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Issue #538 - 1st November 2019
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| Contents | — – o o O o o – — |
^ WORD OF THE WEEK
furkal |
Friday 1st November - The earliest-known written reference to Austria (High German: Ostarrîchi) was made in a deed issued by Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, 996. Philosopher Étienne de La Boétie born, 1530. Edward Kelley, self-proclaimed spirit medium and associate of John Dee, died, 1597. John Adams became the first President of the United States to live in the Executive Mansion (now named the White House), 1800. Writer Dale Carnegie died, 1955. Swimmer Sharron Davies born, 1962. World Vegan Day. Saturday 2nd November - The Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War temporarily halted with the Peace of Bicêtre, 1410. King Edward V of England born, 1470. Soprano Jenny Lind died, 1887. The BBC Television Service (now BBC1) was launched, 1936. Singer-songwriter k.d. Lang born, 1961. Jazz clarinettish Acker Bilk died, 2014. International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists (United Nations). Statehood Day in North Dakota and South Dakota. Sunday 3rd November - Poet Lucan born, 39. Florence, Italy, was severely damaged by the flooding of the River Arno, 1333. Mathematician and astronomer Paul Guldin died, 1643. Canada's oldest chartered bank, the Bank of Montreal, opened, 1817. Actress Monica Vitti born, 1931. Physicist, engineer and inventor of the eponymous early electronic musical instrument Léon Theremin died, 1993. Monday 4th November - Sophia of Bavaria, queen of Bohemia, died, 1428. Artist Gerard van Honthorst born, 1592. Mozart's Symphony No. 36 premiered in Linz, 1783. Composer Felix Mendelssohn died, 1847. Actress Loretta Swit born, 1937. Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, 2008. Tuesday 5th November - Soldier John Fastolf died, 1459. Guy Fawkes was arrested while guarding explosives in an undercroft of Parliament, 1605. Mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel born, 1688. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony broke the law by voting, 1872. Singer-songwriter Art Garfunkel born, 1941. Novelist John Fowles died, 2005. Guy Fawkes Night in the UK and other countries. Wednesday 6th November - Roman empress Agrippina the Younger born, 15 [or 16]. Conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked and became the first known European to set foot in what is now Texas, 1528. Businessman Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford, born, 1893. Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died, 1893. Mohandas Gandhi was arrested while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa, 1913. Steeplejack and engineer Fred Dibnah died, 2004. Thursday 7th November - Korean monarch Uijong of Goryeo died, 1173. The London Gazette, claimedly the oldest still-produced English-language journal, was first published, 1665. Antiquarian William Stukeley born, 1687. The first Melbourne Cup horse race was run in Melbourne, Australia, 1861. Singer-songwriter Lorde born, 1996. Boxer Joe Frazier died, 2011.
This week, Terry Pratchett, from Guards! Guards!:Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
A selection of quotations from films with a common director. Answers next issue or from the regular address.Last issue's quotations were from films directed by John Carpenter:
- - It's not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?
- Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough.- Maybe one of us ought to try to row. Where to? What for?
- - On Mondays and Wednesdays I work for the Travelers' Aid at the airport.
- Helping travelers?
- No, misdirecting them.- Every man's ready to get married when the right girl comes along.
- Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it. Nobody except us.
- I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.
-- They Live [1988]- Something that one lives with like an albatross round the neck. No, more like a millstone. A plumbing stone, by God! Damn them all!
-- The Fog [1980]- Whoa, whoa. You better watch what you say about my car. She's real sensitive.
-- Christine [1983]- - There was an accident. About an hour ago, a small jet went down inside New York City. The President was on board.
- The president of what?
-- Escape From New York [1981]- Well, kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition.
-- Halloween [1978]
Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- Dorset County Council has been slammed for putting in place a diversion while a 65' (19.8m) section of the A352 in Godmanstone was closed for five days to repair a sewer. The problem was not that there was a diversion, it was that the diversion was a 41-mile (105km) route that took an hour to travel, to bypass a route that normally took seconds. The council defended the route saying it needed to be suitable for all the types of traffic normally using the A352, and acknowledged that local drivers will most likely just take smaller side roads.
- Police in Nebraska are looking for a man who tried to open a bank account with a fake $1m (£776,640) note. The man walked into a branch of Pinnacle Bank on Monday and, when staff told him the note was a fake, repeatedly insisted that it was genuine, before giving up and leaving, taking it with him. Police are more concerned for his welfare than any criminality as he might have been the victim of a con, and are studying CCTV footage to try to identify him. There has never been a $1m note in US public circulation.
- Thames Water has removed a 40-tonne fatberg from a sewer in south London. The mass of congealed fat, grease, oil, wet wipes, nappies and, er, other things was blocking up to 80% of the sewer and was broken up with high-pressure hoses but much of it had to be removed by hand. The fatberg is not the largest Thames Water has had to deal with - it cleared a 130-tonne fatberg from a Whitechapel sewer in 2017, but both pale in comparison to the UK record 400-tonne fatberg discovered in a sewer under Liverpool earlier this year.
- Students at New Vista Middle School in Lancaster, California, have ID badges which list a number of support organisations' phone numbers on the back. Unfortunately for the school a number of pupils have discovered that the number given for a suicide prevention hotline was actually a phone sex line after one girl called it "for kicks" and her mother posted about the error on Facebook. The mistake was caused by two digits being swapped and the school hastily took all the badges back earlier this week and are due to issue corrected ones shortly.
- Hordes of insensitive tourists gathered at Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, in central Australia last Friday to climb it one last time before it was officially closed off to climbers on Saturday. Uluru is sacred to the indigenous Anangu people, who have spent years asking people not to climb it. The closure is not solely out of respect for their beliefs; at 1,142' (384m) high Uluru is notoriously dangerous with strong winds, high temperatures and just a metal chain to hold on to as people walked up and down it. After the last tourist came back down the chain was removed.
- Museums are not just records of the past; for many visitors they can bring back memories of childhood. When Zoë Andrews and her sister visited the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) recently they discovered a very personal memory. Zoë was browsing through the second-hand books in the museum library's shop and discovered a Ladybird Children's Classic edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Opening it she saw a coded message on the front page. It was her sister's name, in a code they had devised when children in the early 1990s. The MERL had acquired the book from a charity shop. MERL director Kate Arnold-Forster told reporters "One of the most unexpected yet fascinating aspects of libraries is discovering books that bear traces of their readers' lives, moving us to speculate about how they were read and enjoyed. That it's The Secret Garden - a novel that has survived generations and provided a magical escape for so many readers - makes this story all the more wonderful."
- An auctioneer visiting the Compiègne home of an elderly French woman last month noticed an old painting hanging above a hot plate in her kitchen and advised her to get it valued by experts. It turned out to be a long-lost painting by Italian artist Cenni di Pepo, known as Cimabue (c1240-1302), titled Christ Mocked. It was auctioned last weekend with an estimated price of up to €6m (£5m; $6.65m); it sold to an anonymous French buyer for €24m (£20m; $26.6m).
- Hunter Thomas Alexander, 66, shot a buck near Yellville in the Ozark Mountains north of Little Rock, Arkansas, last week and approached it to make sure that it was dead, at which point it attacked him. Alexander died later in hospital with multiple puncture wounds to his body.
- Russian scientists who tried tracking migrating eagles with solar-powered GPS units and SMS messaging devices have been left with headaches and a massive phone bill. The small devices, fitted to the birds' backs, track their location using GPS and, provided a mobile phone signal is detected, send an SMS text message back to the research team. Typically the cost is equivalent to 3-23c (2-18p) per message, with four message per bird per day, but one Steppe Eagle flew outside the range of mobile signals for much of the year before reappearing in Iran, from where text messages are twenty-five times more expensive. Three other eagles flew into Iraq and Pakistan at similar expense to the project which has had to appeal for additional funding to meet the cost, although the eagle in Iran has since moved on to Saudi Arabia, where SMS charges are lower.
- Last week Liverpool Football Club beat Belgian team Genk 4-1 in the Champions League, and many supporters made the trip to Belgium to watch them. Two, identifed only as Londoner Rob and Leicester resident Lee, spent £200 ($258) each on train and match tickets but were surprised at the lack of other Liverpool fans, until they were having dinner an hour before the kick-off and said to a waiter "We are playing you guys tonight" only to be told "No you're not." They had mistakenly gone to Ghent, 93 miles (150km) away, and it was too late to go to the right city. They took the mistake with good humour though; "We watched it in an Irish bar with a bunch of lovely people and really enjoyed watching it on the TV," Rob said. Local team KAA Gent [sic] have invited them to be VIP guests at a January match - against Genk.
IN BRIEF: A thousand needleworkers volunteer to complete giant quilting project of deceased Chicago woman. ● California wildfires' smoke visible from the International Space Station. ● Mysterious substance photographed by China's Yutu-2 moon rover most likely glass caused by asteroid impact. ● First global atlas of earthworm population compiled. ● Gamer irate at Bethesda for introducing optional subscription for Fallout 76 called Fallout 1st registers domain name (Bethesda forgot...) to mock them. ● Stained, cigarette-burned cardigan worn by Kurt Cobain for 1993 MTV "Unplugged" show auctions for $334,000 (£260,000). ● Origin of all modern humans traced to area south of the Zambezi River in Botswana, once the site of huge lake. ● Quadruple rainbow photographed in Orkney. ● Leicester City equal 24-year-old Premier League record for biggest victory with 9-0 defeat of Southampton. ● Paramedics attending car crash at first thought driver was drenched in blood; she had been to a Halloween event in costume and it was make-up. ● Traffic backed-up for two miles (3.2km) on M8 in Glasgow while police tried to remove swan. ● Ozone hole over Antarctica at smallest-known size due to warmer stratospheric temperatures, still expected to return to 1980 level by 2070. ● Newly-discovered beetle species named Nelloptodes gretae after Greta Thunberg because of its pigtail-like antennae.
After a group of Republican congressman led by Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) illegally stormed the impeachment inquiry hearings - held behind closed doors so witnesses cannot collaborate, rules set by Republicans investigating Bill Clinton - the Twitter tag #MattGaetzIsATool went viral. Some of the group also broke the law by taking their phones in with them. ● Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduces resolution condemning inquiry for secrecy, being launched without an open vote and failing to give Trump right to defend himself; slammed by legal experts as having "absolutely no substance [..] historically, legally or morally." ● Democrats file resolution in Congress to formalise inquiry and set up open hearings.
Trump's long-awaited (by him, at least) border wall is looking even more unlikely to happen as private landowners are fighting eminent domain and purchase attempts, leaving the US government with just 16% of the land needed having been acquired so far. ● Trump tells audience in Pittsburgh that he's building a wall "in Colorado" - 370 miles north of the Mexico border, but it does border New Mexico - which is a US state, prompting numerous Twitter memes wondering, among other things, if New Mexico was going to pay for it...
Trump declares "a great outcome" in Syria as more US troops are deployed to guard... oil fields, because he wants US oil companies to take them over, something that experts warn would be tantamount to war crimes. In North-west Syria a year-long operation to locate and kill IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was successful "largely in spite of Mr Trump's actions [in withdrawing US troops from the area]" according to Pentagon officials, not least because it involved considerable cooperation from Kurdish fighters in locating him and, apparently, stealing his underwear so his body could be DNA-tested to confirm its identity. ● Mystery remains over Trump's announcement of al-Baghdadi's death. The attack was carried out at 3:30pm US time, when Trump's location was recorded as being on a golf course, a picture of himself, Pence, military and intelligence leaders seated around a situation desk covered in laptops and cables (no situation desk would be so covered in cabling according to a former member of George Bush's White House Communications team) was released, but metadata showed it had been taken at 5:05pm, and at 9:23pm Trump tweeted that "Something very big has just happened" (best Twitter response: "I hope you did a courtesy flush"). ● Trump also claimed al-Baghdadi's death was "the biggest there is", more significant than Osama bin Laden's - bin Laden masterminded the death of over 3,000 Americans, the ongoing poor health of many more, and destroyed a major area of arguably America's greatest city, but of course, was killed under Obama's presidency... ● Trump thanked Russia before notifying Congress of al-Baghdadi's death, Russia responded by saying it did not help the United States and doubted his death. Almost every aspect of Trump's description of al-Baghdadi's death was made up. ● Trump tweeted "declassified picture" [Fair enough; if the dog's name was revealed the unit and handler could be traced] of Special Forces' Belgian malinous dog involved in operation prompting Twitterati to post their own "declassified pictures" of their dogs. ● Trump claimed, without any evidence or corroboration, that the intended replacement for al-Baghdadi had also since been killed.
Trump declined to throw first pitch of the World Series baseball game on Sunday because "I don't know, they got to dress me up a lot of heavy armour - I'll look too heavy" - despite also having claimed to have been "captain of the [high school] baseball team" and "[I] was supposed to be a professional baseball player" [presumably bone spurs are no impediment to baseball... -Ed] before going into real estate and squandering his father's fortune. Barack Obama, when President, threw out the first pitch in slacks and a fluffy jacket. As it happened, Trump attended the game and both Astros and Nationals fans were united in cheering gymnast Simone Biles, who did throw the first pitch, and in booing Trump - and chanting "Lock him up!" - when he was shown on the giant screen in the stadium. ● The decision to award the Pentagon's "Jedi" $10bn (£7.77bn) cloud computing contract to the less-security-experienced Microsoft rather than Amazon will mire it in legal battles for some time, not least because a speechwriter for General Mattis has revealed that Trump made clear he wanted to "screw" Amazon over it. ● US Air Force cleared of breaking rules over scores of overnight stays at Trump's Scottish resort by, er, Air Force review. ● Poor congressman Devin Nunes (R-Ca), one of Trump's loyalest flunkeys, when he isn't suing Twitter, a journalist and a fictitious cow for being mean to him; Trump tweeted to promote a book about Nunes, spelled his name "Nunez"... needless to say the Twitterati had a field day. ● Far from placing his business and commercial interests in a blind trust as he should have done when he came to office, instead handing them over to his children while he remains the prime beneficiary, analysis of Trump's numerous conflicts of interest by a Washington ethics TV show has revealed that he has actively promoted his businesses, on average, one every 4.66 days. ● At Halloween event Trump meets child dressed as a minion [It's about time the minions met him; they work for "the most evil" criminals, after all -Ed], but instead of putting chocolate bar in their bucket, he put it on their costumed head. As did Melania. The bars slid off and were snatched by another child. ● Trump tweets advice to Apple boss Tim Cook suggesting return to home button on the iPhone as "Far better than the Swipe!", Twitter users wonder if he was mistakenly holding the TV remote instead, or subtweeting Rudy Giuliani, who apparently keeps his phone in his back pocket as he recently twice 'butt-dialled' a reporter who heard him discussing Ukraine, the Bidens, the Middle East and a need for more money... ● Some Trump-licensed organisations removing his name because it is bad for business.
Courtier Sir Malcolm Rees (Master of the Household of the Prince of Wales [2006-2008], 76), actor John Witherspoon (The Wayan Bros., Vampire in Brooklyn, Barnaby Jones, 77), film producer Robert Evans (Marathon Man, China Town, Paramount Pictures executive, 89), yoga teacher V Nanammal (99).
^ DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!
Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:13, 22, 28, 33, 37, 41[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 came home from school to find her parents watching the television. "Mummy! Daddy! Guess what Miss taught us in school today," Little Jennifer asked.
"Tell us, Little Jennifer," her mother replied, taking a sip of coffee.
"She told us how to make babies!"
Little Jennifer's mother spat out her drink in shock. "I think I'd better phone the school!"
"Hang on a minute," Little Jennifer's father said, "How did she tell you babies are made, Little Jennifer?"
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "She said you take the word 'baby', lose the 'y' and add 'i-e-s'!"
^ ...end of line