^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 23rd April		-		Irish king Brian Boru was killed in battle, 1014. King Edward III of England announced the founding of the Order of the Garter, 1348. Writer and cartographer Johann Stumpf born, 1500. Cardiff City became the first - and so far only - soccer team not based in England to win the FA Cup, 1927. Tennis player Daniela Hantuchová born, 1983. Author P.L. Travers died, 1996. St George's Day in England, Portugal, Catalonia, Aragon, Bulgaria, Georgia and other nations. World Book Day (UNESCO).
Saturday 24th April		-		The marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots to François, Dauphin of France, 1558. Academic Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth College, died, 1779. Writer Anthony Trollope born, 1815. An estimated 400 people committed a mass trespass of Kinder Scout in England's Peak District to demand public access to open countryside, 1932. Cyclist Laura Kenny born, 1992. Businesswoman Estée Lauder died, 2004.
Sunday 25th April		-		Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of Great Britain, born, 1599. Physicist Anders Celsius died, 1744. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem, 1792. Actress Mary Miles Minter born, 1902. Bell Telephone Laboratories gave the first public demonstration of the solar cell, 1954. Writer, journalist and activist Jane Jacobs died, 2006. Red Hat Society Day.
Monday 26th April		-		Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles (64km) to warn American colonial forces of the British army's approach, 1777. Artist Eugene Delacroix born, 1798. John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was killed, 1865. Ballerina and choreographer Margaret Scott born, 1922. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's reactor no. 4 exploded, 1986. Actress Jayne Meadows died, 2015.
Tuesday 27th April		-		The English defeated the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar in the First War of Scottish Independence, 1296. Philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft born, 1759. American general and explorer Zebulon Pike was killed at the Battle of York, 1813. US President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the American Civil War, 1861. Disc jokey and music historian Casy Kasem born, 1932. Ruth Handler, creator of the Barbie doll, died, 2002.
Wednesday 28th April		-		Cheesemaker Marie Harel born, 1761. Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors were set adrift in the Mutiny on the Bounty, 1789. Businessman Samuel Cunard, founder of the Cunard Line, died, 1865. Astronomer Jan Oort born, 1900. Thor Heyerdahl and five crewmates set out on the Kon-Tiki raft to prove that pre-Columbian Peruvians could have sailed to Polynesia, 1947. Writer Jenny Diski died, 2016.
Thursday 29th April		-		Joan of Arc arrived at Orléans to relieve the siege, 1429. Poet John Cleveland died, 1658. Landscape painter David Cox born, 1783. Acting coach Paula Strasberg died, 1966. The counter-culture musical Hair opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, 1968. Actress Uma Thurman born, 1970.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Anthony Trollope:

What on Earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book and a cup of coffee?

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural.
• Why are they all standing around that manky old boot?
• I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad.
• A cup of tea would restore my normality.
• Veg bad. Veg bad. Veg bad. Say no to carrots, cabbage and cauliflower.

Last issue's quotations were from films released in 1977:

• I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I've been seeing this shape. Shaving cream, pillows... Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important.
      -- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
      -- Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
• I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.
      -- Annie Hall
• I love you. I mean, I don't love you, I dig you. I like you a lot.
      -- New York, New York
• - In my country, Major, the condemned man is usually allowed a final request.
  - Granted.
  - Let's get out of these wet things.
      -- The Spy Who Loved Me

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A brown bear which wandered into a Pasadena, California, house while the owner was napping was chased off by her dogs - two terriers called Squirt and Mei Mei who "don't know they're small" according to owner Deedee Mueller. ● The twelfth reported big cat encounter in Cheshire since December came recently after a dog walker heard a "continous growling and snarling" from undergrowth in Caldy Valley Nature Park. ● A herd of deer has taken to grazing on a London housing estate after crossing the road between the estate and Dagnam Park, where they have been breeding for hundreds of years; residents have been urged to "respect" them and neither approach, follow nor feed them. ● An American-Chinese research team has sparked a fresh ethics debate by developing monkey embryos containing human tissue after injecting human stem cells into macaque embryos. Team leader Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte helped create the first human-pig hybrid in 2017. The embryos were destroyed after 20 days. ● A suspected rhinoceros poacher in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, was trampled to death by elephants while fleeing park rangers. ● A new species of giant dinosaur has been identified from parts of a skeleton found in Chile's Atacama desert. The young titanosaur would have measured 20' (6.3m) in length. ● New finds and research into the tyrannosaurus rex has suggested that the iconically fearsome predator walked at about the same speed as humans and, far from being the solitary predators they are usually depicted as, might have hunted in packs like modern wolves.


• The Ingenuity helicopter drone has made the first sustained controlled flight on another planet after taking to the Martian skies for 39.1 seconds, a little over three times the duration of the Wright Brothers' celebrated first flight on Earth. Ingenuity was carrying a fragment of cloth from the Wrights' Flyer. Because of the thin Martian atmosphere - just 1% the density of Earth's - the helicopter's rotors span at 2,500rpm to lift it 9.8' (3m) above ground (about the same altitude as the Flyer's first flight), hover for 30s and land again. Because of the time delay in communicating with Mars Ingenuity operated autonomously. Further flights are planned.


• Archaeological excavations on a building site in Eastfield, near Scarborough, have uncovered a high-status Roman villa and bath house of a complexity and size hitherto unknown in Britain and possibly the whole of the former Roman Empire. The villa has a circular central room off which other rooms were built. The archaeologists and experts in Roman history are at a loss to explain how such a grand structure came to be built so far north in a country that was itself a far-flung outpost of the empire, but the significance of the find is such that developers Keepmoat Homes have altered the layout of their planned housing estate to preserve it.


• Czech police investigating an October 2014 explosion at an ammunition warhouse in Vrbetice have named two suspects - Russians Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. The men - or at least two men holding the same passports - are also wanted by British police over the 2018 attempted novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury that led to the hospitalisation of the Skripals, a police officer and a man who discovered the perfume bottle used to deliver the poison, and the death of a woman who sprayed it onto her wrist thinking it was perfume. ● A man who threw an empty McDonald's coffee cup, sometimes with one or two cigarette butts in it, onto the Lake View, NY, lawn of Edward and Cheryl Patton just after sunset almost every day for three years has been arrested and charged with second-degree harassment and despiting trash on a highway after the Patton's neighbours saw him in the act and followed him to get his license plate number. Larry Pope, 76, used to work with Cheryl Patton at a bus service where she described him as having been a "nemesis" because of issues over her role as a union official. ● As the Main Street drawbridge in Daytona Beach, Florida, was being raised a driver accelerated through a traffic arm barrier to jump the gap. The barrier had to be replaced and the car's windscreen appeared on CCTV cameras to have been damaged, but it was unknown at the time of reporting if the driver - whose identity police are believed to have determined - was injured. Last month a motorbike rider pulled the same stunt [we presume by driving around the barrier -Ed].


• While former glamour model Katie Price prepares for her seventh or eighth (depending on which newspaper is reporting it) marriage, it has been revealed that a man in Taiwan has married his wife four times, each time divorcing her after 8 days then remarrying the next day. Under Taiwanese law "a worker shall be entitled to eight days of wedding leave with pay" and the man had tried to get 32 days of paid leave. His employer, a bank, only approved the first 8 days so he filed a complaint and the Taipei City Labour Bureau ruled against the bank and fined them TWD$20,000 (£675; $940). The bank appealed, pointing out how the employee was playing the system, only for the Bureau to uphold the ruling while agreeing that the man's actions were unethical.


• A woman in Krakow, Poland, called the Krakow Animal Welfare Society after seeing a mysterious creature, possibly a lizard, sitting in the lilac tree outside her home. She was particularly worried because it had not moved for several days. An officer who went to her home identified the creature very promptly; it was not an animal at all but a croissant that a neighbour had probably thrown out of a window for the birds to eat, but which had become caught in the tree. Posting about the incident on Facebook the Society praised the woman for calling them because "it's better to check and be pleasantly disappointed" as there are people willing to get rid of an animal if it causes them trouble or they become bored with it. The ultimate fate of the croissant was unreported.


• Eighty-year-old Denis Fawsitt and his wife play the EuroMillions Lottery every week, using family birthdays for their choice of numbers. Last month, when he went to their local Co-Operative store to buy his ticket, as he always did, he realised that he had forgotten his glasses and could not read the ticket form to fill in the numbers, so "I went to pay for my papers and asked the lady behind the counter for a lucky dip". In the subsequent draw the five main numbers and one Lucky Star matched the random numbers he had been given, winning the couple £116,124 ($161,652). When they realised that they had won, according to Mrs Fawsitt, "Denis had a drop of whisky and I had a small sherry." They intend to have a big family party with their two daughters, two grandsons and one granddaughter and families once "this horrible COVID has gone away and it's safe".


• Helen Whiteshaw, 76, from Glasgow, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) in 2020 and quickly lost the power of speech, but she now has her own voice back via a computer aid after engineers realised that in 2019 she had appeared on the ITV game show Tipping Point and were able to extract enough phonemes from the recording of her voice on the show to reconstruct her voice in the system. Her daughter described it as "just the best" to hear her mother's voice again, while Ms Whiteshaw said that "it is wonderful being able to talk to people and sound normal and not like a machine."


• Retailers Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Aldi are at war - over a caterpillar called Colin. M&S started selling cakes in the form of Colin the Caterpillar about 30 years ago, and his design has remained consistent - barring seasonal variations - ever since. After budget supermarket Aldi started selling a similar cake (called Cuthbert) M&S threatened them with court action. Aldi stopped selling their caterpillar cake in February but recently brought it back as a limited edition to benefit two cancer charities, tweet-tagging M&S to say "let's raise money for charity, not lawyers". M&S responded that "we love a charity idea (Colin's been a BIG fundraiser for years). We just want you to use your own character. How about #kevinthecarrotcake? That idea's on us." M&S have now filed an intellectual property claim with the High Court, citing three trademarks they hold for Colin, claiming that he has acquired and retains an enhanced distinctive character. While Aldi has a reputation for producing items similar to other stores, it should be noted that almost all of the big UK supermarkets sell some form of caterpillar cake including Wiggles (Sainsbury's), Clyde (ASDA), Curly (Tesco) and Cecil (Waitrose).


• Scientists in Switzerland are studying soil health by recruiting thousands of volunteers to bury pairs of pristine white cotton underpants in their gardens. Each volunteer will receive two pairs to bury, with one being dug up after a month, the other a month later. According to Proof by Underpants' website "apart from the waistband and the seams, our test pants are made from 100% biodegradable organic cotton. This substance can serve as a food source for various microorganisms in the soil. They eat the underpants with ravenous hunger. The more active microorganisms live in the soil, the faster and the more holistically the underpants will be eaten up." Teabags will be buried along with the pants to act as a control, and DNA from the soil will be studied to identify the organisms living there. [And we didn't even say that the project is pants... -Ed] [You just did... -SubEd] [You're fired! -Ed]

IN BRIEF: The boom in sales of gardening equipment, furniture and ornaments during the recent lockdown, coupled with delays in shipping both products and raw materials, most notably caused by the Suez Canal blockage [viz. TFIrs passim] has led to a national shortage of ornamental garden gnomes. ● The man reported on in an earlier issue after being fined for farting at a police officer is launching a legal appeal, claiming freedom of speech... ● Iranian TV censored a broadcast of a soccer match between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur more than 100 times to remove all shots showing a female assistant referee. ● About 200 tonnes of illegally harvested giant clam shells worth £18m ($25m) have been seized in the Philippines and four men arrested. ● A WWII-era aircraft flown during an air show in Florida made a controlled emergency landing in the sea close to the beach, to the amazement of onlookers. ● As the funeral of Prince Philip in St George's Chapel, Windsor, got underway last weekend one of the soldiers standing in line in full ceremonial uniform outside the chapel collapsed in the heat and had to be helped up. ● A surfer who lost his favourite board while surfing a big wave was reunited with it four years later after it washed ashore 1,670 miles (2,700km) away; it was still "100% surfable". ● Tim Curry, who famously played Dr Frank-N-Furter in the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show has revealed that he was once thrown out of a early screening (where fans often dress up as their favourite characters, although he was not in costume) in New York because "they thought I was an imposter." ● The Welsh Ambulance Service, having taken an 89-year-old woman home from hospital after 10 weeks of being treated for COVID-19, had to apologise after it was discovered that they had put her to bed in someone else's house. ● Scientists at Perdue University have developed a white paint said to be "whiter than the whitest paint currently available" and able to reflect more than 98% of sunlight, which could help fight the effects of climate change and save energy.

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: Organisers of a gig by rapper AJ Tracey in Manchester last weekend have been fined £10,000 ($13,920) for breaching COVID rules after "a large gathering" turned up. Tracey, whose performance was cancelled before he arrived, tweeted that he "didn't expect that many people to turn up." ● A Bradford hairdresser who has failed to pay any of the £17,000 ($23,665) worth of fines she was hit with for breaching COVID rules by staying open (she was claiming "jurisdiction under common law" citing the Magna Carta [viz. TFIrs passim]) is being taken to court and faces an unlimited fine if convicted. ● After a fitness studio in Kelowna, British Columbia, announced that it would not accept any membership applications from people who have received a COVID-19 vaccination it came to the attention of several provincial agencies which discovered that it was operating without a business license and shut it down, subsequently denying an application for a license. ● Far-right rocker Ted Nugent, who ranted that COVID-19 was a scam and queried why there had been no lockdowns for COVID-1 thru -18 [viz. the last issue] has caught COVID-19. [Karma's a bitch... -Ed]

UPDATES: The A68 iceberg that was about a quarter the size of Wales when it calved off Antarctica's Larson C Ice Shelf in 2017 and threatened to run aground on South Georgia has shattered into smaller pieces as a result of warmer waters and higher air temperatures.

^{^} OBITUARIES

TV director Stuart McDonald (Parkinson, That's Life!, Robot Wars, [age not given]), choreographer Liam Scarlett (Royal Ballet, Australian Queensland Ballet, 35), actress Helen McCrory (Peaky Blinders, Harry Potter, The Queen, 52), songwriter Jim Steinman ("Bat Out of Hell", "Total Eclipse of the Heart", "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)", 73), musician Mike Mitchell (last-surviving member of the original Kingsman, "Louie Louie", 77), software developer Charles Geschke (co-founder of Adobe, co-creator of the Portable Document Format [PDF], 2009 recipient of the National Medal of Technology, 81), actor and stuntman Felix Silla (The Addams Family, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, Star Wars: Episode VI - The Return of the Jedi, 84), costume designer Anthony Powell (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Tess, Death on the Nile, 85), film director Monte Hellman (The Shooting, Beast From Haunted Cave, Road to Nowhere, 91), politician Walter Mondale (US Senate [1964-1976], Vice President [1977-1981], first presidential nominee to choose a female running mate [1984], 93), burlesque dancer and actress Tempest Storm (Teaserama, Paris After Midnight, The Mike Douglas Show, 93).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

2, 5, 17, 29, 42, 48

[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...

    The children were having a gym class. "Alright, everyone," the teacher said, "I want you all to lie on your backs and imagine you're on a bicycle. Raise your legs in the air and pedal your feet really fast." The children did as instructed, except one, who raised her legs but did not move her feet. "Little Jennifer!" the teacher said, "Why aren't you pedalling?"
    Little Jennifer looked at her and smiled as only she could. "I'm going downhill so I'm freewheeling, Miss!"

---

^{^} ...end of line