^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 7th May		-		Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, died, 973. An English army conducted the Burning of Edinburgh, 1544. Poet Robert Browning born, 1812. Alexander Stepanovich Popov demonstrated his lightning detector, a primitive radio receiver, 1895. Actress and singer Traci Lords born, 1968. Writer Alison Uttley died, 1976.
Saturday 8th May		-		Joan of Arc lifted the Siege of Orléans, 1429. Swindler and informer Thomas Drury born, 1551. Barbara Radziwiłł, queen of Poland, died, 1551. Paramount Pictures was founded, 1912. Soprano Heather Harper born, 1930. Writer Maurice Sendak died, 2012. The Furry Dance in Helston, Cornwall. Victory in Europe Day in various European countries. World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day.
Sunday 9th May		-		England and Portugal signed the Treaty of Windsor, the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world still in effect, 1386. Composer Dieterich Buxtehude died, 1707. American abolitionist leader John Brown born, 1800. The Royal Navy captured the German submarine U-110 and recovered a working Enigma machine which was passed to codebreakers, 1941. Diver Grace Reid born, 1996. Singer and actress Lena Horne died, 2010. Mother's Day in the US and other countries.
Monday 10th May		-		Katherine Swynford, widow of John of Gaunt, died, 1403. Christopher Columbus arrived at the Cayman Islands, naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous turtles he found there, 1503. Civil engineer William Henry Barlow born, 1812. Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette recorder, 1975. Tennis player Kateřina Siniaková born, 1996. Poet Shel Silverstein died, 1999.
Tuesday 11th May		-		A copy of the Diamond Sutra, the oldest known dated printed book, was printed in China, 868. Japanese daimyō Niwa Nagashige born, 1571. Spencer Perceval, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was assassinated, 1812. Mossad agents captured fugitive Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, 1960. Model and actress Laetitia Casta born, 1978. Dancer Doris Eaton Travis died, 2010.
Wednesday 12th May		-		China's Tang dynasty ended with the abdication of Emperor Ai, 907. Poet John Dryden died, 1700. Businesswoman Mary Reibey born, 1777. The Donner Party of pioneers set out from Independence, Missouri, for California, 1846. Actor Ving Rhames born, 1959. Medical doctor Agnes Forbes Blackadder, the first female graduate from the University of St Andrews, died, 1964. International Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Day. International Nurses Day.
Thursday 13th May		-		Artist Cornelius Schut born, 1597. The "First Fleet" of convict ships left Portsmouth for Australia, 1787. Naturalist George Cuvier, "the father of paleontology", died, 1832. Indian dancer Balasaraswati born, 1918. Alison Hargreaves, 33, became the first woman to conquer Everest without oxygen or assistance from Sherpas, 1995. Actress Margot Kidder died, 2018.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, John Dryden:

There is a pleasure in madness, which none but madmen know.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• Treguna, Mekoides, Trecorum, Satis Dee!
• I'll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.
• So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you.
• Wenn ist das Nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Feierhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!^{*
      [*}The Friday Irregular accepts no responsibility for any ill effect, including death, from reading this quotation...]
• One thing I know for sure. A person can't sneeze in this town without somebody offering them a handkerchief.

Last issue's quotations were from films released in 1986:

• Everything I've done, I've done for you. I move the stars for no one.
      -- Labyrinth
• You knew it would be over when one of us said stop. But you wouldn't say it. I almost waited too long.
      -- 9½ Weeks
• I am standing here beside myself.
      -- Short Circuit
• And if you screw up just this much, you'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong!
      -- Top Gun
• Gummi bear? It's been in my pocket; they're real warm and soft.
      -- Ferris Beuller's Day Off

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• The Dogs Trust in Canterbury have appealed for someone to adopt a four-year-old mastiff called Galahad. At 15 stone 7lb (100kg) he weighs the same as a baby elephant, but the "biggest dog we've ever had", according to a spokesman, is described as gentle if clumsy. Prospective owners should ideally have a garden and a spare 2-seater sofa for him to sleep on. ● When Rachel Hick dropped her AirPods in their case her golden retriever Jimmy leaped in and swallowed it whole. A veterinary surgeon at Vets Now in Hull X-rayed Jimmy and quickly operated before the case could cause a blockage or the AirPod batteries could leak, and managed to retrieve it. The case was intact and undamaged, with its charging light still on, and the AirPods still worked. Jimmy was kept overnight at the clinic and returned home the next day feeling "a bit sorry for himself" according to Hick. ● A group of wild capuchin monkeys in Panama have been filmed using stones to smash open shellfish and nuts, suggesting that they have entered the technological stone age, the fourth group of non-human primates to do so, after chimpanzees in West Africa, another group of capuchins in South America and macaques in Thailand. Neighbouring groups have not started using stone tools yet, suggesting that the jump into the stone age in primates - including humans - is reached by chance as much as by mental development.


• On its third test flight, conducted last Sunday, the Ingenuity helicopter drone on Mars captured an image of the Perseverence rover aboard which it landed on the red planet. During the flight Ingenuity flew about 328' (100m) over 80 seconds. At the time it took the picture of Perseverence it was 279' (85m) away and 16' (5m) above the ground, also photographing one of its feet. You can see Perseverence top-left in the image here [NASA].


• A man mapping a forest in western Sweden for his orienteering club found a trove of some 50 pieces of Bronze Age treasure. Thomas Karlsson had glimpsed something metal glinting near rocks on the forest floor and went to investigate, thinking it might be an old lamp. Archaeologists have said that it is rare for Bronze Age hoards to be found in forests as they were usually left as offerings to the gods near rivers or in wetlands. It is speculated that the treasure, including necklaces, pins and bracelets, dated to 750-500 BCE might have been uncovered by animals digging the ground. ● A team of volunteers have excavated a World War II amphibious vehicle buried 30' (9m) underground for 74 years. The lightly-armoured Buffalo LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked) was one of 16 used to protect the town of Crowland in Lincolnshire after the River Welland burst its banks in 1947. As the waters receded five of the Buffalos were washed away, of which one was recovered at the time, and four sank into pits and holes. The team are now crowdfunding to raise money to restore the Buffalo and put it on display. ● Scans of a mummy, thought to be that of a priest, at the National Museum in Warsaw, have found that the mummy was... a mummy. It is the only known example of an ancient Egyptian mummified pregnant woman. Thought to date from the 1^st Centure BCE, the woman was most likely of high status and aged between 20 and 30. The circumference of the foetus' head suggests that it was 26-30 weeks old when the woman died. ● The remains of a huge Roman amphitheatre, comparable to the Colosseum in Rome, have been found under a hill covered in olive and fig trees near the ancient city of Mastaura in Turkey. ● The Italian government has given approval to a plan to restore the Roman Colosseum's wooden floor, in retractable form, at a cost of €18.5m (£ 16.1m; $22.2m) to give visitors a gladiator's eye view of the arena. The original floor was removed by archaeologists in the C18^th to reveal the rooms and tunnels beneath. ● A team of treasure hunters from the Silesian Bridge foundation are to excavate a location at the historical Minkowsie Palace in southern Poland, after analysis of documents including an SS officer's diary and a map provided by the families of Nazi officers who frequented the brothel there. The team hope to find 48 crates of gold and treasures, including items buried on behalf of wealthy Germans who lived in the area, to protect them from the advancing Red Army at the end of World War II, and the 'Gold of Breslau', which disappeared from police headquarters in Wroclaw at around the same time.


• A Japanese man has been arrested and charged with fraud after allegedly being romantically involved with 35 different women at the same time, telling each of them that his birthday was on a different day, to defraud them of around £720 ($1,000) worth of presents. He met them while selling hydrogen water shower heads as part of a multi-level marketing business. Some of the women became suspicious and reported him to the police. ● When Anthony Cooper advertised his Samsung Galaxy Note 2 smartphone on Facebook's Marketplace with a price of £550 ($765), a little over half its original cost, he was contacted by someone saying they were the daughter of an elderly pensioner and wanted to buy it urgently for them. Something felt wrong though, so he checked the buyer's given phone number and found that it was linked to a number of scams where payment had not been sent. Rather than confront them outright though, he sent them a package. It was about the size of the Galaxy 2 box, but contained what he described as a "cheap and nasty" teabag, a couple of custard creams and a note reading "Here's a s**t teabag. Have a drink on me. I'm also posting this all over Facebook to make you famous. 😀" ● A man has been jailed for robbing a McDonald's restaurant in England last February. Rudi Batten told staff he had a gun and demanded both cash from tills and that a manager open the store's safe for him. On the way out he also demanded some chicken nuggets, only to be told that it was too early and they were still only serving breakfast menu items, so he made do with a double sausage McMuffin instead. Batten, later identified from CCTV footage, was wielding an unloaded .177 air pistol instead of an actual gun. He was sentenced to six years in prison. ● Authorities on Sicily became suspicious of an American man who landed at Tabana Birgi airport in a private jet and said he was visiting relatives. They found guns, bows and arrows and 35oz (1kg) of marijuana hidden on the plane. Patrick Joseph Horan, 64, said to be a partner in a Sicilian agricultural business, was arrested.


• A 2013 AI (artificial intelligence) system designed to identify baked goods as an aid to checkout operators at more than 400 retailers across Japan has been repurposed by a doctor at the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research in Kyoto to identify cancerous cells on a microscope slide. The system was designed to photograph a tray of items, name and price each of them from around 100 different products, and was spotted on a television show by the doctor who wondered if it could be retrained because - apparently - cancer cells seen through a microscope bear some resemblance to bread. Because it is designed to analyse an entire tray at once, reworking it to instead analyse the image of an entire slide of sample cells was not difficult, and it has been reported as working with 99% accuracy in a fraction of the time taken using previous manual checking.


• War has broken out in the Canadian town of Listowel, a war of words that is, waged across businesses' signage. It started when, having seen a similar thing in Virginia go viral, Trevor Cork of Speedy Glass put the message "HEY DQ [Dairy Queen] WANNA HAVE A SIGN WAR" on his company's sign. Dairy Queen responded with "YOU BET YOUR GLASS WE DO" and then other companies across the town and further afield joined in, Eaton Funeral Home Ltd with "SIGN WAR WITH US? GRAVE MISTAKE!", an admonition from the 365 Auto and Pet Wash of "HEY SPEEDY & DQ KEEP IT CLEAN OR WE MAY RUN YOU THRU THE WASH!" and the Listowel Agricultural Society with "LET'S BE 'FAIR'! WE'LL EVENTUALLY JOIN IN BUT WE'RE OUTSTANDING IN OUR FIELDS RIGHT NOW". Just in case things get out of hand the local fire station has their sign reading "HEY SPEEDY GLASS & DQ IF THIS THING GETS ANY HOTTER WE'LL BE READY WITH HOSES & WATER". More businesses and organisations are joining in the fun daily and people are driving around town deliberately seeking out the latest signs.


• At the start of April the Denver Beer Company, a local craft brewery founded in 2004, launched a crowdfunding bid to raise $1,000,000,000 (£718,920,182) to buy the beleagured Colorado Rockies Major League baseball team. A month later they have admitted defeat, having fallen $999,993,870 (£718,915,774.91) short of their target. They will donate the money raised to a charity that aids hospitality workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.


• While the small Ingenuity drone helicopter is taking to the skies of Mars, something significantly larger has been in the air over the Southern California desert. The Stratolaunch is a twin-fuselage, six-engine jet plane, with the world's longest wingspan - 383' (116.7m). The plane was initially developed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a carrier for satellite-bearing rockets to launch from, but Allen died before it took its first flight in April 2019, and it is now planned as a carrier for hypersonic research vehicles. The Stratolaunch, with its three-person crew in the cockpit on the starboard fuselage, reached a speed of 199mph (320km/h) and an altitude of 14,000' (4,270m) on its second test flight last Thursday before landing safely 194 minutes after take-off.


• Pandora, the world's biggest jewellery company, has announced that it will stop using mined diamonds, switching instead to laboratory-manufactured ones as a reaction to concerns about the environmental effects and working practices of diamond mining. Manufactured diamonds are also around a third of the cost to produce as naturally-formed ones are to mine. Creating artificial diamonds is energy-intensive and in China, where most are currently made, this energy comes mostly from environmentally-unfriendly coal power stations; labs creating diamonds in America and in Britain, where Pandora's gemstones will initially be made, use renewable energy sources.


• The border between France and Belgium has been temporarily altered (in Belgium's favour) after a farmer, fed up with a boundary stone in the path of his tractor, moved it 7'6" (2.29m) to one side. The stone dates back to 1819 when the border was being established before the 1820 Treaty of Kortijk formalised it. The mayors of the French and Belgian towns affected were more amused than annoyed, but the farmer may face a border commission and criminal charges if he does not return the stone to its proper location.

IN BRIEF: Golfer Marcus Armitage has set a new world record for the farthest golf shot to land in a moving car. At Elvington Airfield, formerly RAF Elvington, in Yorkshire, he drove the ball 303 yards (277m) into a car being driven by Paul O'Neill, beating the previous record set in 2012 when Jake Shepherd hit a ball 273 yards (249.6m) into a car being driven by retired Formula 1 racing driver David Coulthard. ● The Boulder, Colorado, Sheriff's Office recently issued an alert that boulders were blocking the road in Boulder Canyon near Boulder. ● Joy Chapman, from Surrey, British Columbia, has set a new world record for the "lowest note ever sung by a female", hitting a 34.21hz C# (the bottom C# on a standard 88-key piano). ● Fox News, not noted for their accuracy or truth, recently warned viewers that President Biden's environmental policies will leave Americans forced to drink "plant-based beer" [Beer has always been plant-based - wait until they hear about the added dihydrogen monoxide... -Ed] ● Severn Trent are working to clear a 300-tonne 3'-high 1,094 yard-long (1m-high x 1km-long) fatberg in a Birmingham sewer. ● To mark the completion of the Queen's Beasts commemorative coin collection the Royal Mint has created an 8"- (20cm)-wide 22lb (10kg) gold coin with a face denomination of £10,000 ($13,910), hand crafted using traditional and new techniques over 400 hours, and depicting all ten of the beasts shown in the coin collection including a unicorn, a horse, a griffin and a dragon. The selling price is available on request. ● AI scientist Matt Ginsberg, who describes himself as "terrible" at crosswords developed an AI to solve them; the AI came first in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. ● It emerged this week that Cadbury's Flake chocolate bars do not melt when microwaved; because of the way they are manufactured they will eventually burn, but not melt. ● The Hook Eagle Morris Men have responded to calls for Morris troupes to stop using traditional blackface makeup by performing their May Day dance with blue-painted faces. ● Never mind the stereotypical complaining Karens of America, research has found that people in Britain who complain about something are more likely to be called Tracey or Colin. ● A hand-annotated rehearsal script for Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back has auctioned for £23,000 ($32,000) in an auction of film memorabilia that belonged to the late Darth Vader physical actor Dave Prowse; part of the auction proceeds are going to fund research into Alzheimer's, the condition Prowse lived with for 10 years before he died last November.

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: One of the effects of the lockdown in Britain has been a surge in the sale of books across almost all genres (educational was down) and in all formats: hardback, paperback, electronic and audio. ● Stephen Karanja, chairman of the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association, who campaigned against the "totally unnecessary" global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, instead endorsing alternative treatments including Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, has died a week after being admitted to hospital with COVID-19. [We should point out that the Catholic Church in Kenya backs the vaccination programme. -Ed] ● The Japanese seaside town of Noto has used 25m Yen (£164,700; $228,500) of funding provided as part of a COVID-19 emergency relief grant to build a 43'- (13m)-long statue of a squid, as part of a long-term campaign to bring tourists back into the town. ● Police in Indonia have arrested several employees of a pharmaceutical company for allegedly washing used Covid nasal swabs and reselling them. ● An Australian man has been arrested for allegedly sticking fake QR labels over official check-in signs in South Plympton, Adelaide. As part of track-and-trace customers scan the codes with their smartphones to visit a website to check-in at the business they are visiting. The fake QR codes took them to an anti-vaccination site instead.

UPDATES: Not so much an update as a diversion. After reporting on the battle of the chocolate caterpiller cakes, Mark & Spencer's Colin vs Aldi's Cuthbert, we have heard of a Scottish fish-and-chip shop owner who took a break from the more famous Scottish delicacy, the deep-fried Mars bar, to deep-fry a Colin the Caterpiller cake. Apparently it required extra-thick batter [We are going to end that story there before our arteries clog up just imagining it... -Ed].

^{^} OBITUARIES

Model and singer Nick Kamen (Levi 501 jeans' 1985 launderette ad, "Each Time You Break My Heart", "I Promised Myself", 59), actor Nathan Jung (Star Trek: The Original Series, M*A*S*H, Big Trouble in Little China, 74), TV director Frank Cox (Doctor Who, Take the High Road, Doomwatch, 80), composer Anthony Payne (completed Elgar's unfinished Third Symphony, Phoenix Mass, The World's Winter, 84), actress Olympia Dukakis (Tales of the City, Steel Magnolias, Moonstruck, 89), actress Billie Hayes (H.R. Pufnstuf, Li'l Abner, The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, 96), music producer and lyricist Marcel Stellman (Cilla Black, The Shadows, brought the French TV show Des chiffes et des lettres to British TV as Countdown, 96), philanthropist and widow of Kirk Douglas Anne Bydens (102).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

8, 28, 35, 51, 53, 55

[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...

    One night Little Jennifer's parents were watching television when they heard the sound of something being dragged across the floor upstairs followed by the sound of running feet. Her mother went up and found that Little Jennifer had pulled her bed into the middle of the room and was busy running around it. "Little Jennifer!" she said, "What on Earth are you doing?"
    Little Jennifer stopped, looked at her mother and smiled as only she could. "Well, Mummy, in school today I told Miss that I didn't slept well last night and she said I should catch up with my sleep tonight!"

---

^{^} ...end of line