^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 19th February		-		Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus born, 1473. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was formally transferred to England at the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War; it would be renamed New York, 1674. Mathematician and physicist Jean-Charles de Borda died, 1799. Burlesque actress and dancer Lydia Thompson born, 1838. More than sixty tornadoes struck the Southern United States in the Enigma tornado outbreak, 1884. Novelist Harper Lee died, 2016.
Saturday 20th February		-		Norway pawned Orkney and Shetland to Scotland in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark, 1472. Composer John Dowland died, 1626. Artist Jan de Baen born, 1633. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened, 1872. Fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt born, 1924. Actress Sandra Dee died, 2005. World Day of Social Justice.
Sunday 21st February		-		King James I of Scotland was assassinated, 1437. Manchu emperor Nurhaci born, 1559. The first recorded self-propelling steam locomotive made its initial run at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales, 1804. Super-centenarian Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified person in history, born, 1875. Gerald Holtom designed the CND logo, known today as the peace symbol, 1958. Seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann died, 1993. International Mother Language Day (UNESCO).
Monday 22nd February		-		The Stuart dynasty began with Robert II acceding to the Scottish throne, 1371. Hungarian king Ladislaus the Posthumous born, 1440. Explorer Amerigo Vespucci died, 1512. The last invasion of Britain began, near Fishguard, 1797. Poet Edna St Vincent Millay born, 1892. Actress Simone Simon died, 2005.
Tuesday 23rd February		-		Diarist Samuel Pepys born, 1633. Highwayman Dick Turpin was identified by his former schoolteacher, at York Castle, 1739. Artist Sir Joshua Reynolds died, 1792. A group of six US Marines were photographed raising the American flag at the top of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima, 1945. Actress Dakota Fanning born, 1994. Pianist and Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer died, 2014.
Wednesday 24th February		-		Æthelberht, king of Kent, died, 616. Moroccan jurist and explorer Ibn Battuta born, 1304. Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, one of the first recognised operas, premiered, 1607. Suffragist Lydia Becker born, 1827. Nancy Astor became the first woman to speak in the House of Commons, three months after her election as an MP, 1920. Historian Margaret Leech died, 1974.
Thursday 25th February		-		Astronomer Maria Margarethe Kirch born, 1670. Architect Christopher Wren died, 1723. Samuel Colt was granted a United States patent for his revolver, 1836. Singer-songwriter, film producer and Beatle George Harrison born, 1943. Writer Grace Metalious died, 2964. The Warsaw Pact was officially disbanded, 1991.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Sir Joshua Reynolds:

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• I told him [Christopher Columbus] the world was round and I never saw him again.
• I'll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash ya got.
• I was having fun on this job! You had all this energy, and all these crazy ideas... and you kept taking your pants off.
• Son of a bitch is dug in like an Alabama tick.
• What's the matter, Colonel Sandurz? CHICKEN?

Last issue's quotations were from filmes released in 1995:

• Goodbye, Porpoise Spit!
      -- Muriel's Wedding
• You know you drive almost slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.
      -- Bad Boys
• I have a house, and family, and things like that... not like I'm complaining or anything, because I have a cat, I have an apartment, sole possession of the remote control. That's very important. It's just, I never met anyone I could laugh with.
      -- While You Were Sleeping
• - I can see right through you.
  - Yeah, kind of happens when you haven't got any skin.
      -- Casper
• I am the law!
      -- Judge Dredd

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• Wasps are being deployed at Bickling Hall in Norfolk to stop clothes moths destroying rare fabrics including a tapestry given by Catherine the Great in the 1760s and part of Queen Anne's throne canopy. The trichogramma evanescens wasps are just 0.02" (0.5mm) long and lay their eggs inside moth eggs, so a wasp hatches instead of a moth; once there are no more moth eggs the wasps die off and become part of the house dust. ● Two cats rescued from a house fire in Runcorn were treated with oxygen on-site using pet-sized masks donated by the Smokey Paws charity and carried on fire engines; the firefighters had been trained in their use by a local vetinary clinic. ● British Antarctic Survey scientists have discovered sponges and barnacles under the 2,950'- (899m)-thick Filcher-Ronne Ice Shelf, where no life was thought to exist. ● A border collie called Lulu was left $5m (£3.6m) in her owner's will when he died last year; the will stated that Lulu was to be left in the care of her owner's friend Martha Burton, who will be reimbursed monthly for Lulu's reasonably care expenses from the legacy fund. ● Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have trained four pigs, called Hamlet, Omelette, Ebony and Ivory, to use a joystick to control an on-screen cursor to play a simple video game; they were rewarded with food pellets for beating each level, but continued to play on after the release mechanism broke and researchers encouraged them. ● To mark Shrove Tuesday this week the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral was videoed sitting in his garden to deliver a morning sermon, with a plate of pancakes beside him. Midway through the sermon Tiger, one of the cathedral cats, jumped onto the table and started eating the pancakes. "Well Tiger has found some breakfast, it's Pancake Day for him as well so we're not too sorry about that," the Dean laughed. Last year Tiger drank from a glass of milk during another video sermon while Leo, another of the cats, disappeared beneath the Dean's robes in an earlier one. ● Badgers have been in the news this week. When Saltdean, East Sussex, resident Zoe Henderson noticed that her cat's food was disappearing overnight her family set up a CCTV camera and recorded a badger - nicknamed Bruce - climbing in through the cat flap in the early hours to eat the food on several occasions. Zoe's husband told reporters that the only downside to their nocturnal visitor was that he is "a bit smelly" necessitating steam cleaning the kitchen after his visits. Meanwhile in Torfaen, South Wales, the RSPCA and fire service rescued two badgers who had fallen into a canal and become stuck trying to climb a ladder back onto land. They are being cared for by the RSPCA until they are healthy enough to be returned to the wild.


• Astronomers who employed a new technique using a secondary mirror and filters to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere in imaging extrasolar exoplanets have identified what could be the nearest habitable one to Earth yet discovered, in the Alpha Centauri system just 4.3 light years away. ● The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has detected signs of halogen in Mars' atmosphere. Halogen is a possible indicator of volcanic activity but none of the other chemicals expected to have been released by Martian volcanoes have been detected alongside the halogen, suggesting instead that it is a product of dust and water vapour rising into the atmosphere and reacting in sunlight to release chlorine which binds with hydrogen to form halogen. ● A recently-discovered galaxy, dubbed ALESS 073.1 is puzzling astronomers. It has been dated to just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang but is far enough away for its image seen from Earth today to be that of the relatively young galaxy, which appears to be too mature for its age, with a bulge, rotating disk and spiral arms; it was thought that galactic bulges formed from the collision of smaller galaxies, and arms such as in the Milky Way, to develop over billions of years. ● A signal was received from Voyager 2 this week, showing that it had successfully received its first order since March last year and reset an internal clock as commanded. The probe has been sending data over the last year but was unable to receive instructions because the 49-year-old DSS 43 antenna in Australia - the only one capable of reaching it - was offline for a refit. If the clock had not been reset the probe would have shut down automatically. Voyager 2 is almost 30,500,000,000 miles (19,000,000,000km) away and still running half of its instruments; it is expected to finally lose contact with Earth in around 2032, 55 years after its launch and 50 years after its original mission ended.


• Archaeologists have produced notes from the oldest known wind instrument, a conch shell more than 17,000 years old. The shell has markings inside it which match those in the artwork on the walls of the Marsoulas cave in the Pyranees, where it was excavated in 1931, when it was thought to have been used for drinking, but recent analysis of modifications made to it, suggesting that a mouthpiece could be fitted and fingers used to modify the pitch led scientists to review its description. They hired a professional musician to sound it, and found that it could produce notes near C, C^# and D with a volume of 100 decibels at 3.3' (1m) away. They have now produced a 3D-printed model of the shell to further explore its musical use without risking the original. ● Archaeologists from a joint American-Egyptian team have uncovered the oldest-known beer brewery, in Abydos, almost 300 miles (483km) south of Cairo. They found eight units, each consisting of forty pottery basins in two rows, used to heat grain and water to produce beer. ● It has long been known that the bluestones of Stonehenge were transported to the site from Wales, but new evidence suggests that they were not just quarried in Wales, but erected as a stone circle before it was dismantled and the stones moved 150 miles (240km) to Salisbury Plain. Archaeologists found evidence of a now-mostly-missing stone circle at Waun Mawn in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire with a diameter the same as Stonehenge and also aligned with the midsummer solstice sunrise. One of the holes left by a removed stone at Waun Mawn matched the unusual cross-section of a Stonehenge bluestone exactly. ● A postcard sent 77 years ago has finally been delivered to a house in Liverpool. The card was sent by Bill Caldwell, a then-18-year-old Royal Navy recruit in the first week of training at HMS Raleigh in Torpoint, Cornwall, who posted it to his uncle Fred - who lived with his parents - in 1943. Caldwell died fifteen years ago, but his now-adult children have been given the card.


• A Chattanooga, Tennessee, man has been charged with identity theft after trying to register for a permit to carry a handgun under the name of former US President Barack Obama, even attempting to forge Obama's signature and including a letter written on faked State Department headed paper with his application. ● A pair of would-be drug smugglers have been jailed after their attempt to smuggle £200,000 ($277,427) worth of cocaine from the Netherlands failed spectacularly. Steve Brogan and Anthony Reilly, both 36, from Skelmersdale in Lancashire, crossed from Lowestoft, Suffolk, to the Netherlands on a jet ski, picked up the drugs and started back, but found themselves running low on fuel, so they approached a survey ship but their request for fuel was refused. Eventually the RNLI Lifeboat from Lowestoft and the HM Coastguard helicopter from Hull were called out to rescue them. Brogan initially claimed that they had been "fishing by jet ski but ran into difficulty when they ran out of fuel" before the cocaine was discovered in a backpack. They were arrested as they were delivered to hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk. ● During the recent snowstorms in Scotland two men, one in Dundee the other in Edinburgh, were arrested for dangerous driving after being stopped with their cars' front and rear windscreens covered in thick snow apart from small openings in the front. ● An FBI agent has totalled a seized 512-hp Ferrari F50 hypercar, one of only 349 built, and worth $3m (£2.16m). The car had been stolen in 2003 and recovered during a separate investigation before the agent decided it needed to be moved and took it for a joyride with an assistant US attorney in the passenger seat. He fishtailed it at a corner and it ended up going over the curb before hitting a row of bushes and a tree. ● Blakelee Sands, 18, was arrested in Edmond, Oklahoma, last week after calling police in an attempt to get her fake ID back from a bar where staff had seized it. She told officers she was "McKamie Queen", the name on the ID, but they checked its ID number and found it matched a Texas resident called Robert Sanchez.


• Earlier this month 70-year-old Frank Rothwell from Oldham became the oldest man to complete the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, rowing 3,000 miles (4,828km) unaided from the Canary Islands to Antigua in six weeks. He arrived the day before Valentine's Day and was greeted by his wife of 50 years, Judith. Rothwell is not the oldest person to row the Atlantic - last year 72-year-old Graham Walters was confirmed as such by Guinness and the Ocean Rowing Society despite having to be towed the final few miles. Rothwell's journey, in a boat called Never Too Old, has raised more that £700,000 ($971,000) for dementia research, in tribute to his brother-in-law who died of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 62 while Rothwell was at sea.


• Researchers at Cambridge University has found that Bitcoin uses more electricity per year than Argentina. The cryptocurrency is generated, and transactions verified, by powerful and complex mathematical algorithms requiring banks of hundreds of computers, often with high-powered graphics cards, all of which uses electricity. The researchers estimated that Bitcoin uses around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year, more than Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh) and will continue to grow in power consumption unless its value slumps which, given Elon Musk's Tesla recently investing heavily in it, seems unlikely any time soon.


• This Monday a transformer in Kenner, New Orleans, failed, sending power surges along overhead lines. Christopher Fitzmorris captured the surges, which looked like pulsing balls of light, on his phone accompanied by a sound which was "almost [..] like a tornado" according to Fitzmorris. The power failure left around 10,000 people without power in subzero weather. Before workers restored it later in the day some residents had tried lighting fires, leading to at least one household having to call out firefighters because they had not checked their chimney and the fire damaged nearby walls. You can see Fitzmorris' and others' footage of the surge in a WWLTV report here [YouTube].


• American food delivery service DoorDash aired a TV commercial during the Superbowl broadcast promising to donate $1 (72p) from every order to Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organisation that makes Sesame Street and runs a number of social justice and children's schemes. Soon after the game DoorDash released a press statement boasting that they had raised $1m (£720,000) for Sesame Workshop. All well and good, and highly commendale, except for one omission. To have the commercial broadcast during Superbowl had cost them $5.5m (£3.97m) plus whatever the production and rights costs (Disney owns the Muppets trademarks) were. DoorDash is valued at $29bn (£20.91bn), has a reputation for uinderpaying and mistreating its drivers, leaking customers' and workers' data and was sued along with four other meal delivery companies for abusing their market power. But hey, they raised $1m from their customers...


• Charlene Leslie, a mother of three, was hailed as a "real life superwoman" after a video of her single-handedly helping a dairy lorry get up an icy hill during Storm Darcy went viral. The video shows her pushing the Graham's The Family Dairy lorry to help it get up the hill. After it went viral she told reporters that she had "just wanted to help", but Graham's chairman Dr Robert Graham Snr praised her for helping "although [..] for health and safety reasons we must advise others not to follow her actions" and promised to supply her family with milk and dairy products for free for a year.


• Three Cubans have been rescued from an uninhabited island where they were stranded for 33 days. A US Coast Guard (USCG) aircraft patroling between the Florida Keys and Cuba spotted their makeshift flag on Anguilla Cay and made a second, lower altitude pass, on which the the people were sighted. The plane dropped food, water and a radio to them. According to Coast Guard official Riley Beecher, who first sighted the flag, "unfortunately we didn't have any fluent Spanish speakers but in my broken Spanish I was able to discern that they were from Cuba and that they needed medical assistance." A USCG helicopter later lifted them off the island, to where they said they had swum after their boat had capsized. They had lived off coconuts, conches and rats and found shelter under trees.

IN BRIEF: Thirty Taliban militants have been killed after an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) they were being taught to construct exploded. ● BBC East of England weather forecaster Chris Bell has released a video of himself clad in only in underpants diving into the snow after promising viewers he would do so if more than 1' (30cm) of snow fell at his home. ● Coca-Cola - branded the #1 polluter in the world last year - is trialling extra-strong paper bottles (albeit with a thin plastic liner for now). ● Beverly Hills police have taken to blasting copyrighted pop music if they see they are being filmed in an attempt to stop footage being posted online. ● Finnish artist Janne Pyykkö and 11 volunteers have used ropes and snowshoes to create a 525'- (160m)-wide web of geometric patterns in the snow covering a local golf course. ● Nepal has banned two Indian mountaineers and their team leader for six years after finding that they faked their claim of having reached the summit of Everest. ● The decline in ozone-harming CFC levels in the atmosphere has resumed after a pause, ascribed to illegal CFC production in Eastern China in 2018. ● Last week the overnight temperature recorded in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, fell to -23^oC (-9.4^oF) - the lowest February temperature in the UK since 1955 and the coldest overnight temperature recorded since December 1995. ● Bruce Castor, the lawyer whose opening defence of twice-impeached former president Trump in his second Senate trial was widely mocked was later caught on video stealing Senate drinks coasters as souvenirs [Hey! Stop the Steal! -Ed]. ● The Ukraine justice ministry is auctioning a wide range of items confiscated from debtors by bailiffs, including sheep, cattle and, er, underpants [a bargain starting at 19.4 hryvnia (50p; 70c) a pair [possibly slightly soiled -Ed]... ● United Airlines has announced plans to buy a fleet of 200 flying electric taxis to shuttle passengers to airports, hopefully starting within five years.

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: France has suspended a law banning workers from eating their lunch at their desks to help curb the spread of COVID-19. ● Several twitchers have been fined for breaking travel restrictions after flocking to Exmouth following reports of a Northern mockingbird sighted in a garden earlier this month; the last time the species normally ranging from Canada down to the Caribbean was sighted in the UK was in the 1980s. ● Police raiding a makeshift nightclub in Birmingham found about 150 people crammed into the building with a DJ, bar and VIP area. In another raid on the same night they found a makeshift bar called "The COVID Arms" set up in a garage workshop. ● Liam Thorp, a 32-year-old journalist with the Liverpool Echo tweeted this week "So I'm not getting a [COVID] vaccine next week - was feeling weird about why I'd been selected ahead of others so rang GP to check. Turns out they had my height as 6.2cm [2.4"] instead of 6'2" [1.88m], giving me a BMI [Body mass index - weight divided by the square of height; 18.5-25 kg/m² is 'normal'] of 28,000 😂".

UPDATES: Scientists who managed to map the inside of a newly-created crater in Siberia using a drone have confirmed that it was created by a blast of methane gas released by melting permafrost. ● The Florida treatment plant that was reportedly hacked to change the level of lye in the water has admitted that it had installed off-the-shelf security software and left the default password unchanged. ● A Los Angeles cosmetic surgeon has treated Tessica Brown, who used Gorilla Glue on her hair after she ran out of hair spray, using a blend of medical grade adhesive remover and acetone sprayed on her hair, then removing the glue with medical scissors, tweezers and a comb. The four-hour procedure would normally cost $12,500 (£9,030) but Dr Michael Obeng offered his services for free after hearing of her story. Brown, who was sedated during the procedure and given painkillers and steroids afterwards, raised the money to travel to LA via crowdfunding.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Model Susan Shaw (The Sun's Page 3, 1976 photoshoot with Formula 1 champion James Hunt later immortalised in Rush, turned down Rod Stewart, 70), Peter Lawrence (father of missing chef Claudia Lawrence, whose disappearance in 2009 remains unsolved, and who campaigned for the relatives of missing people, 74), publisher Larry Flynt (Hustler magazine, shooting dramatised in The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1984 Presidential run, 78), snooker player Doug Mountjoy (1978 UK Championship winner, 1979 Irish masters winner, 1989 Classic winner, 78), jazz musician Chick Corea (65 Grammy nominations with 23 wins, Return to Forever, "500 Miles High", 79), illustrator Victor Ambrus (The Glass Man and the Golden Bird: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales, Associate of the Royal College of Art, Time Team, 85), politician Carlos Menem (President of Argentina [1989-1999], moved Argentine economic policy away from Peronism and re-established relations with the UK, 90).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

1, 11, 21, 35, 39, 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 and her parents were attending the cremation of her mother's former teacher. After the service they were talking to the widow. "How old was Mr Greenwood?" Little Jennifer's mother asked.
    "He was 94," the woman sighed, "just a year older than me."
    Little Jennifer looked around the chapel, then looked thoughtfully at Mrs Greenwood and smiled as only she could. "Hardly worth going home then?"

---

^{^} ...end of line