Issue ^#658 - 1^st April 2022

Edited by and copyright ©2022 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 1st April		-		Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and, later, of England, died, 1204. Potosí, Bolivia, was founded after extensive silver deposits were found in the vicinity, 1545. Physician William Harvey, who first detailed the circulation of blood in the human body, born, 1578. Jazz pianist and composer Scott Joplin died, 1917. The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merged to form the Royal Air Force, 1918. Actress Grace Lee Whitney born, 1930. Edible Book Day. Fossil Fools Day. April Fools' Day.
Saturday 2nd April		-		Frankish king Charlemagne born, 747. Arthur, Prince of Wales, died aged 15, 1502. Explorer Juan Ponce de León first sighted land in what is now Florida, 1513. Actress Penelope Keith born, 1940. Crime novelist Lillian O'Donnell died, 2005. A gang of elderly thieves carried out the £16m ($21m; both at current rates) Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary, 2015. World Autism Awareness Day. International Children's Book Day.
Sunday 3rd April		-		Italian noblewoman Maria de' Medici born, 1540. Union forces captured Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, in the American Civil War, 1865. Composer Johannes Brahms died, 1897. Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany [1982-1998], born, 1930. The result of the Grand National horse race was declared void, 1993. Businesswoman Nina Wang died, 2007.
Monday 4th April		-		Mathematician John Napier died, 1617. Orientalist Antoine Galland born, 1646. Napoleon abdicated for the first time, 1814. Poet and memoirist Maya Angelou born, 1928. The Beatles occupied the top five positions on the American Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart, 1964. Astronomer Liisi Oterma died, 2001.
Tuesday 5th April		-		Printmaker Diana Scultori died, 1612. The marriage, in Virginia, of colonist John Rolfe and Native American Pocahontas, 1614. Artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard born, 1732. The top of Ripple Rock, an underwater threat to navigation in Canada's Seymour Narrows was destroyed in what was then one of the largest non-nuclear controlled explosions, 1958. Actress Thea Gill born, 1970. Business magnate, engineer and recluse Howard Hughes died, 1976.
Wednesday 6th April		-		King Richard I of England died, 1199. Jan van Riebeeck established a supply camp at the Cape of Good Hope that would later become Cape Town, 1652. Poet and playwright Jean-Baptiste Rousseau born, 1671. The first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens, 1896. Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington born, 1917. Singer Tammy Wynette died, 1998.
Thursday 7th April		-		Attila the Hun sacked Metz and attacked other cities in Gaul, 451. Artist El Greco died, 1614. Poet William Wordsworth born, 1770. Singer Martha Ray died, 1779. Mount Vesuvius erupted, devastating Naples and forcing a new site for that year's Olympic Games to be found, 1906. Actress, writer and filmmaker Jennifer Lynch born, 1968. World Health Day.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, William Wordsworth:

The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• - [To an elevator operator] You're lucky to have such a steady job.
  - Oh, it has its ups and downs - most people laugh at that one, sir.
• You slimy coward! You'd make the flesh crawl on a squid!
• I know my clothes are a little conservative, but we English always dress as if we're going to a funeral when we're on a holiday.
• To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other's characters before marriage. Which I think is never advisable
• Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all.

Last issue's quotations were from films released in 2007:

• You have many slaves, Xerxes, but few warriors. It won't be long before they fear my spears more than your whips.
      -- 300
• - Why are you wearing a police officer's uniform?
  - 'Cause I am one?
      -- Hot Fuzz
• It's difficult to love yourself, when nobody shows you how.
      -- Angel-A
• I name you Prince Terrien, giant troll hunter extraordinaire. P.T. for short.
      -- Bridge to Terabithia
• Whatever comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a choice. My friend Harry taught me that. He chose to be the best of himself. It's the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what's right.
      -- Spider-Man 3

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A video of a kitten playing her owner's guitar with her teeth has gone viral online, captioned "Why I can't leave my guitar out anymore". ● A Tanzanian flamingo called Pink Floyd which escaped from a zoo in Wichita, Kansas, in 2005 has been filmed enjoying freedom on the Texas coast, having previously been caught on camera in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Arkansas. It appears to have befriended a Caribbean flamingo that was probably blown in by a storm. "Even though they're two different species, they are enough alike that they would have been more than happy to see each other. They're two lonely birds in kind of a foreign habitat. They're not supposed to be there, so they have stayed together because there's a bond," Scott Newland, curator of birds at the zoo Pink Floyd escaped from, told reporters. ● Last week it was a tiger, this week police were called to a road in Sheerness, Kent, after reports of a crocodile sunning itself on the verge; it was made of plastic. ● Scientists studying the DNA of different bat species have identified 13 genes that are missing in vampire bats and account for how they survive on a low-calorie diet of blood. ● A wild dolphin in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, has been observed communicating with harbour porpoises, the first time the two species have been seen communicating. The dolphin raised the pitch of her clicks to match those of the porpoises.


• About 4.4lb (2kg) of helium-3 leaks from the Earth's interior every year, mostly through mid-ocean ridge vents, but scientists are at a loss to explain how. Helium-3, a very rare isotope of the gas, was mainly generated during the Big Bang although some is created in nebulae. In the early development of the Earth the core and mantle would have had equal quantities of helium-3, but the hypothesised impact of the Mars-sized protoplanet Thea early in Earth's history, which led to the ejection of material that now forms the Moon, resulted in an imbalance with more helium-3 in the core. It is thought that it is this supply that is leaking. ● Astronaut Mark Vende Hai has been returned to Earth along with two Russian colleagues aboard a Soyuz craft. Vende Hei had been aboard the International Space Station since April 2021, and now holds the record for spaceflight duration by an American, with 355 continuous days in space. The situation in Ukraine had led to some concern over how he would return but NASA and Roscosmos have continued to work together, despite Fox News and Russian state news program RIA Novosti speculating that he could be left on the station, or that the Russian module would separate from the rest of the ISS. ● Solar scientists are closing in on a theory to explain why the Sun's corona is almost twice as hot as its surface. They suggest that magnetic waves and turbulence lead to the energy from electrons being converted to ion-cyclotron waves which heat the ions in the corona. ● The Chinese Yutu-2 lunar rover has discovered a medium-sized rock on the far side of the Moon described as having the texture of stale Emmental, hard and full of holes, with a slight greenish tinge, thought to be due to the presence of copper phosphate.


• Next month Christie's in Geneva will auction a 228-carat pear-shaped diamond the size of a chicken egg. It was mined in South Africa in the 1990s and the auction will be its first time on sale. It has an estimated value of £15.2m ($20m). ● The uninhabited Gruinard Island off Scotland's northwest coast has gone up in flames, with people living on the mainland describing the scene as "apocalyptic". Gruinard was used for secret germ warfare tests - most infamously of Anthrax - during World War II, and had only been declared free of Anthrax by the Ministry of Defence in 1990. ● The National Trust has bought a 4.4 mile (7km) stretch of the so-called Jurassic Coast (it is actually Triassic, Jurassic and Cambrian) in Dorset along with a 350-acre farm, after the farmer, in whose family it had been held for three generations, decided to retire. The Trust hopes to use regenerative agriculture and natural recovery to turn the site into a network of grasslands, meadows, scrub and wildlife refuges. ● Daguerrotype and ambrotype photographs salvaged from the wreck of the SS Central America which sank off South Carolina in 1857 carrying 425 people and an estimated 21 tonnes of gold coins and nuggets from the California gold rush have been published, and give an insight into the lives of the passengers. Both early forms of photography, daguerrotypes - the first commercially-successful photographs - were made onto metal plates, while ambrotypes used glass plates. The shipwreck was first located in 1988 and there have been several expeditions to it, mostly to try to recover the gold, but the early photographs were salvaged in 2014 and only now made available.


• The family of Ellen Greenberg, a 27-year-old Philadelphia teacher found dead in her apartment in 2012, are calling for the investigation into her death to be reopened as new evidence has come to light to suggest that she was murdered. Her death, from 20 stab wounds to her body, was originally ruled to be a suicide... ● A burglar who broke into a shed and stole a bicycle and tools worth £1,000 ($1,316) then, a few weeks later and with a group broke into an industrial unit and stole £3,000 ($3,950) worth of tools, both while serving a suspended sentence for burglary, and was caught because he did nothing to disguise his identity and was clearly visible on security video, has been sentenced to 3 years and 27 weeks in jail, and received some free advice from Recorder Patrick Fields, presiding over his trial - "The best advice is to give up crime because you are not very good at it and keep getting caught." ● Earlier this week Dorset Police put out an alert about a prisoner who had assaulted officers and escaped from a police van, wearing just his underpants and socks. A day later they suggested that he might have tried to change his appearance by shaving off his beard and hair (and, presumably, stealing some clothes...). He was rearrested at gunpoint on the third day.


• The British Met Office has raised the minimum temperature that an area must experience daily for three days to be classed as a heatwave, by 1^oC (1.8^oF) in the face of climate change. ● Analysis of energy production has shown that combined solar and wind power accounted for 10% of global electricity for the first time last year. Overall clean sources of energy accounted for 38% of electricity produced. ● ExxonMobil are running a pilot project in North Dakota to divert waste gases that would normally be flared off from oil refineries into generators which convert it to electricity. The project uses the electricity to power a bitcoin mining network. The process cuts CO₂-equivalent emissions by almost 63%. ● Officials in Australia have confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef has suffered a fourth mass bleaching event in the last six years as sea temperatures were above average. ● Blood samples from 17 of 22 anonymous donors have been found to contain microplastics; the first time the microscopic plastic particles have been found in human blood. ● It is an old joke that the British are obsessed with the weather, especially rain. The Met Office has the most powerful supercomputer in Britain, but analysis and forecasting needs data, and rainfall data from before 1960 was held on written sheets, recorded at thousands of weather stations across Britain. At the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown the Rainfall Rescue project was launched. The sheets had been scanned and were made available online for volunteers to type in the data - some 5.4m individual observations across 66,000 sheets. Each sheet was offered four times, to different users, for quality control. Taking into account location and dates, Met Office archivist Dr Catherine Ross estimated that the project required around 100 million keystrokes. Sixteen thousand volunteers, The Friday Irregular's editor included, completed the task in just 16 days, and the Met Office now has digited rainfall data across a dense grid going back to 1836.


• Last weekend's Academy Awards [winners below] should be remembered for a number of things - Troy Kotsur becoming the first deaf man to win Best Supporting Actor, Jane Campion becoming only the third woman to win Best Director and the first to have won both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (for 1993's The Piano), and Will Smith and Sir Kenneth Branagh finally winning Oscars. Unfortunately it will be remembered for Smith's storming the stage to slap comedian Chris Rock in response to a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia. Twitter users flooded Will Smith with abuse over the incident, but they did not, for the most part, check which Will Smith they were insulting. Much of the abuse went to Maryland state senator Will Smith, a veteran, lawyer and chair of the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Smith (the actor) apologised to the Academy during his later acceptance speech for the Best Actor award, and to Rock a couple of days later. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have launched an investigation, set to report its results in a few weeks.

IN BRIEF: Cassandra Latham-Jones, 71, has become Britain's first official witch after the Inland Revenue allowed her to register as a self-employed 'village witch' for the purposes of tax returns. A trained nurse, Latham-Jones has been a witch in the Cornish village of St Buryan for 30 years, but can now write off expenses including potion ingredients as tax-deductible. ● A four year old girl who was born more than four months premature and spent the first 13 months of her life in hospital has been named this year's honorary 41^st runner in the Grand National. ● A woman has given birth to twins with different birthdays. Blake was born at 11.57pm, his brother Bobby at 12:26am the next day. ● A couple who got engaged on a Lancashire beach found themselves searching the sands frantically after the ring fell off the bride-to-be's finger. They bought a second-hand metal detector which did not locate it, then appealed via Facebook and experienced detectorist Marc Robinson offered his help, finding the ring two minutes after starting his search. ● A 1999 Pokémon Base Set Shadowless 1^st Edition Holo Charizard card in perfect mint condition has sold at auction for $420,000 (£319,000). ● The chief executive of the York Theatre Royal has revealed that a theatregoer walked out of a production of Shakespeare's As You Like It and demanded a refund because "it had Yorkshire accents in it".... [All t' world's a stage, lad... -Ed]

UPDATES: The Tongan volcanic eruption earlier this year sent shock waves through the upper atmosphere comparable to those created by severe solar storms. ● The increasingly-pointless and decreasingly-sized convoy of lorries slowly going round the Washington D.C. beltway to protest lifted-before-they-started COVID-19 protection mandates has finally announced that they will give up and go home. It should come as a relief to those who, having been repeatedly flipped the bird by other drivers and held up by a deliberately-slow cyclist, have had to resort to urinating in their own cabs because there was nowhere else to go...

^{^} ENTERTAINMENT

2022 Razzies: Worst Picture: Diana: The Musical; Worst Actor: LeBron James, Space Jam: A New Legacy; Worst Actress: Jeanna de Waal, Diana: The Musical; Worst Supporting Actor: Jared Leto, House of Gucci; Worst Supporting Actress: Judy Kaye (as both Queen Elizabeth II and Barbara Cartland), Diana: The Musical; Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie: Bruce Willis, Cosmic Sin; Razzie Redeemer Award: Will Smith, King Richard; Worst Screen Couple: LeBron James & any Warner cartoon character (or WarnerMedia product) he dribbles on, Space Jam: A New Legacy; Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel: Space Jam: A New Legacy; Worst Director: Christopher Ashley, Diana: The Musical; Worst Screenplay: Joe DiPietro (script) & Joe DiPietro and David Bryan (music & lyrics), Diana: The Musical.

2022 Academy Awards: Best Picture: Coda; Best Actress: Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye; Best Actor: Will Smith, Ali King Richard; Best Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story; Best Supporting Actor: Troy Kotsur, Coda; Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog; Best Original Screenplay: Sir Kenneth Branagh, Belfast; Best Adapted Screenplay: Sian Heder, Coda; Best Animated Feature: Encanto; Best Documentary Feature: Summer of Soul; Best International Feature: Drive My Car (Japan); Best Original Song: "No Time to Die", Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell - No Time to Die; Best Original Score: Hans Zimmer - Dune; Best Cinematography: Greig Fraser - Dune; Best Visual Effects: Paul Lambert, Tristan Myles, Brian Connor and Gerd Nefzer - Dune; Best Film Editing: Joe Walker, Dune; Best Costume Design: Jenny Beavan, Dune; Best Sound: Mac Ruth, Mark Mangini, Theo Green, Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett - Dune; Best Production Design: Patrice Vermette and Zsuzsanna Sipos - Dune; Best Make-Up and Hairstyling: Linda Dowds, Stephanie Ingram and Justin Raleigh - The Eyes of Tammy Faye; Best Live Action Short: The Long Goodbye; Best Animated Short: The Windshield Wiper; Best Documentary Short: The Queen of Basketball; #OscarsFanFavourite: Army of the Dead; #OscarsCheerMoment: the Flash Speed Force scene, Zack Snyder's Justice League.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Drummer Taylor Hawkins (Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders, Alanis Morissette, Foo Fighters, 50), country singer Jeff Carson ("Not on Your Love", "The Car", "Yeah Buddy", 58), computer scientist Stephen Wilhite (Compuserve/AOL, creator of the .GIF graphics file format [he pronounced it 'jif'], 2013 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, 74), actor Paul Herman (The Sopranos, Goodfellas, Once Upon a Time in America, 76), actress Denise Coffey (Do Not Adjust Your Set, Georgy Girl, Far From the Madding Crowd, 85), actor Akira Takarada (Toho Godzilla film series, King Kong Escapes, Tales of a Golden Geisha, 87), film & TV director Marvin J. Chomsky (Star Trek, Roots, Evel Knievel, 92).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

7, 13, 32, 36, 38, 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...

    Little Jennifer came home from visiting her friend Little Mary. "How did it go?" her mother asked.
    "Well, Mummy," Little Jennifer said, "Little Mary and me were throwing a ball around and I knocked over a vase which broke."
    "I should phone Little Mary's mother and offer to buy her another one."
    Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Oh, that's alright, Mummy. When she was picking up the pieces she said it had been her grandmother's and was quite irreplaceable!"

---

^{^} ...end of line