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Issue #535 - 11th October 2019
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| Contents | — – o o O o o – — |
^ WORD OF THE WEEK
williwaw |
Friday 11th October - The peerage and clergy in England passed the Ordinances of 1311 restricting the power of the monarchy, 1311. Russian general Grigory Potemkin born, 1739. American explorer & politician Meriwether Lewis died, 1809. Theodore Roosevelt became the first US President to fly in an aeroplane, 1910. Actress, writer & comedian Dawn French born, 1957. Photojournalist Dorothea Lange died, 1965. Saturday 12th October - The Babylonian empire ended with the capture of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, 539 BCE. Greek orator & statesman Demosthenes committed suicide, 322 BCE. King Edward VI of England born, 1537. The first iron lung respirator was used, at the Children's Hospital in Boston, 1928. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti born, 1935. Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language, died, 2011. Día del idioma español / Spanish Language Day (United Nations). Sunday 13th October - Roman emperor Claudius died, possibly poisoned, 54. The coronation of King Henry IV of England at Westminster Abbey, 1399. Artist Mariotto Albertinelli born, 1474. Astronomer Geminiano Montanari died, 1687. A large crowd in Portugal claimedly witnessed the Miracle of the Sun, 1917. Gardener & broadcaster Rachel de Thame born, 1961. International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction. Monday 14th October - King Harold II of England was killed at the Battle of Hastings, 1066. Sophia of Hanover born, 1630. A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh was published, 1926. Former England soccer player Alex Scott born, 1984. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot died, 2010. World Standards Day. Tuesday 15th October - Poet Virgil born, 70 BCE. Anatomist Andreas Vesalius died, 1564. The Gregorian calendar was first adopted, in Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire, 1582. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche born, 1844. The "From Hell" letter purportedly written by Jack the Ripper was sent to George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, 1888. Dancer & spy Margaretha Zelle (aka Mata Hari) executed, 1917. Global Handwashing Day. Wednesday 16th October - Jadwiga was crowned "King" of Poland, despite being female, 1384. Artist Anna Waser born, 1678. Marie Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI of France, guillotined, 1793. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published, 1847. Writer Oscar Wilde born, 1854. Actress Deborah Kerr died, 2007. World Food Day. Thursday 17th October - A tornado, thought to be of strength T8/F4, struck London, 1091. Artist Cristofano Allori born, 1577. Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, died, 1587. The tomb of Pharaoh Seti I was discovered, 1817. Playwright Arthur Miller born, 1915. Singer-songwriter Gord Downie died, 2017. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
This week, Piglet and Pooh in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh:- How do you spell 'love'?
- You don't spell it, you feel it.
A selection of quotations from films by the same director. Answers next issue or from the regular address.Last issue's quotations were from films starring Charles Dance:
- If everything's ready here on the Dark Side of the Moon... play the five tones.
- My father was fond of saying you need three things in life - a good doctor, a forgiving priest, and a clever accountant. The first two, I've never had much use for.
- - Martin hates boats. Martin hates water. Martin... Martin sits in his car when we go on the ferry to the mainland. I guess it's a childhood thing. It's a... there's a clinical name for it isn't there?
- Drowning.- Can you think of a plan that *doesn't* involve your 10-year-old sister joining the army?
- I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne. Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky...
- It's not a child's place to save his country.
-- Dracula Untold [2014]- Courage is no match for an unfriendly shoe, Countess...
-- For Your Eyes Only [1981]- You're a general-knowledge god.
-- Starter For 10 [2006]- - You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you?
- We do if something's funny, sir.
-- Gosford Park [2001]- A man more eviler than Skeletor.
-- Ali G Indahouse [2002]
Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- HISTORY! Archaeologists studying three small, spouted clay vessels shaped like livestock and dating back to the Bronze and Iron Ages between 1,200 BCE and 450 BCE ago have found traces of animal fats inside them suggesting that they may have been used to feed babies with animal milk, probably from goats or cows. By supplementing breast milk with animal milk prehistoric families would have been able to raise more children, leading to the population boom that saw humanity spread far and wide. The "bottles" had been found buried alongside infants. ● The age of the Sahara Desert, which occupies 3,600,000 miles2 (9,200,000 km2) of North Africa has long been in dispute, not helped by the fact that the Sahara is thought to cycle between desert and grassland every 20,000 years as the Earth's precession around the sun moves the North African Monsoon. New research by Daniel Muhs of the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that the Sahara is at least 4.6 million years old. Muhs analysed sediment layers on the Canary Islands of Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria, which are subject to an annual event called the "Calima" which blows large quantities of Saharan dust westwards onto the islands and found quartz and mica, common in the Sahara but rare in the Canaries' volcanic rock, between datable layers of rock. ● A team of scientists from the University of Kentucky have used the Diamond Light Source synchotron in England to image the insides of rolled-up scrolls discovered in Herculaneum, where they were buried and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius that also buried Pompeii. The scrolls cannot be physically unwrapped without risk of destroying their contents, but the synchotron which generates an accelerated electron beam 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, allowed them to build up a 3D model of the interior of the rolled text, and scans of four single-page fragments will be used to train a compluter to differentiate between ink and papyrus to virtually unwroll the scroll.
- NATURE! Conservationists working off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, last month to tag great white sharks so their movements can be monitored caught a female 15'5" (4.7m) long - longer than a Honda Civic, and weighing 2,076lb (941.7kg). The shark, dubbed Unama'ki, was hoisted onto a platform for 15 minutes where she was tagged, scanned with ultrasound and examined before being released. The only North Atlantic shark bigger that Unama'ki was another female, named Mary Lee, tagged in 2012, but who disappeared from satellite-mounted trackers in 2017. Larger sharks have been tagged off South Africa and Mexico. ● A dead baby Loggerhead turtle that was found washed up in Boca Raton, Florida, was found to have 104 pieces of plastic in its stomach, including a piece of balloon and of bottle wrappers. The Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, which found the turtle, said that while washbacks - baby turtles that are washed back ashore - are common at this time of year and many are saved, every single one that dies is found to have eaten plastic pollution. ● It has long been known that octopuses can change colour to camouflage themselves while hunting prey or evading predators, but for the first time one has been filmed changing colour while asleep, suggesting that it was a response to dreaming. The footage was captured by filmmakers working on a PBS documentary Octopus: Making Contact.
- SCIENCE! Bad news for the estimated 20% of American homes that rely on septic tanks for handling their toilet waste. A report commissioned by Rebecca Sosa, vice-chairwoman of the Miami-Dade County Commission in Florida, has suggested that the estimated 60 million toilets connected to septic tanks could be rendered inoperable within the next 25 years by climate change. Bacteria in the tanks separates the waste into solid sludge and water, with the water drained through an outflow pipe into a drainage field. Rising sea levels will saturate the fields, preventing them from absorbing the outflow, and erosion will remove the soft earth needed to filter out the "pollutants" leading to groundwater contamination and public health hazards. Florida's low-lying terrain, porous limestone bedrock and reliance on septic systems (it has 15% of the US total) mean that it is especially threatened. ● NASA has released audio recordings of more than 100 events on Mars detected by the seismometer on the InSight lander. Some 21 have been indentified as marsquakes, some - dubbed 'dinks and donks' - are thought to be the seismometer or lander itself moving, some are the Martian wind, and some are still unexplained. ● The second confirmed extra-Solar System object passing through has been identified by Russian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov. The comet, officially named 2I/Borisov, was detected as it approached, unlike 'Oumuamua, which was only discovered as it was leaving the Solar System in 2017, and so is giving astronomers plently of time to study it. Unlike the extremely-elongated 'Oumuamua 2I/Borisov is shaped more like a traditional comet, and has a reddish carbon-rich surface. As it warms in the sunlight 2I/Berisov is venting cyanogen, the gaseous form of cyanide, deadly to humans, although if anyone was able to breathe it in they would probably already be dead from exposure to space...
- PEOPLE! Russian news service tnvernews.ru has reported that since 2006 Orthodox priests in the city of Tver, fed up with locals' boozing, drug use and extramarital sex, have taken to circling the city in a bi-plane at an altitude of 660-990' (200-300m) every national Sobriety Day (September 11) to sprinkle holy water over the residents. [If they are still doing it after 13 years we would guess it does not work... -Ed] ● American amateur runner Sheila Pereira, 42, signed up to compete in the Worcester City Half Marathon, assuming it was in her hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. It was not. It was in Worcester, England, 3,200 miles (5150km) away on the other side of the Atlantic. Still wanting to run Pereira completed a 13.1 mile (21.08km) course around her town on her own, on the same day, with tracking app data as evidence and was praised by the Engish event organisers who sent her a race finisher's pack including a T-shirt and participation medal. Steve Cram, whose company organised the British run, has invited her to the UK for a future race. ● When Connor Spear, 19, from Plymouth, went to the Tokyo World dance festival in Bristol he was unable to find a parking space in the official car park, so parked his car in a residential road before taking a 10-minute taxi ride to the event, but had forgotten where he left it by the time the festival ended. Two days' driving around Bristol with his mother proved fruitless so he posted a reward offer online for anyone who could help locate the vehicle. A week after the festival ended he got a phone call from a man who said he had cycled past the car every day for a week.
- CRIME! If you have an email address you have almost certainly received a 419 scam email at some point. Someone claiming to need to get a large quantity of money out of a country but needing your help and offering a cut [The '419' name is from the penal code in Nigeria, where many such scams originated]. Ross Walsh, a 22-year-old DJ from Limerick, Ireland, received one from a "Solomon Gundi", offering to set up a business with him for a mere £1,000 ($1222) investment and a promise to then transfer £50,000 ($61,083). Knowing it was a scam Walsh played along, but when "Gundi" complained that the £1,000 had not been transferred, he told the scammer that his bank was worried it might be a scam and would need a small amount of money - £25 ($30.50) - paid into his account to "unfreeze the assets", adding that in future they should communicate in code so as not to alert the bank to their 'deal'. "Gundi" sent the money, which Walsh donated to the Irish Cancer Society - and cut off all communication with "Gundi". ● Billy Bob Hall, 59, of Weatherford, Texas, thought he was the subject of a parole violation, and rightly thought that just going on the run was not a good idea, so he drank seven bottles of Budweiser beer and walked to the Parker County jail to turn himself in. The duty officer checked their records for outstanding arrest warrants but could not find one for Hall. Unfortunately for the paragon of civic virtue he was then arrested for "public intoxication" as the officer considered him "intoxicated to the degree that he posed a danger to himself and to others", so he ended up in the jail anyway. ● Kristine Barnett, 45, and her ex-husband Michael Bennett have been charged with neglect after abandoning 2010-adopted Ukranian-born child Natalie Grace in their Lafayette, Indiana, apartment when they emigrated to Canada in 2013. Barnett's defence is that Natalie, 3'- (91cm)-tall and who had difficulty walking, was not a 9-year-old child but a 22-year-old with dwarfism who had hidden knives in a couch, smeared blood on mirrors and tried to kill the family. Barnett produced a letter from a doctor confirming that Natalie was an adult, although the letter's authenticity was unproven. Barnett's story strongly resembles the plot of the 2009 horror film The Orphan.
- UPDATES: A team of Canadian scientists have suggested that the mysterious illness that affected dozens of staff at the American and Cuban embassies in Havana, Cuba, in 2016 was probably caused not by an unknown sonic weapon but by insecticides deployed to combat mosquitos carrying the the Zika virus. ● The seemingly random dimming of star KIC 8462852, commonly known as Tabby's Star, which prompted speculation that it might be surrounded by an alien megastructure, possibly a partially-built 'Dyson sphere', or by a cloud of comets has now been suggested to be caused by the breaking up of an orphaned exomoon, torn from its planet by the star's gravity.
IN BRIEF: Lost 'continent' found submerged in Mediterranean. ● Banksy painting Devolved Parliament, depicting the UK House of Commons full of chimpanzees, auctions for almost £9.9m ($12.1m) ● Boy who swore at pop group Five Star on children's TV live phone in in 1980s apologises - or does he? Questions raised over identity of man claiming to have been caller. ● New British research ship almost called Boaty McBoatface after public poll officially named the RRS Sir David Attenborough in ceremony at Camell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead [An autonomous submarine carried aboard *is* called Boaty McBoatface]. ● German research ship Polarstern sets off on mission to be locked in arctic sea ice for a year. ● Astronomers identify 20 more Saturnian moons, bringing planet's tally to 82, passing Jupiter's 79 known moons. ● Belong Gaming Arena in Bristol installs emergency buttons for hardcore gamers to summon a burrito from nearby restaurant. ● Good Morning Britain illustrate interview with singer Bonnie Tyler by showing a number of photos of her at the height of her career including one of... someone else who looked (very) vaguely like her. ● Before playing Princess Margaret on The Crown actress Helena Bonham-Carter consulted a medium to 'speak to' the dead princess - was told to be sure to get the smoking right... ● Wally Conron, breeder of the first labradoodle (labrador-poodle cross) describes it as his "life's regret" after copycat cross-breeds have left many dogs with health issues. ● Northern California power company cutting electricity to ~800,000 homes for several days to prevent forest fires from downed cables. ● Bury St Edmunds Cricket Club scorer donates £30,000 ($36,650) windfall to club for purpose-built scorers' hut to replace currently-used shed. ● Typing on a touchscreen phone now averaging 38 words per minute (wpm), nearing standard keyboard average of 52wpm. ● Truro, Cornwall, roundabout decorated with family of four giant wooden hedgehogs named best in Britain by Roundabout Appreciation Society. ● Trans-continental US United Airlines flight diverted in mid-air after passenger gets stuck in toilet. ● University of Lincoln installs vending machine that delivers story paragraphs or poems. ● On the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11 baby Christina Brown was born in Germantown, Tennessee at 9:11, weighing 9lb 11oz. ● World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, hit by complaints of poor attendence, heat; women's marathon started at midnight to avoid daytime temperatures but 28 of 68 competitors still withdrew because of high temperature/humidity. ● Former World Champion snooker player Neil Robertson had to forfeit title after satnav sent him to the wrong Barnsley for tournament.
2019 Ig Nobel Awards, for published scientific research that makes people laugh and then think:
- MEDICINE PRIZE: Silvano Gallus, for collecting evidence that pizza made and eaten in Italy might protect against illness and death.
- MEDICAL EDUCATION PRIZE: Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon, for using clicker-training, usually used to train animals, to train orthopedic surgeons.
- ANATOMY PRIZE: Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa, for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in both naked and clothed postmen in France.
- CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shigeru Watanabe, Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano and Seiji Igarashi, for estimating the total saliva volume produced per day by an average five-year-old child.
- ENGINEERING PRIZE: Iman Farahbakhsh, for inventing a nappy-changing machine for use on human babies.
- ECONOMICS PRIZE: Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss and Andrea Voss, for testing which country's paper money is best-suited for transmitting dangeous bacteria.
- PEACE PRIZE: Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan and Gil Yosipovitch, for attempting to measure the pleasurability of scratching an itch.
- PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Fritz Strack, for discovering that holding a pen in your mouth makes you smile, which makes you happier — and for then discovering that it does not.
- PHYSICS PRIZE: Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver and David Hu, for studying how, and why, wombats produce cube-shaped faeces.
Proving that even a 16-year-old can pwn* Trump on Tritter, after he tried to troll climate change activist Greta Thunberg by retweeting WIRED's quotation from her speech to the UN "People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth," with the comment "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!", Thunberg changed her Twitter profile to read "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future." ● After Trump tweets that "Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race [election] to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren" Clinton responds "Don't tempt me. Do your job" before telling PBS TV interviewer Judy Woodruff that it is "truly remarkable how obsessed he remains with me [..] I mean, obviously I can beat him again" [she won the popular vote in 2016]. ● Extremist anti-Muslim group ACT for America announce their annual gala, to be held at - where else? - Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort; until story breaks and Mar-a-Lago seemingly cancel booking. ● Remember Trump's "Bigger than Watergate" claims over Hillary Clinton's private email server? Details of his conversations with several world leaders including Ukraine's and Turkey's, most notably to try to get them to investigate his 2020 opponents [more below], were kept on a separate server unconnected to the official White House system, and numerous high-level staffers discussed official policy over WhatsApp, an encrypted phone app, so there was no official record of their conversations. ● Even right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson, who once described Trump as "God's man for the job" is warning that Trump is "in danger of losing the mandate of heaven". ● 2016 pro-Trump Facebook pages that had a bigger reach than The Washington Post and The New York Times combined were seemingly run by three people in Ukraine who did not speak English and included an elderly woman and a 13-year-old girl... or more likely by Russia's Internet Research Agency propaganda organisation. ● Don Jr tweets that "All I want for Christmas is for Hillary to run again", gets responses including "All I want for Christmas is for your dad to stop caging children and stop extorting foreign governments" and "All Americans want for Christmas is dear old dad gone and you in jail". ● Trump tries to label Nancy Pelosi with nickname "Nervous Nancy", backfires spectacularly as people call him the "Nervous Nancy". ● US District Court Judge Victor Marrero throws out Trump's attempt to block Manhattan District Attorney's office from acquiring his tax returns and other financial documents as demanding "absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind" for himself and anyone who may have collaborated with him in his dealings was an "overreach of executive power" that found "no support in the Constitution's text or history" or in case law.
[*'pwn', pronounced 'own', a term from online gaming where someone utterly thrashes an opponent]
Trump tweets [about the impeachment inquiry] "the greatest scam in the history of American politics", Chelsea Clinton responds with "Yes, you are." ● CNN refuses to air two Trump campaign ads attacking Joe Biden because they contained "demonstrably false" assertions and "statements of fact that are not true." ● MSNBC cuts into Trump press conference to fact check his statements as being untrue. ● Trump threatens civil war if he is removed from office and calls impeachment inquiry a coup attempt in rambling press conference with embarrassed Finnish president who looked like he really did not want to be there. ● Trump facing three whistleblowers over Ukraine conversation - two anonymous White House staffers and, er, himself, after he admitted wanting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, and adding that China should too; Hillary Clinton reminds him that "Impeachable offences committed on national television still count." ● Questions raised over whether Trump is trying to throw VP Mike Pence under a bus over impeachment, because if both he and Pence are removed the Speaker of the House would become President, and he hopes Reublican senators will not vote to impeach if it results in President Pelosi [But, really, isn't that just too clever for a schmuck like Trump? -Ed]. ● Trump trying to deflect reports of impeachment inquiry by still blaming Hillary Clinton [see above] and claiming that Obama tried to get foreign governments to investigate him [He did not]. ● Trump tweet from 2014 resurfaces to much enjoyment on Twitter: "Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?"
Planned route for Trump's vanity border wall threatens 22 archaeological sites as well as land that contains "an abundance of natural and cultural resources unique to the Sonoran Desert" in Arizona, according to National Park Service report. ● Trump reportedly discussed strengthening the Mexico border with a moat containing alligators or snakes; a 2,000 mile- (3,145km)-long moat would need one heck of a water supply to keep it filled, alligators do not attack people to order and the only venomous snakes in the American Southwest are not aquatic. Trump also discussed shooting illegal immigrants in the legs. ● There are lots of languages spoken by people who want to immigrate to the US, and lots of people in America who can translate them to English. How do the US Citizenship and Immigration Services vet potential immigrants' social media posts written in non-English languages? Do they hire translators, skilled in the dialects, slang and nuances of the languages? Do they heck. They copy and paste the text into Google Translate or Bing. Under any other president this would be viewed as dereliction of duty; sadly, under Trump, it is totally unsurprising.
After it was pointed out that Trump's withdrawing of US troops from northern Syria would clear the way for Turkey to wipe out Kurdish US allies in the fight against ISIL (as has begun, including hitting civilians and a prison holding captured ISIL fighters), he then went into full god mode claiming that "if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)". Leaving aside the blatant narcissism and inaccuracy of his "great and unmatched wisdom", the only country whose economy he has harmed is America's, and he would not harm Turkey's because he gets millions of dollars a year from Trump Towers hotel in Instanbul; indeed Ivanka Trump tweeted praising Turkishpresidentdespot (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after he attended its opening seven years ago...
Chef Carl Ruiz (Food Network, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, La Cubana restaurant, 44), actor Robert Garrison (The Karate Kid, Iron Eagle, Columbo 59), music producer Bob Esty (Casablanca Records, Cher, Donna Summer, Barbra Streisand, 72), Soprano Jessye Norman (Tannhäuser, Les Troyens, Carmen, 74), newsreader Peter Sissons (BBC, ITN, Channel 4, 77), lyricist Robert Hunter (The Grateful Dead, 78), drummer Ginger Baker (Cream, Blind Faith, The Graham Bond Organisation, 80), actor Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses, Diamonds Are Forever, Jackie Brown, 80), actress Diahann Carroll (Dynasty, Claudine, first black Best Actress Tony Award winner, 84), comedian Rip Taylor (The Ed Sullivan Show, The $1.98 Beauty Show, Amazon Women on the Moon, 84), politician Jacques Chirac (Prime Minister of France 1986-1988, President of France 1995-2007, 86), actress Anna Quayle (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Grange Hill, A Hard Day's Night, 86), tortoise Alagba (believed to have been the oldest in Africa, claimed to have been 344).
^ DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!
Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:13, 37, 38, 41, 42, 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 had come home after a spell in hospital with strict instructions that she was to walk slowly and not rush, especially when going up or coming down the stairs. One morning her parents were in the kitchen starting breakfast while Little Jennifer was still upstairs getting dressed. Suddenly there was a loud *thump* from the hall and they raced out to find Little Jennifer standing at the bottom of the stairs. "Oh, Little Jennifer," her mother said, "you know you're supposed to take each step down the stairs slowly, not race."
Little Jennifer smiled, as only she could. "I didn't race down the stairs, Mummy. I slid down the bannister!"
^ ...end of line