^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 6th November		-		Adolphe Sax, designer of the saxophone, born, 1814. Rutgers College defeated the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in the first official intercollegiate American football game, 1869. Tennis player Ana Ivanovic born, 1987. Writer L. Sprague de Camp died, 2000. Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States, 2012. Actor Clive Dunn died, 2012. International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflicts.
Saturday 7th November		-		The Ensisheim meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known impact date, struck the Earth in Alsace, France, 1492. Archaeologist William Stukeley born, 1687. Cartographer and artist Paul Sandby died, 1809. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City opened, 1929. Humanitarian and 39th First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt, died, 1962. Pianist Hélène Grimaud born, 1969.
Sunday 8th November		-		Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I of England, born, 1543. The Bodleian Library in Oxford opened, 1602. Robert Catesby, leader of the Gunpowder Plot, shot dead during a stand-off, 1605. Writer Bram Stoker born, 1847. The UK conducted its first successful hydrogen bomb test over Kirimati in Operation Grapple X, 1957. Philanthropist Rhea Chiles died, 2015. Remembrance Sunday in the UK. World Urbanism Day.
Monday 9th November		-		Poet Jami died, 1492. King George II of the United Kingdom and Ireland born, 1683. William of Orange captured Exeter during the Glorious Revolution, 1688. King Edward VII of the United Kingdom was presented with the Cullinan Diamond, 1907. Actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr born, 1914. Writer Rosemary Timperley died, 1988.
Tuesday 10th November		-		Explorer Richard Chancellor died, 1556. Artist and engraver William Hogarth born, 1697. The French Convention proclaimed a Goddess of Reason, 1793. Fashion designer Lily Pulitzer born, 1931. Windows 1.0 was given its first public presentation, 1983. Actress Diana Coupland died, 2006.
Wednesday 11th November		-		Physician and occultist Paracelsus born, 1493. Tycho Brahe observed the supernova SN 1572, 1572. Highwayman Joseph Blake hanged, 1724. Journalist and civil rights activist Daisy Bates born, 1914. The armistice ending World War I was signed, with combat officially ending at 11:11am, 1918. Voice artist Mary Kay Bergman committed suicide, 1999.
Thursday 12th November		-		Cnut the Great, King of Denmark, England and Norway, died, 1035. Plymouth became the first town incorporated by the English Parliament, 1439. Sculptor Auguste Rodin born, 1833. During World War II the Royal Air Force launched 29 Avro Lancaster bombers on a mission to sink the German battleship Tirpitz off Norway, 1948. Gymnast Nadia Comăneci born, 1961. Mathematician and software engineer Sally Schlaer died, 1998. World Pneumonia Day.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Eleanor Roosevelt:

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.
• What Jefferson was saying was, "Hey! You know, we left this England place 'cause it was bogus; so if we don't get some cool rules ourselves - pronto - we'll just be bogus too!" Get it?
• Hey, Elliot, where's your goblin?
• Stop! I wanna go home, take off this uniform, and leave the show. I'm waiting in this cell because I have to know... have I been guilty all this time?
• This house is clean.

Last issue's spooky quotations were:

• - I have a trick here with two corks and a length of string. Please examine.
  - Jumbo, when will you learn there's only one good trick with a cork and it's taking it out of the bottle!
      -- The Ghosts of Berkeley Square [1947]
• Nobody but a monumental bore would have thought of having a honeymoon in Budleigh Salterton. I was an eager young bride, Charles, I wanted glamour and music and romance. What I got was potted palms, seven hours of every day on a damp golf course and a three piece orchestra playing "Merry England".
      -- Blithe Spirit [1945]
• Listen... you smell something?
      -- Ghostbusters [1984]
• - I don't know you! I don't know Sam, but let me tell you what he did to me. He kept me up all night singing "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am."
  - That's how he got me to go out with him.
      -- Ghost [1990]
• Pessimism is just a higher form of optimism. If you expect nothing from people, then you go through life being pleasantly surprised.
      -- The Innkeepers [2011]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• Scientists in Madagascar have found a Voeltzkow's chameleon, thought to have become extinct more than a century ago. The chameleon, which has a life span of only a few months during the wet season lives in a area that is hard to get to, making the discovery all the more remarkable. ● Also rediscovered, this time in England, was the Great Fox Spider, which had not been seen since the 1990s. The spider, has only been found at three locations in Dorset and Surrey, and several mature males and a female were recently indentified after "many hours of late night searching with a torch over the last two years" on a Ministry of Defense training area in Surrey, according to arachnologist Mike Waite. ● A great white shark dubbed Katherine which had been tracked by OCEARCH in the North Atlantic since 2013 was presumed lost or died after signals from her tag faded a year ago but earlier this year a faint signal was detected and she has now been confirmed to be off the east coast of the US. ● A one-eyed albino shark fetus was found inside a dead shark by Indonesian fisherman last month. ● Analysis of dog DNA has shown that they were first domesticated at the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, making them the oldest domesticated animals [For comparison the earliest known domestication of humans by cats was about 9,000 years ago. -Ed]. ● A moose has been filmed kicking a football around a playing field in Homer, Alaska, ending with a kick towards a goal.


• Thames Water has cleared a fatberg more than 98' (30m) long and weighing 10 tonnes, or in the technical jargon beloved of press releases "more than an African elephant", from a sewer in central London. The congealed solid mass of oil, grease, wet wipes, nappies and other items had to be broken up with small tools and by hand. Last year Thames Water cleared 140 tonnes of fatbergs from under London.


• YouTube has a new most-watched music video. Passing Luis Fonsi's "Desposito" with 7.04bn views (or 30,187 years of play-time) is Pinkfong's version of "Baby Shark", a song thought to have originated as a campfire song in American summer camps in the mid-1970s in the wake of the success of Jaws. If you want to add to its views, it can be found here [Be warned though, it is an earworm and we accept no responsibility if you cannot get it out of your head, but scientific evidence suggests that singing the first verse of the British national anthem might help... -Ed]. ● Streaming service Twitch has been wielding its Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown hammer of late, removing thousands of channels of illegally-shared music but sometimes it goes spectacularly wrong and removes legal channels, including that of DragonForce guitarist Herman Li who was sharing his own band's music - and also gave permission for others to share the band's music. He, like many others, has moved over to YouTube.


• Essex County Fire and Rescue Services were recently called to rescue three men, described as being in their late teens, from a disused industrial tumble dryer in a derelict laundry in Bower Hill. Watch manager Glenn Jackson told reporters that two of the men were inside the dryer while the third had his ankles caught in the door. Firemen had to free him so he could climb in before they removed the door with heavy cutting equipment and rescued all three.


• NASA has announced that scientists have discovered cyclopropenylidene - a molecule consisting of three carbon atoms and two hydrogen atoms - in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. The molecule has been detected in other areas of the galaxy but never before in an atmosphere. ● NASA also sparked both fear and excitement by tweeting "PSST... Uh, did anyone hear... that?" It turned out to be a promotion for a new SoundCloud playlist of "sinister sounds of the solar system", but given recent announcements of water on the moon and the possible presense of phosphene in Venus' atmosphere [since relegated to probable misinterpretation of data] many expected something more significant.


• New York City resident Leonard Shoulders, 33, was waiting for a bus in the Bronx when a sinkhole opened up under him. Not only did he fall and break an arm and a leg, he found himself covered in large rats and unable to scream for help for fear of them going into his mouth, according to his brother. Emergency services took about 30 minutes to rescue him and he was hospitalised for treatment to his injuries, but according to his mother he has been left traumatised. ● A three-year-old girl and a man in his 70s have - separately - been pulled out alive after spending days under the rubble left by the earthquake that recently devasted parts of Turkey.


• Last November Azzedin Khan, 33, from Hertfordshire, was stopped by police after being caught driving out of the Hatfield tunnel on the A1(M) at 137mph (220km/h) and driving so aggressively along the A414 that a police officer in an unmarked car thought that either the car was stolen or the driver was making a getaway from a crime. Khan's explanation to police who stopped him was that he was late for the cinema. In court recently he was jailed for six months, banned from driving for 25 months and ordered to take an extended retest. ● Russian oligarch Vladimir Marugov, nicknamed the "sausage king" for owning some of the largest meat processing plants in Russia has been murdered in his outdoor sauna with a crossbow. His partner managed to escape and call the police. ● A Littleton, New Hampshire, woman has been charged with false impersonation and six charges of falsifying physical evidence. Lisa Landon, 33, allegedly impersonated a Hillsborough County prosecutor to file made-up documents online with court officials declaring that a drug possession and stalking case against her had been dropped.


• The driver of a metro train in Spijkenisse near Rotterdam in the Netherlands had a lucky escape after his train overran the buffers at the end of elevated track just before midnight on Sunday. Instead of falling 32' (10m) to the ground the first carriage was left balancing atop a large plastic sculpture of a whale's tail at the De Akkers station. There were no passengers on the train, and the driver was able to walk through the first two carriages to safely leave the train via the third, which was still level with the platform. While firefighters pondered how to safely recover the train artist Maarten Strujis, who installed the sculpture, named Whale Tails, in 2002 mused that "you actually expect the plastic to pulverise a bit [after almost 20 years], but that is apparently not the case." BBC newsreader Simon McCoy ended a report on the story with "Latest pictures there from Dutch whale-ways".


• Oceanographers aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's (SOI) research ship Falkor have found a previously-unrecorded 1,640'- (500m)-tall - taller than the Empire State Building in New York City - 'blade-like' coral reef off Cape York, Australia, while conducting 3D mapping of the sea floor in the area as part of a 12-month mission. They livestreamed video of the reef taken from the autonomous underwater vehicle SuBastian. SOI executive director Dr Joyotika Virmani commented that "to find a new half-a-kilometre tall reef [..] shows how mysterious the world is just beyond our coastline." There are seven other known tall reefs in the area, but this is the first to be discovered since the late 1800s. It is detached from the main body of the Great Barrier Reef.


• Angela Nava, of Richmond, Texas, just wanted to bring a little humour to Halloween in the midst of the pandemic but her local homeowners' association has accused her of tastelessness for her display of a skeleton strip club, with a pole dancing skeleton and others waving dollar bills. They sent her a letter giving her 30 days to take down the "offensively positioned" and "inappropriate" display, but Nava, who told Houston's ABC-13 that her immediate neighbours had been supportive, planned to take it down immediately after Halloween anyway.

IN BRIEF: Amazon's Swedish website has launched amid a flurry of mistranslations and cultural mistakes, including labelling frying pans as for women, describing a silicone baking mould as "suitable for chocolate, faeces, goose water and bread" and describing a t-shirt as a "child sexual assault" football shirt. The mistakes were blamed on relying on translation software instead of humans. ● Arkansas State Senate Republican candidate Charles Beckham III has apologised after it emerged that while at school he donned Klu Klux Klan robes to scare female Black students. ● Two men in India have been arrested after allegedly tricking a doctor into believing he had bought a magic Aladdin's lamp for nearly $130,000 (£99,977); one of the men had reportedly dressed as a genie to appear before the man at night. ● A two-tonne steam engine built in the 1930s and bought for £50 ($65) in 1950 has been auctioned for £911,000 ($1,184,578) after undergoing a two-year restoration. ● A yachtsman has been rescued after a freak wave during Storm Aiden capsized his 30' (10m) yacht six miles southwest of the Isles of Scilly. ● We reported in a previous TFIr on the woman who sat her online bar exam while in labour; this week a man arrived at a polling station and told officials that that his wife, outside in the car, had gone into labour but refused to go to hospital until she had voted; an election worker went outside, checked her ID and gave her a postal ballot form which the woman insisted on filling out - in between Lamaze breathing - and was then driven off to hospital in Orlando with an "I voted" sticker. ● A tweet which went viral in the UK last week suggesting that much-loved retailer Woolworths, which shut down in 2008, was returning to the high street has turned out to be a hoax.

UPDATES: Sky TV has officially cancelled its carpentry contest The Chop after investigating the allegedly Nazi face tattoos of a contestant that led to its broadcast being halted.

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: Hours before France entered its second national lockdown 430 miles (700km) of roads in and around Paris were jammed with traffic as people tried to leave the city before a 9pm curfew and the midnight lockdown or tried to return after spending the school holiday elsewhere. ● A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has claimed to have developed software that can diagnose if someone has caught COVID-19 just from the sound of their coughing, with 98.5% accuracy.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Baker and author Luis Troyano (The Great British Bake Off [2014], Bake it Great, 48), conductor Alexander Vedernikov (Royalk Danish Opera, Odense Symphony Orchestra, Mikhailovsky Theatre, 56), actor and comedian John Sessions (Spitting Image, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Porterhouse Blue, 67), rugby player J.J. Williams (Wales, British and Irish Lions, BBC Wales pundit, 72), film producer Charles Gordon (The Rocketeer, Die Hard, Field of Dreams, 73), journalist Robert Fisk (The Sunday Express, The Times, The Independent, 74), comedian and actor Bobby Ball (Cannon and Ball, Not Going Out, Benidorm, 76), soccer player Nobby Stiles (Manchester United, England, 1966 World Cup team, 78), actor Sir Sean Connery (James Bond, The Hunt for Red October, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 90).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

25, 28, 33, 34, 47, 54

[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...

    Little Jennifer had developed a habit of sucking her thumb, much to her mother's annoyance. "Little Jennifer," she said, "if you keep sucking your thumb like that you'll get fat!" Little Jennifer did not entirely believe her mother, but agreed to stop.
    A few days later her mother was hosting a baby shower for a friend. Little Jennifer came home from school, took one look at the eight-months pregnant woman and smiled as only she could. "I know what you've been doing," she said knowingly, "Mummy told me!"

---

^{^} ...end of line