Issue ^#642 - 26^th November 2021

Edited by and copyright ©2021 Simon Lamont
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tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

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Unless otherwise indicated dollar values are in US dollars. Currency conversions are at current rates at time of writing and may be rounded.
The Friday Irregular uses Common Era year notation.

^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 26th November		-		Classical scholar John Hudson died, 1719. Poet William Cowper born, 1731. Thomas Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct was officially opened, 1805. Abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth died, 1883. Cognitive scientist Margaret Boden born, 1936. Six robbers stole 6,800 gold bars from the Brink's-Mat warehouse at Heathrow Airport, 1983.
Saturday 27th November		-		Soldier and poet Horace died, 8 BCE. Commodus was granted the rank of "Imperator" and made Supreme Commander of the Roman legions by his father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 176. Physicist and astronomer Anders Celsius born, 1701. Mathematician and computer scientist Ada Lovelace died, 1852. Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra premiered in Frankfurt, 1896. Actress and model Robin Givens born, 1964.
Sunday 28th November		-		William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway paid the bond for their marriage license in Stratford-upon-Avon, 1582. Poet and artist William Blake born, 1757. Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discovered the first identified pulsar, PSR B1919+21, in the constellation of Vulpecula, 1967. Author Enid Blyton died, 1968. Actress Karen Gillan born, 1987. Actor and bodybuilder Dave Prowse died, 2020.
Monday 29th November		-		Emperor Kazan of China born, 968. Korean king Yi-Seong-gye moved the national capital from Kaesŏng to Hangyang, today called Seoul, 1394. Composer Claudio Monteverdi died, 1643. Writer Louisa May Alcott born, 1832. The Warren Commission was established to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, 1963. Actress Natalie Wood drowned in mysterious circumstances, 1981.
Tuesday 30th November		-		Holy Roman Emperor Otto II withdrew his forces from their siege of Paris, 977. Satirist Jonathan Swift born, 1667. Optician and astronomer John Dollond died, 1761. The Flying Scotsman became the first steam locomotive to be authenticated as having reached the speed of 100mph (160.9km/ph), 1934. Broadcaster and journalist Lorraine Kelly born, 1959. Photographer Laura Gilpin died, 1979. Saint Andrew's Day in Scotland.
Wednesday 1st December		-		King Henry V of England entered Paris, during the Hundred Years' War, 1420. Isabella Clara Eugenia, infanta of Spain and queen consort of the Spanish Netherlands, died, 1633. Sculptor and founder of the eponymous wax museum Marie Tussaud born, 1761. Ritual magician and occultist Aleister Crowley died, 1947. Seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. Actor Jeremy Northam born, 1961. World AIDS Day.
Thursday 2nd December		-		The University of Leipzig was founded, 1409. Queen Munjeong of Korea born, 1501. Cartographer Gerardus Mercator died, 1594. The Ford Model A car was introduced as the successor to the Model T, 1927. Fashion designer Gianni Versace born, 1946. Ballerina Jennifer Alexander died, 2007. International Day for the Abolition of Slavery (United Nations).

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, William Cowper, from The Task:

Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavor.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• As my grandpappy, Ol' Reliable, used to say... I don't recollect if I ever mentioned Ol' Reliable before?
• Half an hour late. That's my boss - the only guy in the world who can travel by jet and still be late.
• Say now, that wasn't true, what you said about teachers. Some of us do care, you know?
• When it gets hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox!
• Open that door, you spawn of the devil's own strumpet!

Last issue's quotations were from films released in 1983:

• Christ! Me customer! She's still under the dryer. She only wanted a demi-wave, she'll come out lookin' like a friggin' muppet!
      -- Educating Rita
• Whoa, whoa. You better watch what you say about my car. She's real sensitive.
      -- Christine
• - Hey, ya' got Pac Man?
  - No.
  - Ya' got Space Invaders?
  - Nope.
  - Ya' got Asteroids?
  - Naw, but my dad does. Can't even sit on the toilet some days.
      -- National Lampoon's Vacation
• - I'm going to wash my hair and puke.
  - Puke first.
      -- The Big Chill
• He marches us towards a solid face of rock. The man has raisins in his braincase.
      -- Krull

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• Research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has found strong evidence that crustaceans like lobsters can feel pain and experience distress. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs intend to table an amendment to the upcoming Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill to outlaw boiling lobsters alive in light of the research. The legislation will also provide legal protections to cephalopods like octopuses for the first time. ● Shortly after Colin Clayton and his wife Eva got married in 2011 they had three cats, Weasel and her kittens Diesel and Big Ginge who lived with them on a narrowboat in Birmingham. The cats would often go off during the day but always return, if not the same day then the next. But one day Big Ginge did not return. The couple put up flyers, spent days wandering the area calling his name and registered him as missing on the pet microchip database. This year Cats Protection Lichfield and Tamworth learned about a stray cat and Sue Hocknell spent three weeks trying to catch him without success until a local man started feeding him to gain his trust and Hocknell was able to retrieve him. The cat had a lump on his leg so was examined by a vet. The lump was nothing serious but a routine scan found that the cat was chipped - and had been reported as missing ten years ago. Colin and Eva were stunned when they received a phone call to tell them that Big Ginge had been found and they were soon reunited. Colin told reporters that "For now we will be keeping him indoors. He seems very content and has shown no interest in venturing out." ● An application to build more than 200 houses on a former farm in Thornton, in the borough of Sefton, north of Liverpool, met with objections from locals citing congestion, the strain on schools, green field development and the displacement of wild pink-footed geese which migrate from Spitsbergen, Iceland and Greenland to overwinter on the site. The borough council eventually approved the plans, under the conditions that the developer pays for road improvements, donates to local education and commits to feeding the geese.


• Astronomers have discovered that a white dwarf star, LAMOST J024048.51+195226.9, slightly larger than the Earth but at least 200,000 times more massive, rotates once every 25 seconds, making it the fastest-spinning white dwarf star yet observed. ● As this issue is being written NASA has just launched the Dart mission to test a theory for neutralising the threat of a large asteroid hitting Earth, risking life on the planet. The Dart spacecraft will crash into an asteroid called Dimorhphos which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos. Neither are a threat to Earth, but it is hoped that if the orbit of Dimorphos can be altered by the impact of Dart, an asteroid on a collision course with Earth could have its path altered to push it away from the planet by similar means. ● The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been pushed back to at least December 22^nd after a securing ring unexpectedly opened while the telescope was being attached to its launch adaptor, which holds it in place on the launch rocket.


• A planned statue of writer Virginia Woolf sitting on a bench overlooking the Thames in Richmond has been described as "ill-advised, insensitive and reckless" by the Richmond Society conservation group. Woolf, a prime member of the Bloomsbury Group in the early C20^th, committed suicide by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse to drown. ● The FBI has surveyed an area of land in New Jersey for the long-missing body of labour organiser Jimmy Hoffa, whose 1975 disappearance has long been thought connected to the Mafia, after the March 2020 deathbed confession of landfill worker Frank Cappola that his father had told him that a group of unidentified men had ordered him to bury Hoffa's body there, in a steel drum. Data from the search is still being analysed. ● A 13-year-old girl called Milly was using her father's metal detector for only the third time when she discovered something in a field in Hertfordshire. As her father dug it out they joked that it might be an axe-head, and sure enough, it was. They found another 19 Bronze Age items before it was decided that the site should be covered over and professional archaeologists called in. Eventually the site gave up a hoard of 65 artefacts dating from around 1300 BCE. ● A collection of 54 pages of notes and preparatory calculations made by Albert Einstein as he developed his general theory of relativity has sold at auction in Paris for €11.6m (£9.7m; $12.65m), almost four times its highest estimate. ● In the same sale as the Ottoman atlas reported in last week's TFIr was the address book that belonged to Dame Edith Sitwell and was annotated by her with comments including "well-meaning American pest" and "psychopath who insulted me after television". Estimated at £200-300 ($267-400) it went for £52,500 ($69,850). ● A pair of cufflinks that belonged to James Bond author Ian Fleming and are inscribed with the - presumably - coded inscriptions 'WUS', 'SIL', 'UDH' and 'NUF' have sold at auction for almost £6,000 ($7,998).


• Two people were arrested on Interstate 5 in Carlsbad, southern California, last Friday after the back door of an armoured truck fell open and bags of money fell out, some of which opened, leading to drivers stopping and scrambling to pick up the $1 and $10 notes. The California Highway Patrol posted online that anyone found to have taken the money could face criminal charges; with plenty of video evidence posted online in the aftermath it is not surprising that by Friday afternoon at least a dozen people had handed in money. ● A man who broke into a St Helens, Merseyside, home and tried to steal a mobility scooter gave up and instead made off with eight king-sized beef and tomato Pot Noodles. Christine Gibson, who suffers from fibromyalgia and has mobility issues, called police after seeing the man on her security cameras. She later told reporters that the burgler had not taken any of the chicken and mushroom Pot Noodles she had. ● A 37-year-old man was arrested outside a driving test centre in Cologne and charged with driving without a license. He told officers that he had decided to drive himself to his driving test to make sure he got there in time. The test was cancelled.


• At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow earlier this month Brazil signed on to a global deal to reverse deforestation. The country's National Institute for Space Research has released data showing that deforestation of the Amazon rainforest surged by more than a fifth to a fifteen-year high between August 2020 and July 2021; about 5,110 square miles (13,235km²) was lost in that time. The Brazillian government and its pro-farming pro-mining president Jair Bolsonaro have been accused of playing down the deforestation rate in the build-up to COP26. ● British dairy cooperative Arla has worked with farmers and GP Batteries to develop rechargable batteries based on cow manure. The batteries have been dubbed 'patteries' and it is estimated that, using the technology, 2.2lb (1kg) of manure can produce 3.75kwh of electricity, enough to power an iron for 3.5 hours or a vaccuum cleaner for 5 hours. Arla has suggested that its 460,000 cattle could fuel 1.2m homes. As they said, that is "udderly amazing". ● Rolls-Royce are claiming that Spirit of Innovation, its all-electric plane, is the fastest plane of its type, having set three world records during test runs, and reaching a top speed of 387.4mph (623km/h) earlier this month. The World Air Sports Federation are due to verify the data.


• New York native Dierdre Wolownick had long dreamed of sitting atop the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park to watch the sunset, feeling the wind in her hair and camping there to watch the stars, sleep under the moonlight and see the sun rise. In 2017 she accomplished her dream, and became the oldest woman to climb the 3,2000' (975m) face of El Capitan at the age of 66. On September 23^rd this year, she did it again, at the age of 70, beating her own record. She completed the Lurking Fear route up the face in 13 hours; it usually takes elite climbers four or five days. Wolownick told CNN that she started climbing ten years ago to get closer to her son, Alex Honnold, the first person to free-solo (climb without ropes or safety gear) El Capitan, in 2017. The granite rock face was thought to be unclimbable until pioneering climber Warren Harding conquered it in 1957, and it is still a gold standard of American rock climbing.


• Boutique aviation company Hi Fly has become the first to land an Airbus A340 passenger plane on Antarctica. The flight was to resupply an upscale adventure camp run by tourism company White Desert. To land successfully a 9,843' (3,000m) runway had been carved out with grooving to create a workable braking coefficient that allowed the heavy plane to land safely. The flights between the Cape Town, South Africa and the Wolf's Fang camp took between five and five-and-a-half hours, with the plane on the ground in Antarctica for less than three hours. The biggest problem the pilots reported was not the landing but the glare from the ice.


• Collins Dictionary has chosen 'NFT' as its word of the year. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are certificates of ownership for digital content, with sales of NFTs for content including the "Charlie Bit My Finger" [YouTube] video, "Disaster Girl" [BBC] picture and Mike Winkleman's Everydays: the First 5000 Days [Forbes] artwork reaching incredible prices at auction. Also making the list of new words are 'metaverse', the three-dimensional online world much hyped by FacebookMeta, 'crypto', short for 'cryptocurrency', 'neopronoun', pronouns that are gender-free, and 'cheugy', slang for anything unfashionable or uncool.


• A nine-bedroom waterfront villa in Miami is up for sale, for $31m (£23.26m). There are two notable things about it. Firstly, it was once owned by Madonna. Secondly, it is being sold by a dog. In 1992 German countess Karlotta Liebenstein died, leaving a multimillion-dollar trust for her dog, a German Shepherd called Gunther III. The trust, currently worth about $500m (£375m) now belongs to Gunther VI, that dog's great-grandson, and has invested in sports teams and property, as well as founding Gunther Rescue to care for rescue animals. Gunther has his own chef and travels by private jet, but when he visits the Italian home of Carla Riccitelli, one of his main carers and a member of the trust board he has to share it with her other animals - six cats and a couple of chickens; "He's still learning to be with six cats," she told reporters.


• It is possibly the ultimate combat sport for millenial snowflakes. On January 29^th fighters from mixed martial arts [MMA] and boxing will compete in the first live, pay-per-view Pillow Fight Championship (PFC). Steve Williams, CEO of PFC told reporters that "It's serious. It's hardcore swinging with specialised pillows. The only difference between our fights and MMA fights is that nobody gets hurt. [..] You can call it an alternative sport, but we think it's going to have mainstream appeal."

IN BRIEF: Recent smartphones fitted with time-of-flight sensors (including Apple's iPhone 12/13 and the Samsung's Galaxy S20+) for augmented reality and photography can be used to detect hidden cameras. ● The Chinese hypersonic glider test in July fired a missile over the South China Sea while at mach 5, the first time a hypersonic glider has done so. ● El Salvador, the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender has announced plans to build a city at the base of the Conchagua volcano where geothermal energy would be used to power Bitcoin mining [the energy-intensive computer operations to create new Bitcoin]. ● A Florida family is being fined by their homeowner's association for putting up Christmas decorations in their yard before Thanksgiving. ● Leeds gymnast Ash Watson has broken his own world record by completing a backflip between horizontal bars 19.7' (6m) apart. ● New Jersey resident Harry Krame has returned a book to his school library 53 years after taking it out. The vice principal waived the overdue fees, which at 10c/day would have been up to $2,000 (£1,500). ● The Friday after Thanksgiving is widely called Black Friday but there is one profession in America who know it by a different name. For plumbers it is "Brown Friday" the day when food waste and large family gatherings lead to call-outs to clear blockages. ● After Sesame Street's Big Bird tweeted that he had received his COVID-19 vaccination the Republican Party has officially banned him and fellow Sesame Street residents Elmo, Bert and Ernie from their February convention [they might still allow Count von Count in, if only to confuse him by making him unable to count any vaccinated or sane people... -Ed]. ● About 500 drivers of Tesla electric cars left angry comments on social media at the end of last week after a failure of the Tesla mobile app left them unable to unlock their cars (the app is used to unlock and start the vehicles). The fault was fixed after a few hours. ● The estate of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien have successfully taken legal action against the developers of a cryptocurrency called "JRR Token".

UPDATES: Over 100 QAnon supporters gathered in Dealy Plaza, Texas, again, in the expectation that JFK, Jr, would reappear. He is still dead and did not appear. [Same time next week, eh, guys? -Ed] ● Scotland has been hit by a second earthquake less than a week after the last one. This one was centred outside Roybridge in the Highlands and registered at a magnitude of 2.2. ● A mysterious boom heard over Yorkshire shortly after the Scottish earthquake last week was initially thought to have been an earthquake despite no seismographic evidence. It has now been revealed that it was a sonic boom caused by a Swiss F-18 Hornet fighter jet on a training exercise based at RAF Leeming.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Kodiak bear Bart the Bear II (We Bought a Zoo, Dr Dolittle 2, the Vital Ground Foundation, 21), comedian and actor Peter Aykroyd (younger brother of Dan Aykroyd, Saturday Night Live, Nothing But Trouble, 66), model and actress Mary Collinson (twin sister of model/actress Madeleine Collinson [d. 2014], Playboy, Twins of Evil, 69), photographer Mick Rock (known as "The Man Who Shot the Seventies", subjects included David Bowie, Blondie and the Sex Pistols, 72), voice actor Will Ryan (The Land Before Time, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Mickey's Christmas Carol, 72), actor Art LaFleur (Field of Dreams, Santa Claus 2 & 3, The Sandlot, 78), singer-songwriter and musician Keith Allison (member of Paul Revere & the Raiders, recorded with Harry Nilsson, wrote for Peter Sellers, 79), actress Marie Versini (Is Paris Burning?, The Brides of Fu Manchu, Jack of Spades, 81), songwriter and musician Dave Frishberg (Schoolhouse Rock!, "I'm Just a Bill", The Dave Frishberg Songbook, Volume 1, 88), walking guide Cedric Robinson (the Queen's Guide to Morecambe Bay sands who guided more than 500,000 people including Prince Philip across the treacherous sands, 88), nuclear physicist, businessman and philanthropist Peter Buck (the last-surviving founder of the Subway chain, 90), supercentennarian Francisca Susano (believed to have been the oldest person in the world and the last surviving person born in the 19^th Century, 124), ZX Spectrum video game artist and programmer Bernie Drummond (Match Day II, Batman, Head Over Heels, age not given).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

19, 20, 21, 22, 37, 49

[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 eating breakfast when they heard the postman dropping their mail through the door. Little Jennifer went to get it and came back shaking each letter close to her ear. "What are you doing, Little Jennifer?" her mother asked.
    Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Little Simon told me that his Daddy had received a chain letter the other day. I'm seeing if any of these rattle, Mummy!"

---

^{^} ...end of line