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Issue #476 - 18th May 2018
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| Contents | — – o o O o o – — |
^ WORD OF THE WEEK
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Friday 18th May - Mathematician & poet Omar Khayyám born, 1048. The Crusader presence in the Holy Land ended with the Fall of Acre, 1291. Rupert of Germany, Count Palatine of the Rhine, died, 1410. Engraver Stefano della Bella born, 1610. Great Britain declared war on France, starting the Seven Years' War, 1756. Composer Gustav Mahler died, 1911. Actress Miriam Margolyes born, 1941. Jackie Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier, 1953. Runner Betty Robinson died, 1999. International Museum Day. World AIDS Vaccine Day. Saturday 19th May - Woodcarver & architect Baccio D'Agnolo born, 1462. Explorer Jacques Cartier set sail on his second expedition to North America, 1535. Anne Boleyn, Queen of England & second wife of King Henry VIII of England, executed, 1536. Queen Elizabeth I of England issued an order for the arrest of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1568. Artist Claude Vignon born, 1593. The skies over New England went dark during the day, 1780. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, died, 1795. Scientist Ruth Ella Moore born, 1903. Poet Ogden Nash died, 1971. Sunday 20th May - Æthelberht II, king of East Anglia, murdered, 794. Prince Louis of France was defeated at the Second Battle of Lincoln during the First Barons' War, 1217. Explorer Christopher Columbus died, 1506. Anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius, "The Father of Embryology", born, 1537. Thomas Thorpe published, possibly without permission, the first issue of Shakespeare's sonnets, 1609. Writer Honoré de Balzac born, 1799. Levi Strauss & Jacob Davis were awarded the American patent for blue jeans with copper rivets, 1873. Singer-songwriter & actress Cher born, 1946. Actor Jon Pertwee died, 1996. World Metrology Day. Monday 21st May - The coronation of Otto III as Holy Roman Emperor, 996. Henry VI, king of England, died, possibly murdered, 1471. Poet Alexander Pope born, 1688. Writer Daniel Defoe was imprisoned for seditious libel, 1703. Prison reformer Elizabeth Fry born, 1780. Poet Thomas Wharton died, 1790. The Manchester Ship Canal, linking Manchester to the Irish Sea at Liverpool, was opened, 1894. Computer scientist & writer of OXO, one of the first computer games using a video display, Sandy Douglas, born, 1921. Singer-songwriter Twinkle died, 2015. Tuesday 22nd May - Roman emperor Constantine the Great died, 337. Halley's Comet made its fourteenth recorded perihelion passage, 760. Writer Su Xun born, 1009. Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first atlas, was published, 1570. William Sturgeon, inventor of the electromagnet & the electric motor, born, 1783. Martha Washington, first First Lady of the United States, died, 1802. The Wright Brothers were granted a U.S. patent for their flying machine, 1906. Peace activist & Nobel laureate Betty Williams born, 1943. Fusilier Lee Rigby murdered, 2013. World Goth Day. Wednesday 23rd May - Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, 1430. Antiquarian & collector Elias Ashmole born, 1617. Pirate William Kidd hanged, 1701. Cyrill Demian was granted an Austrian patent for the accordion, 1829. Aviator Otto Lilienthal born, 1848. Playwright Henrik Ibsen died, 1906. The New York Public Library was dedicated, 1911. Singer & actress Rosemary Clooney born, 1928. Actor Roger Moore died, 2017. World Turtle Day. Thursday 24th May - Roman general Germanicus born, 15 BCE. Mathemnatician & astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus died, 1543. The first institutional library printed catalogue, the Nomenclatur of Leiden University Library, was printed, 1595. Political theorist & journalist Jean Paul Marat born, 1743. Sarah Josepha Hale's nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was published, 1830. Golfer & architect Old Tom Morris died, 1908. Actress & director Mai Zetterling born, 1925. The first Eurovision Song Contest was held in Lugano, 1956. Writer Tanith Lee died, 2015.
This week, Tessa Jowell, Baroness Jowell:In the end what gives life meaning is not only how it is lived, but how it draws to a close.
A selection of quotations from films with a common actor or actress. Answers next issue or from the regular address.Last issue's quotations were from films starring Benedict Cumberbatch:
- How do you live in New York and not have a single percocet?
- I leave you alone for two minutes and the wolves descend.
- Look, I know you're all moved in, but an opportunity came up at the bank that I thought you might be interested in. This place sat gathering dust for years until you came along and bought it, and now, as it happens, another party's expressed interest in the farm. The good news is, they're willing to pay what you paid and put another 15% on top of that.
- - Hi-ho lads, it's off to work.
- If he starts whistling, I'll smash his face in.- You know what happens if we get caught, right? We go to jail forever. Like, until we're 21.
- Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to be clever. Some people are born clever the same way some people are born beautiful. I'm not one of those people. I've had to work at it.
-- Starter For 10 [2006]- I promise you, that I'll look after him as closely as you've done, I'll respect him and all the care that you've taken with him. And if I can, I'll return him to your care.
-- War Horse [2011]- To get ahead in this world, you need more than fair looks and a kind heart.
-- The Other Boleyn Girl [2008]- You became a doctor to save one life above all others. Your own.
-- Doctor Strange [2016]- Far to the east, over ranges and rivers lies a single solitary peak.
-- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey [2012]
Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- HISTORY! Work to widen a road in Starcross, Devon, has had to be suspended after the discovery of a "nationally significant" underground reservoir, part of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's atmospheric railway. The railway used a vaccuum system to move trains and the reservoir supplied water to create steam to power air pumping stations along the track. The system proved more expensive to operate than steam trains and was scrapped after a year, but the historical significance of the reservoir means that transport planners will have to go back to their drawing boards. ● A new excavation of a Roman stable in Pompeii has found the void left by a dying horse, its body shape preserved, like many of the human residents, as an empty space in volcanic ash from the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius. Archaeologists have displayed a cast of the horse, believed to have been a thoroughbred racing animal rather than used for farming. ● Swiss researchers examining DNA taken from a 5th-Century leprosy victim discovered in Essex have speculated that red squirrels may have brought the disease to Britain over 1,000 years ago, as the DNA contained a match for the strain of the disease still carried by the squirrels. Grey squirrels were not introduced to Britain until the 19th Century.
- NATURE! Police in Bartlett, Illinois, were recently handed a 'cute puppy' found by a passer-by on the side of a busy road. The 'puppy' was badly dehydrated and covered in dirt, but when they gave it water and cleaned it up a bit they realised that it was not a puppy - it was a wild coyote pup that had probably become separated from its litter. The female pup was taken to a wildlife rehabilitation centre, where it is being cared for before probably being handed to another centre where there is a group of coyote pups of a similar age. ● The Blue Planet II has drawn attention to the problem of plastic contamination in the world's oceans, and a study by scientists analysing images from the Mariana Trench taken over the last 30 years has now confirmed that at least one plastic bag - of the type used in supermarkets - had made its way to the deepest-known place in the oceans, the bottom of the Trench, 36,000' (11km) below the surface. ● Rather happier news from Java, where researchers on the 2-week South Java Biodiversity Expedition have discovered more than a dozen new species including several types of crab, an ice cream cone worm and a cock-eyed squid.
- SCIENCE! It has been a long-standing holy grail for medicine, but British scientists now believe they have found a way of fighting the common cold. Rather than targetting the virus, which exists in hundreds of different varieties, they are targetting a protein in the human body that every strain of the virus uses to replicate itself. They hope to develop an inhaler to speed up dosage while minimising side effects, none of which have been detected in the lab. ● A team of scientists in America believe they have transferred memory between snails. They trained a snail to adopt a defensive reaction to a stimulus for 50s, then transferred RNA, one of the building blocks of life, from the snail into another snail, which seemed to have picked up the training, adopting the same reaction for a similar period of time. Control snails without the transplanted RNA only held it for a few seconds. ● NASA is planning to send a helicopter to Mars. The helicopter, which will be included with a rover due to launch in 2020 for a 2021 landing is about 12" (30cm) in circumference and weighs 4lbs (1.8kg) with rotors that will spin at almost 3,000 revolutions per minute to fly in the atmosphere of Mars, which is 100 times thinner than Earth's. Because of the distance from Earth it will be largely autonomous, as Martian rovers are.
- PEOPLE! Chinese climber Xia Boyu, who lost both feet to frostbite on Mount Everest 40 years ago, and later both lower legs to lymphoma, has returned to the mountain after three more failed attempts, becoming the second double amputee to reach the summit, and the first to do so from the Nepalese side. Nepalese authorities had introduced rules banning double amputees from attempting the ascent, as a safety precaution, but a court blocked the ban as discriminatory earlier this year, clearing the way for Xia's ascent. ● A fracas in a German IKEA store last weekend ended with a woman being taken to hospital. The dispute, originally between a 49-year-old woman and an 18-year-old woman started when one accused the other of not following the arrows on the floor properly and pushing her trolley in the wrong direction. The 18-year-old's father then became involved and the older woman fell into a shelf, injuring her head. Bavarian police are appealing for witnesses. ● Stephen Hawking once held a party for time travellers, to which none came, leading him to claim it as "experimental evidence that time travel is not possible." Now it seems that they can also apply for tickets to his memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Anyone applying to enter the lottery for tickets via a website is asked to enter their date of birth, with dates up to 31 December 2038 being accepted. Of the 12,000 people from 50 countries who applied in the first 24 hours, none claimed to have been born in the future...
- CRIME! Several British police forces have been trialling facial recognition software to identify and track wanted offenders at big events, but a Freedom of Information request by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has revealed that the system implemented by the Metropolitan Police in London only managed to correctly identify 2 people, neither of whom were wanted criminals, and no arrests were made as a result of the system. On a single day of the Notting Hill Carnival last year the system threw up 35 false positives. The police are defending their use of facial recognition software, claiming that no arrests would be made on the basis of the system alone. ● An Essex court has heard how a man attempted to dodge five tickets issued from speed cameras in eight days by inventing a fake employee, who he claimed had been driving the car, but had subsequently been sacked for numerous traffic offences. When police tried to locate the 'driver' they were able to prove that he had not been employed by James Wilson, and Wilson had no documentation to show that he had been. Wilson was fined £1,500 ($ 2,026), including court costs, and received 30 points on his driving license, disqualifying him from driving. ● Miami salesman Adrian Abramovich has been fined a record $120m (£88m) for making more than 90 million automated marketing phone calls in the US. The calls, which were trying to sell timeshare properties and holidays had illegally spoofed caller ID numbers to appear local to the recipients and claimed to be from reputable travel companies, before transferring the call to an overseas call centre to flog the holidays.
IN BRIEF: Iowa man "horsing around" with his dog on his sofa shot in the leg after dog knocks safety catch off his holstered gun, then hits trigger. ● Never mind North Korea, Scots are up in arms against Donald Trump after his Turnberry golf resport refused to supply the somewhat orange and quinessentially Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru ("Made in Scotland from girders") to an event, claiming that it risked staining the carpets. ● The person who previously added Middle Earth and Narnia to Didcot road signs has now put fake social media-inspired streetname signs around Oxford, including "Selfie Passage", "Twitter Lane", "WTF Lane" & "Snapchat End". ● Pie producer Fray Bentos considering redesigning its iconic tins because (apparently) millenials keep posting to social media that they have trouble opening them. ● Southern hemisphere record 23.8m (78') wave recorded by buoy off New Zealand's Campbell Island. ● Motorised garden shed sets speed record of 101mph (160km/h), passing own record of 80mph (129km/h). ● Much online confusion after New York Times tweeted its own version of Yorkshire pudding, called a 'Dutch baby' to be served with "syrup, preserves, confectioners' sugar or cinnamon sugar" with many pointing out that the one thing a Yorkshire pudding - a recipe dating back to at least 1747, 29 years before the founding of the USA - is not, is a dessert.
Sir Anthony Hopkins mistaken for tramp while filming modern-day King Lear as passer-by stops to tell him where the nearest hostel is. Avengers: Infinity War now highest-grossing superhero film of all time in UK & Ireland, grossing £60m ($81.05m) in under three weeks. Pianist Lauren Zhang wins BBC Young Musician 2018. The Greatest Showman being adapted for Broadway. Online outcry prompts NBC to pick up Brooklyn Nine-Nine for sixth season one day after Fox cancelled it. Black Panther director Ryan Coogler welcomes possibility of female-led sequel. Eighty-two women protest inequality at Cannes Film Festival - marking the 82 female directors whose films have been shown since its inception against 1,688 male directors; Palme d'Or has been awarded to 71 male directors, but just 2 female directors. Lars von Trier returns to Cannes seven years after being banned for sympathetic comments about Hitler in press conference, only to see over 100 people walk out of screening of his 'vile', 'torturous' film The House That Jack Built. Danny Dyer, Martin Freeman to co-star in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter as part of 24-week festival production of all Pinter's one-act plays at Harold Pinter Theatre marking decade since playwright's death. Netta wins Eurovision Song Contest for Israel with Toy; UK's SuRie comes 24th of 26. Deadpool 2 soundtrack to be first in franchise with parental advisory sticker for plentiful profanities (though presumably not in the Celine Dion track). Lindsey Buckingham says he was fired from Fleetwood Mac after they "lost their perspective". Author Jojo Moyes donates £360,000 ($486,300) to keep Quick Reads adult literacy programme going for another 3 years. Cannes jury member Kristen Stewart defies festival dress code to take off heels before going in to BlacKkKlansman premiere barefoot. Marvel developing Miss Marvel film about female muslim superhero. Nintendo putting NES Classic back into production. Steven Knight confirms Peaky Blinders to end after series 7 "with the first air raid siren in Birmingham in 1939". Spotify removes R. Kelly from curated playlists as part of "Hate Content & Hateful Conduct" policy. Early reactions to Solo: A Star Wars Story almost entirely positive. Clique of 'superfans' account for 72% of vinyl record sales in UK, according to Entertainment Retailers Association. The CW picks up Roswell, Charmed reboots; fans of original series unimpressed. Tidal accused of inflating audience figures for Beyonce's Lemonade & Kanye West's Life of Pablo. Lifetime's Harry & Meghan TV movie met with reaction ranging from bemusement to indignation. Writers Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese confirm plans for Zombieland 2 with original cast, possibly for release next year.
Bafta TV Awards: Leading actress: Molly Windsor, Three Girls; Leading actor: Sean Bean, Broken; Supporting actress: Vanessa Kirby, The Crown; Supporting actor: Brian F. O'Byrne, Little Boy Blue; Entertainment performance: Graham Norton, The Graham Norton Show; Male performance in a comedy programme: Toby Jones, Detectorists; Female performance in a comedy programme: Daisy May Cooper, This Country; Drama series: Peaky Blinders; Single drama: Murdered For Being Different; Mini-series: Three Girls; Soap and continuing drama: Casualty; International: The Handmaid's Tale; Entertainment programme: Britain's Got Talent; Comedy and comedy entertainment programme: Murder in Successville; Scripted comedy: This Country; Features: Cruising with Jane McDonald; Must-see moment: Blue Planet II - Mother pilot whale grieves; Current affairs: Panorama - Undercover: Britain's Immigration Secrets; Single documentary: Rio Ferdinand: being Mum and Dad; Factual series: Ambulance; Reality and constructed factual: Love Island; Specialist factual: Basquiat - Rage to Riches; News coverage: Sky News - The Rohingya Crisis; Sport: ITV Sport/ITV - The Grand National; Live event: World War One Remembered: Passchendaele; Short-form programme: Morgana Robinson's Summer; Bafta fellowship: Kate Adie; Special award: John Motson.
Musician Scott Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit, 36), actress Margot Kidder (The Amityville Horror, Superman, 69), politician Tessa Jowell, Baroness Jowell (Sure Start, 2012 London Olympics, 70), serial killer Dennis Nilsen (72), soccer player Ray Wilson (Everton, England 1966, 83), author Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, 88), botanist & ecologist David Goodall (Ecosystems of the World, 104), supercentenarian Bessie Camm (oldest verified person in the UK, 113).
^ DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!
Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:10, 17, 21, 35, 37, 40[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.
The class were having a history lesson. "Alright, children," the teacher said, "Can anyone tell me something important that didn't exist 100 years ago?"
Little Jennifer's hand shot up. "Yes, Little Jennifer?"
Little Jennifer smiled confidently. "Me, Miss!"
^ ...end of line