died, 1883. Artist Grant Wood born, 1891. The Coso artifact, allegedly a 500,000-year-old rock encasing a spark plug, was discovered near Olancha, California, 1961. Tennis player Jamie Murray born, 1986. Kim Jong-nam, one-time heir apparent to his father, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, died, probably assassinated, 2017. World Radio Day. Wednesday 14th February - Richard II of England died, possibly starved in captivity, 1400. Muslims in Granada were ordered to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain, in the Spanish Inquisition, 1502. Lucrezia de' Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, born, 1545. Engraver Abraham Bosse died, 1676. Great Ormond St Hospital in London, England's first hospital with beds specifically designed for children, was founded, 1852. Artist & writer Nina Hamnett born, 1890. Writer P.G. Wodehouse died, 1975. Model & actress Rie Rasmussen born, 1976. The Voyager 1 space probe took the photograph of Earth now known as Pale Blue Dot, 1990. Singles Awareness Day. Valentine's Day. V Day. Thursday 15th February - Oswiu, King of Northumbria, died, 670. An English invasion force landed in La Rochelle, during the Anglo-French War (1213-1214), 1214. Astronomer, mathematician & physicist Galileo Galilei born, 1564. President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Sumpreme Court of the United States, 1879. Actress Gale Sondergaard born, 1899. Musical comedy composer Lionel Monckton died, 1924. Currency in the United Kingdom became fully decimilised on Decimal Day, 1972. Animator Brendon Small born, 1975. Physicist & Nobel Prize laureate, Richard Feynman died, 1988.
This week, P.G. Wodehouse, in The Code of the Woosters:It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
A mixed bag of quotations. Answers next issue or from the regular address.Last issue's quotations were from films starring Emilio Estevez:
- - We work together as a team!
- Best defense is a good offense.- Can I use the facilities? Because being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit!
- They say we only use a fraction of our brain's true potential. Now that's when we're awake. When we're asleep, we can do almost anything.
- Why is it that self-righteousness always goes hand-in-hand with resistance movements?
- I kind of think happiness is over-rated. People spend their whole lives chasing it, like it's the most important thing in the world. Happy people are kind of arrogant.
- Don't mess with the bull, young man, you'll get the horns.
-- The Breakfast Club [1985]- - I'm not leaving my house.
- Alex, if you stay they're gonna kill you. And then I'm gonna have to to go around and kill all the guys who killed you. That's a lot of killing.
-- Young Guns [1988]- You break my heart. Then again, you break everyone's heart.
-- St Elmo's Fire [1985]- - Do you sleep in the nude?
- Only when I'm naked.
-- Loaded Weapon 1 [1993]- I bought some liquor. Orujo. It's from Galicia. It's made of eighteen different herbs, and so secret that it has to be squeezed by blind monks.
-- The Way [2010]
Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- SPACE (OR NOT!) Flat Earther "Mad" Mike Hughes [TFIrs passim] finally tried to launch his homemade rocket on Sunday and anyone who paid $5 (£3.60) to watch the live stream would have seen Hughes - and his rocket - sitting around for 11 minutes before he conceded defeat, blaming a failed actuator in a location that would have been fatal to get to and fix. He had intended the unmanned rocket to reach an altitude of 1,800' (549m) as a proof-of-concept. He reckons he will need to raise about $2m (£1.44m) to build his manned rocket, to - in theory - take him far up enough to see the 'flatness' of the Earth. ● Elon Musk's SpaceX, considerably better-funded and more scientifically valid than Hughes, has successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket - the most powerful US rocket since the Saturn V which launched men on their journey to the moon - from Cape Canaveral. The Falcon Heavy is essential a trio of smaller rockets fixed to the payload, with the rockets detaching and returning to Earth to be reused. In practice two of the rockets made perfect vertical landings on land but the third missed its offshore barge and splashed down into the sea. The test payload for the first flight was Musk's Tesla electric sportscar, complete with a spacesuit-clad mannequin in the driver's seat, a "DON'T PANIC" sign on the dashboard (or on a display in the dashboard) and David Bowie's Space Oddity playing on the stereo. The Tesla was planned to head to Mars but missed the narrow target window and is heading towards the asteroid belt. ● Cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov performed a record 8-hour 13-minute spacewalk from the International Space Station this week to perform various tasks including improving a high-gain antenna's electronics. They successfully detached the folded antenna, took out the old circuitry and put in the new, but replaced the antenna pointing it in the opposite direction. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is assessing whether a second spacewalk is needed to fix it. ● Astrophysicists at the University of Oklahoma have used gravitational microlensing (basically, light behind a distant dense object is bent around it) to detect the first known planets outside our galaxy.
- HISTORY! DNA analysis of the 10,000-year-old remains of a man found in a cave below Chedder Gorge in Somerset 115 years ago has revealed that he had dark brown skin and blue eyes, similar to other Stone Age hunter gatherers whose remains have been found and analysed in Hungary, Spain and Luxembourg. ● Reanalysis of the carbon dating of the remains of at least 264 individuals excavated from a mass grave in Repton in the 1970s and 1980s suggests that they might have been part of the Viking army which defeated the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century, but of whom little evidence remains. ● A new theory on dinosaurs, which followed from mapping their spread across the globe, suggests that they had run out of room and were already in decline by the time of the asteroid impact which killed them off. ● Archaeologists find causewood enclosure - an ancient camp - at Larkhill, near Stonehenge, possibly a trading centre, although they also found a set of posts laid out in a similar pattern to Stonehenge, suggesting that the architects of the monument were based there. ● Forensic linguist Dr Andrea Nini of Manchester University has analysed two of the most credible letters sent to police in 1888 and attributed to Jack the Ripper, and determined that they were most likely written by a reporter the Central News Agency in London. ● Researchers using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology have discovered more than 60,000 Mayan house, palaces, roads and other man-made features in the jungles of northern Guatemala. ● Two detectorists searching for buried artifacts in a field on the Suffolk/Essex border were thrilled when they unearthed a horde of 50 "gold" coins and pottery - until they discovered that they were props from the BBC comedy drama Detectorists which had accidentally been buried in a ploughing scene.
- TRANSPORT! A Chinese man identified only as Mr Huang, in the city of Laibin in Southern Guangxi was hoping to achieve online fame after spending two months renovating an old vehicle, giving it new bodywork, a fake gun turret and a fake radar dish to turn it into a "tank". He certainly drew attention to himself - from the police. When he tried taking his car out on the road in January they intercepted it. Huang was fined 1,750 yuan (£195; $278), had to undergo a "safety education" assessment and had his driving license revoked. His car was confiscated and crushed. ● A new mystery surrounds the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in March 2014. Texan ocean exploration company Ocean Infinity has a vessel named Seabed Constructor on a 90-day mission searching for the wreckage of the Boeing 777 on the seabed, under a "no find, no fee" contract with the Malaysian government. On the last day of January someone on the ship turned off its Automatic Identification System - which can be used to track and identify ships worldwide - for 80 hours, before it was re-enabled as the ship headed to Australia for a planned refuelling stop. The mission had already identified - and dismissed as geological - two sites of interest, but many are wondering if they found the location of the downed plane and turned off the AIS so nobody else could know where they were, or had they found another wreck that they wanted to keep secret. Ocean Infinity have not responded to questions about the incident. ● A Norwegian Airlines flight had to turn back 20 minutes into its flight because of a problem with its toilets, despite carrying 84 plumbers among its passengers, all of whom were staff of plumbing company Rorkjop; CEO Frank Olsen told reporters his plumbers would have loved to fix the problem, but unfortunately it could only be done from outside the plane, rather difficult at 10,000m (32,800').
- FOOD! PepsiCo has attracted a lot of flack this week after announcing plans to introduce packs of Doritos specially designed for women - who apparently (according to CEO Indra Nooyi) prefer smaller-sized crisps, none of the orange 'dust' so they do not have to lick their fingers clean, and fewer crumbs left in the (smaller, handbag-suitable-sized) bag because they do not like to tip the bag into their mouths. Oh, and less crunchy crisps, because, you know, noise. As expected by everyone except, apparently, Mrs Nooyi, the idea was met with widespread ridicule, with one Twitter using suggesting that people should always carry a bag of crisps with them in case they were surrounded by a pack of women, to scare them off with the crunching... ● Staff a a crematorium in Bolton were thrown into a panic when a coconut that someone had slipped into a coffin [Because the deceased liked coconuts, we presume. -Ed] exploded in the furnace. Donna Bell, Assistant Director of Community Services at Bolton Council, asked people to be considerate when placing items inside coffins ahead of the funeral service and cremation, with mobile phones being a particular problem thanks to their batteries causing emissions, but other things seen recently include e-cigarettes, bottles of alcohol and both golf clubs and balls.
- WILDLIFE! Robert Meilhammer, 51, was with a group of fellow hunters in Easton, Maryland, shooting at Canada geese when a shot goose fell from the sky hitting him, knocking him unconscious and causing head and facial injuries. He was taken to Easton Airport in an ambulance and airlifted to Baltimore for treatment, from where he was reportedly in a stable condition. Canada geese can weigh up to 14lbs (6.35kg). ● Police in Gloucester are having trouble with their CCTV cameras, caused by a blue tit they have named Steve who keeps flying at, and perching in front of, the cameras. "He keeps getting in the way and it's always blurred and out of focus because he's close," one officer told reporters. Blue tits have been observed attacking their own reflections, which they think is an intruder. The police are taking it good-humouredly though, tweeting [! -Ed] recently that "Steve is back on his rounds this sunny morning."
IN BRIEF: Traffic wardens ticket car with legal parking permit displayed - because it was covered in snow & they could not see the permit. ● Runner in Cardiff uses tracking app to spell out "THANK YOU" on beach after receiving successful organ donation. ● Cookery broadcaster Nigella Lawson shares recipe for Marmite pasta. ● River in Tyumen, Russia, turns blood-red, and nobody knows why (authorities are waiting for test results). ● Man buries cheap plastic skeleton beneath decking before moving house to prank future owners. ● New York bar puts up notices banning customers from saying "literally" when they mean "figuratively". ● You should keep chocolate in a cool, dark, dry place, but not the fridge, apparently. ● Police called to ASDA supermarket in Altrincham after fighting breaks out over heavily discounted sandwiches, and to a Harvester restaurant in Liverpool after fight breaks out after someone queue-jumps to use a toaster for an "all you can eat" breakfast buffet. ● Man trying to modify his IKEA desk saws it in half, discovers that it was not veneered wood - it was veneered cardboard (He was not angry about it, and IKEA has confirmed that they sometimes use compressed cardboard for its light weight).
Doctor Foster creator Mike Bartlett hints at third series. Netflix use Super Bowl ad to announce untrailed release of third film of J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield franchise, The Cloverfield Paradox. BBC drop 2 of 4 filmed filmed episodes of Mel and Sue's Generation Game before broadcast, announce that the show (presumably one or both of the retained ones) will include Basil Brush. Amazon developing Conan series, based on Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, written by Colony co-creator Ryan Condal. Upcoming Labyrinth film will be a spin-off from the cult David Bowie/Jennifer Connelly original, not a reboot, directed by Evil Dead's Fede Alvarez, co-written by Alvarez & Metal Gear Solid's Jay Basu; casting underway, filming expected to start this autumn. Speculation that Doctor Who could move from Saturday to Sunday nights to avoid being pushed past younger children's bedtimes by Strictly Come Dancing. Manchester Art Gallery removes J.W. Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs, claimedly to start debate on how classic pictures depicting naked adolescent girls should be displayed in the modern age, instead gets backlash and allegations of puritanical censorship and political correctness. 2017 interview with Heath Ledger's sister suggests that he was keen to reprise role of the Joker in third Christopher Nolan Batman film before he died. Despite co-creator Reece Sheersmith's earlier claims that just-ended series of Inside No. 9 would be the last, BBC recommissions it for another series. HBO outbids Apple for Demimonde, J.J. Abrams' first self-penned TV show since Fringe. Justin Timberlake to tour UK this summer. Paul Simon announces retirement from touring (but not one-off gigs) after this summer. Smashing Pumpkins stoke rumours of reunion. Queen (with Adam Lambert) playing London's O2, venues in Italy & Germany this summer. P!nk slams critics after national anthem performance at Super Bowl; alleged chewing gum was a throat lozenge after she'd caught 'flu from her children. Lady Gaga forced to cancel last 10 dates of European tour on medical advice after fibromyalgia flare-up. Man arrested in Orlando after 'credible' kidnap threat to Lana Del Ray. Parklife festival bans, er, potato peelers at the behest of Liam Gallagher (something to do with the feud with his brother, apparently). Matt Smith to play Charles Manson in film Charlie, directed by American Psycho's Hannah Murray. Spice Girls announce reunion (though some speculation that Victoria Beckham only agreed on condition that she does not have to sing); Nadine Coyle announces Girls Aloud reunion as, er, solo performances of band's hits. US police name Robert Wagner a "person of interest" in the 1981 death of his then-wife Natalie Wood after new evidence comes to light & reanalysis of his "conflicting" accounts of what happened that night. RCL pledge new delivery date for Sinclair ZX Vega+ handheld games device after Indiegogo threatens action to recover backers' money. British public vote on which song will not win this year's Eurovision Song Contest. Ozzy Osbourne announces another retirement tour. Cast of The Greatest Showman top UK album chart ahead of Craig David & Ed Sheeran; Drake tops UK singles chart ahead of Ramz & Eminem ft. Ed Sheeran. UK govt announces review into demise of traditional printed news press including rise of online "clickbait" and "fake news" [Because "fake news" has never appeared in the printed newspapers, has it?... -Ed]. Nintendo announce Super Mario (presumably animated) film with Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me, Minions); hopefully better than 1993's Bob Hoskins live actioner...
Actor Ole Thestrup (Borgen, Ronal Barbaren, 69), actor John Mahoney (Frasier, Say Anything..., 77), singer Dennis Edwards (The Temptations, 74), mathematician Alan Baker (1970 Fields Medal winner, 78).
The Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) was taken at the behest of astronomer Carl Sagan. This week's site has the photograph and an extract from Sagan's 1994 book, also called Pale Blue Dot.- http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html
^ DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!
Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:9, 20, 25, 46, 55, 57[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.
Little Jennifer was staying at her grandparents' house for the weekend while her parents were away, and it was teatime. "Would you like a chocolate biscuit, Little Jennifer?" her grandmother asked her.
"Yes please, Grannie," Little Jennifer replied.
Her grandfather smiled at them. "It is good to see someone with such polite manners, isn't it? I do like people who say 'please' and 'thank you'," he said.
Little Jennifer quickly finished her biscuit and smiled as only Little Jennifer could. "I'll say both if it gets me a big slice of that cake in the kitchen, Grandpa," she said.
^ ...end of line