^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 16th October		-		The coronation of Jadwiga as King of Poland, despite her being a woman, 1384. English noblewoman Anne of Gloucester died, 1438. Lexicographer Noah Webster born, 1758. The 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis began, 1962. Actress and filmmaker Kellie Martin born, 1975. Comedian Sean Hughes died, 2017. World Anaesthesia Day. World Food Day.
Saturday 17th October		-		A tornado, estimated to have been of T8/F4 strength, struck central London, 1091. Poet Jupiter Hammon born, 1711. The London Beer Flood killed eight people, 1814. Canadian war heroine Laura Secord died, 1868. Actress Rita Hayworth born, 1918. Artist Frank Dicksee died, 1928. International Day for the Abolition of Poverty.
Sunday 18th October		-		Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria observed an eclipse of the Sun, 320. Margaret Tudor, queen of King James IV of Scotland, died, 1541. Renaissance poet Lady Mary Wroth born, 1587. Herman Melville's Moby Dick was first published, as The Whale, 1851. Engineer and businessman Thomas Edison died, 1931. Composer Howard Shore born, 1946.
Monday 19th October		-		The Universität Heidelberg, Germany's oldest university, held its first lecture, 1386. Satirist Jonathan Swift died, 1745. Poet and critic Leigh Hunt born, 1784. Napoleon's forces began retreating from Moscow, ending the French invasion of Russia, 1812. Journalist and author Deborah Blum born, 1954. Actress Phyllis Kirk died, 2006.
Tuesday 20th October		-		Physician and scholar Thomas Linacre died, 1524. Physicist, mathematician and architect Sir Christopher Wren born, 1632. The Royal Navy captured pirate Calico Jack in the Caribbean, 1720. The Governor of Kenya declared a state of emergency in the face of the Mau Mau Uprising, 1952. Lawyer, politician and 2020 Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris born, 1964. Aviator Sheila Scott died, 1988. World Osteoporosis Day. World Statistics Day.
Wednesday 21st October		-		Artist Giovanni Paoli Panini died, 1765. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge born, 1772. A British fleet under Lord Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. Anti-apartheid activist Albertina Sisulu born, 1918. Actress Dorothy Hale died, 1938. The metre was formally defined as the distance light travels across a vaccuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second, 1983.
Thursday 22nd October		-		The Japanese capital was relocated to Heian-kyō (modern-day Kyoto), 794. Astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil died, 1792. Composer Franz Liszt born, 1811. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, was designated as the world's prime meridian, 1884. Screenwriter and director Jennifer Lee born, 1971. Dancer and musician Gabrielle Roth died, 2012. Fechner Day. International Stammering Awareness Day.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Leigh Hunt:

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films released in the same year. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
• Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
• Left early. Please come with the money... or, you keep the car. All my love, Tommy.
• I don't deserve to have this autographed picture of Sean Connery!
• Put that thing all away on the fire! We don't want it getting up again!

Last issue's quotations were from films directed by David O. Russell:

• When you are offered a favor or money, take the favor, not the money. Jesus said that, didn't he?
      -- American Hustle [2013]
• I'm in my tree talking to the Dixie Chicks and they're making me feel better.
      -- I ♥ Huckabees [2004]
• Mom, can we stop at the library? I want to read Nikki's entire high school syllabus.
      -- Silver Linings Playbook [2012]
• We'll I'm gonna be wearing some fashionable Kevlar.
      -- Three Kings [1999]
• We're not talking about his trainer, sweetheart! We're talking about his manager. That's me!
      -- The Fighter [2010]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A team from the OCEARCH NGO tagging and sampling great white sharks off Nova Scotia caught a 3,541lb (1,606kg) 17'2"- (5.23m)-long female great white they estimated as being 50 years old. They named the shark Nukumi, after a wise old grandmother in the folklore of the local Mi'kmaq people. Nukumi, the largest great white the team have found so far, was held on a semi-submersible platform attached to the side of OCEARCH's research boat while she was examined and tagged, then released. ● Seaside drone operators beware - a drone being used to survey the roof at Stranraer Academy in southwest Scotland for damage was downed by an angry seagull in July. The 13lb (6kg) drone crashed onto the very roof it was surveying causing considerable damage. ● A duck who lost a leg in a fishing line accident has been given a custom-made wheelchair to help him get around at the Manor Farm Charitable Trust sanctuary for disabled animals. At the moment the duck, named Stumble, has to be pushed around but Trust founder Di Staney hopes that he will one day be able to use it by himself. ● Keepers at Chester Zoo were stunned when Bornean orangutan Leia gave birth in June, especially as all pregnancy tests on her had come back negative.


• An internet-linked male chastity device sex toy has been found to have a security flaw that could enable someone to remotely lock all the devices in use at the same time, leaving wearers having to cut themselves free with bolt cutters or a grinder. The Cellmate Chastity Cage sheath sells for £145 ($190) and is controlled via Bluetooth by a mobile phone app, which for some reason sends commands to a remote server; it is this link that was found to be open to hacking, not only locking all the devices worldwide but revealing their locations.


• A theme park on Awaji Island off the Japanese city of Kobe has unveiled a "life-size" statue of Gojira, or Godzilla, the radioactive dinosaur of many Japanese and some American horror/sci-fi films. In the original films Godzilla was 164' (50m) tall, growing to 394' (120m) in its latest American outing. The theme park statue is a more compact 75' (23m) and visitors can ride a zip-wire into its mouth. We presume it will not be spewing its signature atomic breath.


• A man has been charged with drugs offences after a number of plastic-wrapped bin bags strapped to the roof of a horsebox he was driving became detached and blew onto the M1 near Belfast early on Saturday morning. The bags contained cannabis worth £1m ($1.3m). Police have appealed for witnesses.


• Veteran fundraiser Lloyd Scott, 58, completed his Three Peaks challenge this week, having walked up the highest peaks in England, Scotland and Wales while wearing his signature 130lb (59kg) lead-booted diving suit. He has previously completed the London Marathon both in the suit and dressed in 100lb (45kg) of armour as St George, pulling a 200lb (90kg) dragon - taking days to finish - as well as a marathon on Mount Everest and underwater, and ridden a penny farthing across Australia. The Three Peaks challenge, which ended with a walk up Snowdonia after conquering both Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis, is expected to be Scott's last 'big' fundraising event.


• Loyola University graduate Brianna Hill knew that she would be pregnant when she sat her final bar exam to become a lawyer. The exam was scheduled for July, but the pandemic meant that it was put back to October, when she was even more pregnant. She was sitting the exam online at home, with technology to monitor people sitting the exam to ensure that there was no cheating. A "very pregnant" Hill sat down to start the first part of the exam only to go into labour within minutes. She kept going until a scheduled break, where she "cleaned myself up, called my husband and the test kept going," she later told reporters, completing the exam before going to West Suburban Hospital in Oakpark, Illinois, to give birth to her son. The next day she woke up in the hospital to find staff had set up a special room for her to take the final part of the test undisturbed, using breaks to breastfeed her son. She will get the results of the exam in December.


• An almost-complete 67m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex dubbed 'Stan', from which many of the casts of T. rex skeletons on display worldwide were taken, was auctioned in New York last week, selling to a private, anonymous, bidder for $31.8m (£24.6m), smashing the previous record for a T. rex, the $8.4m (£6.45m) paid for 'Sue' in 1997. Paleontologists have expressed concern that research access to Stan might be closed off; Sue is on display in the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago.


• A Canadian woman identified only as 'Nicole' has mailed two mosaic tiles, part of an amphora and a section of ceramic back to Pompeii fifteen years after she stole them while on holiday there in her early 20s. Along with the fragments was a confession that she had wanted to have a piece of history "that nobody could have" but the relics had brought her so much bad luck in the intervening years including two diagnoses of breast cancer leading to a double mastectomy and financial problems that she had concluded that they must have been cursed by "so much negative energy" linked to the land; Pompeii was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79CE, not to be rediscovered for 1500 years. So many stolen relics have been returned in recent years with suggestions of there being a curse on them that authorities in Pompeii have opened a special museum to display them.


• Last month farmer Kirk Mathes was away from home when he got a phone call that a locked safe had been dumped in one of his fields near Barre in New York State. When he returned home he found that the old, rust-covered safe, which he estimated at weighing 500-600lb (227-272kg) and must have been moved there with heavy machinery, had a note attached to the door reading "If you can open it, you can keep what is inside." Before police removed them, people had tried to open it with sledgehammers, knocking the dial and handle off and damaging, but not removing, the hinges. Mathes decided to move the safe to a more secure location and keep it locked because "My personal feeling is, leave it as a mystery. If you open it, the show is over. In these times, with the virus and the politics, it might get people a chance to set their problems or troubles aside and have a lot of fun talking about it."


• Facebook infamously uses algorithms a lot, including for vetting ads. Canadian seed and garden supply company The Seed Company by EW Gaze, of St John's, Newfoundland, recently found one of their ads rejected by Facebook's algorithm for being "overtly sexual" despite being a picture of a wicker basket full of Walla Walla onions with some sliced onion beside it. Manager Jackson McLean realised that there must be "something about the round shapes" of the onions that triggered the algorithm into thinking it was female nudity, so he posted the picture, along with the rejection notice, to the company's Facebook feed, prompting amused customers to post their own pictures of suggestive vegetables. He also appealed the ban and Facebook apologised, with Meg Sinclair, head of communications for Facebook Canada saying "We use automated technology to keep nudity off our apps, but sometimes it doesn't know a Walla Walla onion from a, well, you know." The ad was reinstated and, thanks to their newfound reputation, the business sold more Walla Walla onions in three days than it had in the previous five years. McLean told reporters that they were also now listed as "sexy onions" on the company's website.

IN BRIEF: The city council of Danbury, Connecticut, has voted 18-1 to name a new sewage treatment plant the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant after the TV host was rude about their town on-air in August. ● A copy of Geoffrey Faber's poetry anthology The Buried Stream has been returned in near-mint condition to Middlesborough Central Library 57 years after it was taken out; the by-now £500 ($651) fine was waived, as all fines have been during the pandemic. ● The Archbishop of New Orleans has ordered that a church altar be burned after a pastor filmed himself having a threesome on it. ● Two former Oklahoma County Jail guards and their supervisor have been charged with cruelty for playing the "Baby Shark" song at loud volume and on a loop to inmates. ● A first edition copy of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, found on a bookshelf during a lockdown clear out of a South Wales house, has been auctioned for £22,000 ($28,642). ● September was the warmest month on record globally, according to the EU's Copernicus weather observation programme. ● The creators of the War Horse stage play horse puppet are walking a giant puppet of a young girl the 5,000 miles (8,000km) from Syria to England to "rewrite the narrative about refugees."

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: Election officials in Sacramento, California, have issued a request to voters not to disinfect their mail-in ballot forms after at least 100 were received damaged by alcohol spray or disinfectant, and at least one appeared to have been microwaved; the ballots were processed and sent out by machines weeks ago so are safe. They are working to issue new ballot forms to anyone whose paper was obviously damaged in attempts to disinfect them and has thus been rejected. ● The Dukling, Hong Kong's last-remaining authentic junk is facing an uncertain future because of the drastic fall in the number of tourists to the city, many of whom take sightseeing tours aboard it. ● Four of the Swiss Guards who protect the Vatican have been diagnosed with COVID-19. ● Several doctors and nurses have left America for New Zealand, citing burnout from the US healthcare system, the lack of PPE and the inability of the administration to follow the science in its response to COVID-19; New Zealand, in contrast, based its response on science and has not had a positive diagnosis in over a week.

^ TRUMPWATCH

Twitter has flagged another of Trump's tweets for violating its rules against spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The tweet, in which Trump bragged of "a total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday. That means I can't get it (immune) and can't give it." Sharing the tweet other than quote-sharing was blocked. Trump's doctors had performed an Abbott antigen test on him. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not recommend making decisions about discontinuing isolation based on an antigen test; a PCR test, which looks for the presence of genetic material from the virus is preferred. While reinfections are rare at least one case has cropped up in America recently, in a 25-year-old man with no underlying health issues.

Unlike the first presidential debate the vice presidential debate featured a genuine star performance. It was by neither Mike Pence nor Kamala Harris but by a large fly that landed on Pence's head and stayed there for 2 minutes (as many pointed out on Twitter there is a certain type of biological waste matter that flies are attracted to; others wondered if the fly would be tested for COVID). ● After Trump refused to take part in the scheduled debate this week because it was going to be staged virtually and - we presume - he was afraid of being muted both candidates will instead do televised 'town hall' meetings, then, assuming a format can be agreed on, the final debate on October 22^nd. ● After the VP debate Trump posted a graph of incarcerations by race in California in an attempt to claim that as state attorney general Harris was responsible for locking up disproportionately more people of colour. The graph he posted was from 2010. Harris became California's attorney general in 2011...

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal whackolawyer, told a campaign event in Philadelphia that "people don't die of this disease [COVID-19] anymore. Young people don't die at all. Middle aged people die very little. And even elderly people only have one percent chance of dying." On average between 900 and 1,000 Americans of all ages are dying of COVID-19 every day. ● With the White House eschewing even basic safety protocols many news agencies are abandoning the press pool leaving the White House Correspondents' Association "scrambling to find journalists willing to staff the president's events", according to the New York Times' Michael Grynbaum. ● Trump's overt disregard for Dr Antony Fauci, one of America's leading experts on infectious diseases and scientific lead for the White House's response to the pandemic, has been demonstrated publicly many times. Olivia Troye, a former aide to Mike Pence and a former member of the response team, has revealed in a video for Republican Voters Against Trump that both the president and other high-ranking officials tried to sideline Fauci in private meetings as well. ● Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, 78, has admitted that he has avoided going to the White House since August 6^th because of its inept virus safety practices. ● Dr Jonathan Reiner, a medical analyst for CNN, has compared Trump's rallies to forest fires, enabling the virus to spread rapidly - "If you think about unmasked people in mass gatherings, it's like dry brush in a forest fire. [..] The president is making it easier for the virus to spread in [battleground] states." ● Health officials in Minnesota have linked at least 24 cases of COVID-19 to political rallies in September, one to a Biden rally, where COVID safety procedures are common, the rest to Trump's mostly unsafe rallies.

The ongoing analysis of Trump's tax and finance records uncovered by the New York Times has shown that in early 2016, with Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still willing to give his businesses loans turning down further requests because they suspected the money would be routed to his election campaign, and his "self-funded" campaign running out of money as his golf clubs haemorraged funds his campaign received more than $21m (£16.12m) from the Las Vegas hotel he co-owns with casino boss Phil Ruffin. Of course it was not a direct payment. It was channelled as fees to Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing, the payment written off as a business expense by the hotel. Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing had negligible prior income, no employees, no clearly defined business purpose and was until then somewhat dormant. Its president is... dumbest-spawn-of-Donald Eric Trump. Ruffin has donated directly to Trump's campaign as well, and Trump flew to the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow on Ruffin's private jet. So what is Ruffin getting in return? In March a panel of mostly Trump appointees approved the issuing of bonds to finance the building of a high-speed rail link from Southern California to Las Vegas that had been blocked by the Obama administration; Ruffin and other Vegas casino owners wanted the railway.

    The choice of music for Trump rallies continues to amuse. The notoriously LGBTQ+-hostile Trump campaign has been playing the Village People's "YMCA" and at the end of the recent Florida rally - presumably to try to make Trump look physically strong after COVID - their "Macho Man". Both songs are paeans to the post-Stonewall pre-AIDS gay culture in 1970s New York. ● At the rally Trump told his mostly-unmasked (except for those behind him, and so in view of cameras) supporters that Joe Biden is "losing big" in the state. Polls give Biden a slim lead, so is Trump losing bigly big? It would certainly fit with the MSNBC anchor Ari Melber's statement in a recent Really American PAC video that "Donald Trump is often guilty of the very things he accuses others of". ● The local newspaper in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Trump's hometown since he fled New York City, has endorsed Biden.
    After a Trump campaign video used images of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Jackie Robinson to try to paint Trump as a supporter of Black rights (Trump has often shown himself instead to be a racist), Bernice King, MLK's daughter took to Twitter: "I find President Trump's use of my father's image in his political ad beyond insulting and not reflective of #MLK's commitment to creating the #BelovedCommunity. My father should not be used in ways strongly misaligned with his vision and values. My father was working for an America with leaders who have answered the call to conscience and compassionate action. He said "We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the pressing urgencies of the great cause of freedom... a time like this demands great leaders."" ● The Trump campaign also released an ad taking a quotation from Anthony Fauci completely out of context to make it look as if Dr Fauci was endorsing Trump's response to the pandemic.
    At the Florida rally Trump kept up the lie he has been repeating ad nauseam for the last four years, telling the crowd that the Mexico border wall was progressing at record speed ("We're up to almost 400 miles in wall") and that Mexico is paying for it. It is nowhere near complete; of 341 miles built under Trump's administration only 36 miles was not replacing old sections and only 9 miles of that was "primary wall". The costs are being met by a mix of congressionally-appropriated money (at least until the Democrats won a majority in Congress at the 2018 midterm elections) and funding that Trump diverted from other projects and the military. ● After returning to the White House from Walter Reed Trump posted a bizarre video trying to appeal to elderly voters. Apart from an - even for him - rambling message the video was seemingly shot on the lawn outside the White House, but was clearly produced using a blue screen, with the image of the building and lawn projected behind him, as was apparent by the looping motion of the trees. ● Also shortly after returning Trump addressed a "peaceful protest" from the White House balcony, in what was in all but his description a rally, and any White House staff assisting him were in violation of the Hatch Act which prohibits federal employees engaging in party political activities on, or using, federal grounds. The Office of Special Counsel has issued numerous warnings to the Trump administration and various employees thereof about Hatch Act violations.
    In 2016 the Investor's Business Daily/TechnoMetrica and University of Southern California Dornslife/Los Angeles Times polls correctly forecast that Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton; both are now predicting a landslide Biden win. ● Even former friend (until he criticised Trump) Piers Morgan, who predicted the 2016 win, is now saying the election will be a disaster for Trump. ● In its 208 years of existence the New England Journal of Medicine has never published an editorial about a presidential election. Until now. In the face of Trump's disastrous approach to the COVID-19 pandemic Dr Eric Rubin, the Journal's Editor-in-Chief wrote "Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs." Every staff editor signed the editorial. Scientific American has also broken with tradition and backed a candidate - Biden.

    Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, interviewed on Fox News, pondered why Pence was still supporting, and running with, Trump: "There's a classic parlor game of trying to find a little bit of daylight between running mates. If people want to play that game, we could look into why an evangelical Christian like Mike Pence wants to be on a ticket with a president caught with a porn star," and a president who runs an immigration policy Pence described in 2015 as being unconstitutional before deciding to stand with Trump and remain silent while Trump announced his executive order banning Muslims from entering the US. ● The Twitterati have taken to replying to Trump's tweets (at least those that Twitter have not limited) with two words, causing "Vote Biden" to trend, even in the UK. ● He might be losing support across America but Trump can rejoice that one influential group has endorsed him this week. Citing his promised removal of American troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban have backed him...

Dumbest-spawn-of-Donald Eric, obviously not content with being exposed as the president of a company that channelled legally-questionable campaign funding to his father in 2016 took time last Sunday to claim that his father had invented a vaccine for COVID-19, telling ABC News "My father literally started day one creating this vaccine. He worked to push this vaccine, and now my father just took it, and you see how well he got over it" before backtracking to claim that he meant "the medicines [corticosteroid dexamethasone, antiviral drug remdesivir and the experimental Regeneron antibody treatment in addition to standard medications] he was taking" in Walter Reed. There is, as yet, no vaccine for COVID-19. ● Eric also tried to tag Joe Biden with "Biden is a coward" on Twitter after Trump refused to take part in the virtual debate suggested by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Biden had agreed to the format. As people pointed out, "Your dad hid in a bunker. Your dad faked bone spurs to avoid Vietnam. Your dad won't release his taxes. Who's the coward?" (@MrsMagooo15) and "Biden has a son who risked his life in service to the United States of America. Donald Trump has a son who ... is you. 'Nuff said" (@Lyricathy).

    It has emerged that Trump planned a stunt for his release from Water Reed that would have involved him shuffling out look frail then straightening up and pulling his shirt open to reveal a Superman shirt underneath... Fortunately it was spiked, but the Twitterati had fun nevertheless, with @KevinPowers pointing out that "Superman stands for everything Donald Trump is not. Superman is also: - An undocumented immigrant - A Journalist.". ● In a rambling, obviously drug-addled [he was still undergoing treatment for COVID-19] phone interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity Trump ranted (between rasping coughing fits) that Hillary Clinton had still not been indicted [because she was cleared of wrongdoing], that Democrats wanted to tear down buildings and put up new ones with "tiny little windows, so you can't see out, they can't see the light" [they do not], that "California is gonna have to ration water [..] because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea [..] because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish, that aren't doing very well without water" [with certain exceptions fish never do well without water], that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had personally executed a newborn baby [he had not], that America under a Biden presidency would be a "9^th world country" [whatever the heck that means] and accused Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer of "complaining" for being the target of a right-wing militia kidnapping and domestic terror plot [foiled by the FBI, who had to keep moving her between locations until they caught the suspects; former FBI Director Andrew McCabe said that "the person most responsible for fomenting this sort of unrest, this sort of division, this sort of violence in this country right now is the president of the United States"] and, while losing his voice due to all the coughing claimed that Joe Biden was "choking like a dog" during the presidential debate... As @TVietor08 put it on Twitter, Trump was "High as a giraffe's ass" and "even Hannity isn't convinced."
    Trying to play to his declining evangelical base Trump has frequently spoken against abortion, wants to give a Supreme Court seat to a judge who might well attempt to overthrow Roe v Wade, and has suspended federal funding for scientific research involving fetal tissue derived from abortions. It is, therefore, ironic that his treatment for COVID-19 included Regeneron's antibody cocktail, which Trump promised to provide free for anyone who needed it. Regeneron's antibodies were developed using 293T, a human cell line originally derived from aborted fetal tissue. Remdesevir, another of the drugs he was given, was tested using the same line. ● An analysis of the timing of Trump's tweets since he became President by researchers at Colombia University suggests that, in addition to being addled from the treatments for COVID-19 and (reportedly) the Adderal amphetamine medication, Trump is getting far from optimal sleep hours for his age.

Attorney John Bash, appointed by Trump flunkyUS Attorney General William Barr to investigate whether officials in Barack Obama's administration improperly sought the identities of Trump campaign officials whose names were redacted in intelligence documents detailing calls with foreign individuals and agencies during the 2016 election campaign - a key point of Trump's campaigning and frequent whining - has quietly closed his investigation after failing to find any substantive wrongdoing and without releasing a report on his findings.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Actress and artist Margaret Nolan (Goldfinger, Carry On Girls, A Hard Day's Night, 76), actress Conchata Ferrell (A Peaceable Kingdom, Two and a Half Men, Edward Scissorhands, 77), musician and artist Jon Gibson (The Philip Glass Ensemble, 80), actor Ronald Forfar (Bread, Tutti Frutti, The New Avengers, 81), US TV host Tom Kennedy (Name That Tune, You Don't Say!, Password Plus, 93), socialite and political salonnière Roberta McCain (mother of the late Senator John McCain, 108).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:

8, 20, 23, 24, 27, 36

[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.

^{^} AND FINALLY...

    For their homework the children had been asked to write a short piece about inventors. "Alright, children," the teacher said the next day, "let's hear about some inventors. Little Simon, why don't you start?"
    Little Simon stood up and read his piece about Thomas Edison and the light bulb. "Very good, Little Simon. Little Mary?"
    Little Mary stood up, and read to the class her assignment, which was about Charles Babbage and the computer. "Well, done, Little Mary," the teacher said. "Now, Little Jennifer, what did you write about inventors?"
    Little Jennifer got up, cleared her throat and smiled as only she could. "Inventors are usually very clever people, but whoever invented homework was stupid."

---

^{^} ...end of line