Issue ^#686 - 14^th October 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 14th October		-		King Harold II of England was killed at the Battle of Hastings, 1066. The trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, for conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I of England began, 1586. Dwight D. Eisenhower, general and 34th President of the United States, born, 1890. Chuck Yeager became the first person to travel faster than the speed of sound, 1947. Soccer player and broadcaster Alex Scott born, 1984. Actress Collin Wilcox died, 2009. World Standards Day.
Saturday 15th October		-		Polymath Rhazes died, 925. Edgar the Ætheling was proclaimed King of England; never crowned, he would concede power to William the Conqueror two months later, 1066. Writer P.G. Wodehouse born, 1881. Dancer and alleged spy Mata Hari was executed, 1917. The reference manual for FORTRAN, the first modern programming language, was released, 1956. Sarah, Duchess of York, born, 1959.
Sunday 16th October		-		Jadwiga was crowned as King [sic.] of Poland, becoming its first female monarch, 1384. Artist Anna Waser born, 1678. A comet predicted by mathematician William Whiston failed to apocalyptically strike the Earth, 1736. Marie Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI of France, was guillotined, 1793. Actor Peter Bowles born, 1936. Archaeologist George Hourmouziadis died, 2013. World Food Day.
Monday 17th October		-		A tornado, thought to be of strength T8/F4, hit London, 1091. Sculptor Bartolommeo Bandinelli born, 1493. Courtier and poet Philip Sidney died, 1586. Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons (580,000-1,470,000 litres; 154,000-388,000 US gallons) of beer flooded a slum area of London, killing eight, 1814. Laura Secord, Candian heroine of the War of 1812, died, 1868. Actress Rita Heyworth born, 1918. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
Tuesday 18th October		-		Dagobert I was crowned King of the Franks, 629. Poeet Lady Mary Wroth born, 1587. Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, died, 1744. The United States took possession of Alaska, 1867. Actress and politician Melina Mercouri born, 1920. Engineer and businessman Thomas Edison died, 1931.
Wednesday 19th October		-		Roman forces under Scipio defeated Hannibal's army at the Battle of Zama, 202 BCE. Satirist Jonathan Swift died, 1745. Poet and critic Leigh Hunt born, 1784. US President Richard Nixon rejected an Appeals Court ruling that he should turn over the Watergate tapes to the congressional committee investigating the event, 1973. Actress Rebecca Ferguson born, 1983. Environmentalist Margaret Murie died, 2003.
Thursday 20th October		-		Architect and physicist Sir Christopher Wren born, 1632. The US-Canada border was set at the 49th parallel for most of its length with the signing of the Convention of 1818, 1818. Journalist and activist Lydia Maria Child died, 1880. Author Kate Mosse born, 1961. The Sydney Opera House was opened by Queen Elizabeth II fourteen years after construction work began, 1973. Stage magician, skeptic and investigator James Randi died, 2020. World Osteoporosis Day.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, James Randi:

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films containing the word 'cold' in the title, either as a whole word or part of a word. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• I don't know gold dust from diarrhea!
• It has been quite an experience. All against the desert. The greater enemy. I've learnt a lot about the English. So different from all I've been taught. Auf wiedersehen.
• Ain't no man better than me. On account of there's no man around here that ain't old, or full o' mischief.
• She offered me free love. At the time, that was all I could afford.
• I say make them all legal. Meth, ex, opium. An opium den in every mall, that's my platform. Give the people what they want. Tax the shit out of it, then double our pay.

Last issue's baby quotations were from:

• You weren't ugly then. I made you that way.
      -- Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962]
• Fart! Poop! Doody!
      -- The Boss Baby [2017]
• - I'd respect your privacy more if you weren't so secretive.
  - Well I'd tell you more if you didn't want to know so much.
      -- Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead [1991]
• This is no dream! This is really happening!
      -- Rosemary's Baby [1968]
• College is like high school with ashtrays.
      -- She's Having a Baby [1988]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A 5-month-old alpaca in Arkansas who broke his leg and had to have it amputated has been fitted with a prosthetic leg. ● A Savannah cat living in Michigan has broken his brother's Guinness World Record for the tallest living domestic cat, at 18.83" (47.83cm); because he is a therapy cat he is often mistaken for a small panther when out with his owner. ● A campaign by Swiss conservationists in the canton of Aargau to dig hundreds of new ponds has seen the decline of more than half the endangered frog species in the country reversed. ● A family from Tamworth, Staffordshire, got a food delivery from Sainsbury's only to find that their plastic-bag-wrapped bananas came with a hitchhiker - a small Hispaniolan common tree frog. An RSPCA officer, called to take care of the frog, told them that it must have travelled 4,300 miles (6,920km) from the Dominican Republic and was in good health. ● During a routine wildlife survey the Dorset Wildlife Trust recorded the presence of a rare lesser spotter woodpecker at Hollis Mead Organic Farm in Corscombe. There are only known to be 12 breeding pairs in the county and nationally its population has dropped by 83% since 1970. The Trust believe its return is due to the change from industrial to organic farming practices. ● Alaska's Fat Bear Week, in which participants are asked to vote on which wild bear they see pictures of online has bulked up the most ahead of hibernation, has ended with brown bear 747 taking the title for a second time (he won in 2020), tipping the scales at an estimated 1,400lbs (635kg). The contest was not without controversy, with allegations of bots being used to cast votes in the semi-final.


• NASA has confirmed that the impact of the DART probe has changed the orbit of the Dimorphos asteroid by 28-32 minutes, meaning that the mission - to trial whether it would be feasible to deflect an asteroid on collision course with Earth by firing projectiles into it - has been a success. Mission analysts are now studying the tail of debris trailing Dimorphos. ● US Marine Colonel Nicole Mann, 45, has become the first Native American female astronaut in space, after arriving on the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket last weekend. ● Virgin Orbit's 747 jumbo jet Cosmic Girl has arrived in Cornwall to be used for the first satellite launch from the UK. It has been modified to carry a rocket to 35,000' (10km) where the rocket will be released to fire its engines and climb to orbit altitude before releasing its payload, nine small satellites for seven projects in the first flight. Cosmic Girl will conduct test flights ahead of the mission launch, which is expected to receive authorisation in the next few days.


• Canada has agreed to part-fund the purchase of an area of land close to Juno Beach in Normandy, France, to stop a developer building two condominiums on it. Juno was one of the D-Day landing sites in World War II, and there were concerns that the development would affect a privately-owned Canadian museum nearby. The other partner in the purchase is the nearby town of Courseulles-Sur-Mer. ● A "larger than life" statue of Heracles (Hercules), almost 2,000 years old, has been discovered by a team of archaeologists in Philippi, Greece. Parts of the statue were broken off, including a club, which was in pieces, and a lion which would have symbolised a hero. ● The trove of more than 260 gold coins discovered under a kitchen floor during renovation work on a house in Ellerby, East Yorkshire, has sold at auction for £754,000 ($832,300). ● A 230-million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur, discovered in the 1900s near Elgin, Scotland, and embedded in rock has been X-rayed and found to be a near-intact skeleton of a Scleromochlus, a small land-based ancestor of the pterosaurs, the flying dinosaurs.


• US prosecutors have confirmed that all charges against Adnan Syed have been dropped. Syed spent 23 years in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, but analysis by the hit Serial podcast turned up evidence of a mistrial including prosecutors not handing over evidence of other suspects that could have helped his defence. Last month his conviction was quashed and he was due to face a retrial, but more recent analysis of the victim's clothing has also turned up multiple DNA samples from several people, none of them Syed. ● Some of the moai, the large sacred stone statues on Easter Island have been "irreperably damaged" by fire, according to mayor Pedro Edmunds. It is thought that the fire was set deliberately. ● More than a dozen banks in Lebanon have been raided so far this year, by people desperate to get at their own money after a financial crisis led to banks imposing withdrawal limits. ● Calvin Bautista, 36, from New York City, has been in court charged with animal smuggling after customs officers on the US-Canadian border found that he had three Burmese pythons stuffed down his trousers in 2018, contrary to both an international treaty and federal regulations. He faces a fine and up to 20 years in prison. ● Dennis Molla, who was shown on local television in Brooklyn Centre, Minnesota, in 2020, getting emotional because his camper van had been torched and his garage daubed with pro-Biden graffiti because, he claimed, he had Trump 2020 campaign flags on his property, has admitted in court to setting the fire himself. He received insurance payouts and donations via a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign. He will be sentenced for one count of wire fraud at a later date. ● Chess, poker [TFIRs passim], fat bears... where will the curse of alleged cheating strike next, you might ask. Well, competitive Irish dancing, it seems. The Irish Dancing Commission has announced that its ethics committee has received "allegations, with supporting documents, of several grievous breaches of our Code of Conduct". The Commission organises the World Irish Dancing Championships. [Muddy Riverdance, anyone? -Ed]


• SWG3, an arts venue in Glasgow, is operating a system to capture the heat from dancers, tranferring it to a carrier fluid that is then routed to heat pumps where it heats the entire venue. With each dancer generating up to 600W of thermal energy the venue claims to reduce its carbon emissions by 70 tonnes a year and hopes to become "net-zero" by 2025. ● Keep Britain Tidy are introducing a scheme to recycle trawling nets, which have often been dumped at sea or ended up in landfill. ● A collaboration between several universities has led to the creation of solar panels that pass the 30% efficiency barrier by incorporating the "miracle material" perovskite in them. ● The Sphinx rock formation, in the Cairngorms, historically the site of the longest-lasting snow in the UK, is now snow free for only the ninth time in the last 300 years, but the fourth time in the last six. ● Scientists in New Zealand are trialling feeding cattle with a probiotic called Kowbucha to reduce the methane content of their burps. There is certainly an incentive as the New Zealand government has proposed imposing taxes on methane emissions from burping cows, as well as from sheep urine. There are 5 million people in New Zealand, outnumbered by 10 million cattle (both beef and dairy) and 26 million sheep.

IN BRIEF: Last summer Orkney musician Erland Cooper buried the master tape - the only copy - of his next album somewhere on the islands and posted clues to its location on his website. Two fans have solved the mystery and dug up the tape, which Cooper plans to release no matter how damaged the recording is. His music combines field recordings with traditional and electronic elements. ● The Northeastern University School of Law in Boston has apologised after accidentally sending acceptance emails to more than 200 applicants for the next academic year as well as almost 4,000 former applicants, some of whom are enrolled on its courses. ● The latest iPhone 14s have a safety system built in to notify the police if the person carrying them is involved in a car accident causing the phones' accelerometer to detect an impact. In the event of a false alarm the notification can be cancelled within 20 seconds of an alert being sounded. Owners who take their iPhones on rollercoaster rides have discovered that the sudden accelerations are causing their phones to alert the police, and in all the noise the alerts are being missed. ● Somebody is putting up official-looking signs in Pennsylvania parks warning people to be aware of Bigfoot activity. While officials were quick to respond that Bigfoot is neither real nor in Pennsylvania (its usual alleged haunt is the Pacific northwest) there are 124 "credible" sightings in Pennsylvania, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers' Organization. ● The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee recently heard evidence from robot artist Ai-Da and her creator, Aidan Meller. Partway through her evidence, Ai-Da fell asleep and needed to be rebooted... [well, it was the House of Lords... -Ed] ● The Bookbugs and Dragon Tales independent bookshop in Norwich recently launched a campaign to raise £15,000 ($16,500) to give themselves "breathing space" in the current economic climate and fund more outreach work with children. They were stunned when a donation for a third of their target was made in the name of Russell Crowe. Investigation revealed that it was genuine, and was indeed from the film star. ● Lisa Williams, manager of Stennetts Community Cafe in Trimley St Mary has won the Golden Spurtle, awarded to the world's best porridge maker in an annual competition in Carrbridge, in the Scottish Highlands. It was Williams' second triumph, having won in 2019, the last time the competition was held before the pandemic. ● The makers of Texas Pete hot sauce are being sued because the sauce is made in North Carolina, not Texas. ● Anyone with a large enough TV who watched Graham Norton announce the name of the UK city that will host the next Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of current winners Ukraine might have noticed that the prompt card he pulled out of an envelope to read the result from had "Liverpool 2023" printed on its back, before he read the other side... Liverpool's mayor and other officials have criticised hotels across the city which immediately hiked their prices up to ten times over and cancelled already-made (at normal rates) bookings. ● Andy Airey, Mike Palmer and Tim Owen, three fathers who lost their daughters to suicide, have completed a 600-mile (965km) walk between the four UK parliaments to call for suicide prevention to be added to school curricula and to raise money for charity. Last year they met each other for the first time and walked 300 miles (483km) to raise awareness of the issue.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Toy fox terrier Pebbles (Guinness World Records-certified world's oldest living dog, 22), crime author Peter Robinson (DCI Alan Banks series, 72), comedian and actress Judy Tenuta (In Goddess We Trust General Hospital, Menopause The Musical, 72), singer Jody Miller ("Queen of the House", "He Walks Like a Man", "King of the Road", 80), poet, author and engineer Lenny Lipton ("Puff the Magic Dragon", developed technology used in digital 3D projection, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, 82), actor Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, The Six Million Dollar Man, 92), actress Dame Angela Lansbury (Gaslight, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Murder She Wrote, 96).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

15, 17, 34, 38, 47, 50

[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 class were having an English lesson. "Alright, children," the teacher said, "who can give me a sentence with the words 'stranger', 'stranded' and 'straight' in it?"
    Little Simon's hand went up. "When the stranger was stranded on an island, he wanted to get home straight away, Miss."
    "Very good, Little Simon. Now, who can give me a sentence with the words 'repeat', 'release' and 'reply'?"
    Little Mary raised her hand. "On TV the other day I saw a repeat of a show where a man was released from prison and replied to all questions from a reporter with 'no comment', Miss."
    "That's excellent, Little Mary, well done! Now, let's see, who can give me a sentence with the words 'defence', 'defeat' and 'detail' in it?"
    The class thought for a moment before Little Jennifer's hand shot up. "Yes, Little Jennifer?"
    Smiling as only she could, Little Jennifer said, "When I went riding the other day we learned how to go over low jumps, and when the horse goes over defence, defeat go before detail!"

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^{^} ...end of line