Issue ^#688 - 28^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 28th October		-		The Forbidden City was completed and Beijing became the official capital of the Ming Dynasty, 1420. Philosopher Erasmus born, 1466. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published, 1726. Abigail Adams, writer and second First Lady of the United States, died, 1818. Soccer player Lucy Bronze born, 1991. Poet Ted Hughes died, 1998. International Animation Day.
Saturday 29th October		-		Explorer and politician Sir Walter Raleigh was executed, 1618. Wilhelm Leibniz made the first recorded use of the long s (ſ) as a symbol of the integral in calculus, 1675. Physicist Laura Bassi, the first woman to gain a doctorate in science, born, 1711. The first computer-to-computer link was established on the ARPANET, 1969. Musician and songwriter Toby Smith born, 1970. Etiquette expert Letitia Baldrige died, 2012.
Sunday 30th October		-		Architect Sir Christopher Wren born, 1632. Spanish forces failed to retake Jamaica from the English at the Battle of Ocho Rios in the Anglo-Spanish War, 1657. Shipbuilder and philanthropist William H. Webb died, 1899. Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was broadcast across the United States, causing panic in some places, 1938. Singer-songwriter Grace Slick born, 1939. Rock music manager and real estate agent Linda S. Stein was murdered, 2007. Mischief Night in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries.
Monday 31th October		-		Leiden University Library opened, 1587. Gardener and diarist John Evelyn born, 1620. Artist Marie Bashkirtseff died, 1884. The BBC broadcast the drama Ghostwatch, causing some panic in Britain, 1992. Singer and actress Willow Smith born, 2000. Actor Sir Sean Connery died, 2020. Hallowe'en. Start of the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
Tuesday 1st November		-		The Dutch coast was devastated by the All Saints' Flood, 1570. Spencer Perceval, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, born, 1762. Tsar Alexander III of Russia died. 1894. Ansel Adams photographed a moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941. Physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski born, 1978. Diana Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington, died, 2010. World Vegan Day.
Wednesday 2nd November		-		Marie Antoinette, queen consort of King Louis XVI of France, born, 1755. Civil engineer Theodore Judah died, 1863. The Boers besieged Ladysmith during the Second Boer War, 1899. Actor Burt Lancaster born, 1913. Penguin Books was found not guilty of obscenity in R v Penguin Books Ltd, over the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1960. Singer Eva Cassidy died, 1996.
Thursday 3rd November		-		The Peace of Étaples between King Henry VII of England and King Charles VIII of France was signed, 1492. Artist Annibale Caracci born, 1560. Philanthropist Carrie Steele Logan died, 1900. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, carrying Laika, the first animal to enter orbit, 1957. Archer Alison Williamson born, 1971. Skiffle singer-songwriter Lonnie Donegan died, 2002.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Jack Handey, in The Lost Deep Thoughts:

If they ever have a haunted house for dogs, I think a good display would be a bathtub full of soapy water.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• Excuse me, I really must gibber at the oriole window.
• We lost the firehouse. It's a Starbucks now.
• These Italian liners, ya know, they couldn't compete for speed, so they built these floating art palaces instead.
• Ryan, your daughter was born on June 6th, 2005. Right? It's the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year, 2005. 666. I believe this is no coincidence. She's part of the prophecy.
• Beware all wenches.

Last issue's star quotations were from:

• My God, man. Do you want an acute case on your hands? This woman has immediate postprandial, upper-abdominal distention. Now, out of the way! Get out of the way!
      -- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home [1986]
• Bomb, this Doolittle. You are *not* to detonate in the bomb bay. I repeat, you are NOT to detonate in the bomb bay!
      -- Dark Star [1974]
• What do stars do? They shine.
      -- Stardust [2007]
• - Why, you stuck up... half-witted... scruffy-looking... Nerf-herder!
  - Who's scruffy-looking?
      -- Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back [1980]
• Give my regards to King Tut, asshole.
      -- Stargate [1994]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• One of the bison reintroduced to the UK as part of a rewilding project in Kent [TFIrs passim] has given birth to the first bison to be born in the wild in Britain for thousands of years. ● The Des Moines Police Department in Iowa has apologised for and cancelled an alert they issued for a CCTV "mountain lion sighting" on the city outskirts, as they had determined that the grainy video was actually of a house cat. ● Scientists have identified six new species of rainfrog on the eastern slopes of the Equadorian Andes, and recommended that they be added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list of threatened species, as all six were found within a 12.4 mile (20km) radius of deforested land. ● Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen from the University of Zurich has recorded 53 sea creatures that were thought not to use vocal communications vocalising. The finding reinforces the evolutionary biology claim that vertebrates that breathe through their noses and communicate with sound are descended from a single ancestor which lived 400 million years ago. ● A woman has been reunited with Jimi Hendrix, her cat, six years after he escaped through an open window in a friend's house.


• The International Space Station had to fire its thrusters for 305 seconds last Sunday in a Pre-Determined Avoidance Manoeuvre (PDAM) to move out of the way of a fragment from the Russian Cosmos 1408 satellite, which Russia had destroyed with a test missile last November, to much criticism that it would leave a cloud of debris. ● The Curiosity Rover on Mars has finally reached Mount Sharp, which it has been trundling towards for the best part of the last decade; the site was identified by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as somewhere with a high concentration of salty minerals. Curiosity has already identified magnesium sulfate (epsom salts), sodium chloride (table salt) and calcium sulfate (gypsum) and "popcorn-textured nodules", all of which suggest that there was once water at the site. ● Scientists have combined images taken by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer probe, which has taken images of space in all directions for the last 12 years to create a time lapse of the entire sky over the period. ● The Geotail satellite, a joint mission between NASA and Jaxa, the Japanese Space Agency, which has been relaying measurements of the tail of Earth's magnetosphere for the last 30 years, may be ended soon as its backup data recorder has failed; the main one failed in 2012.


• A coroner has declared as treasure a 400-year-old gold ring emblazoned with a gryphon found by a metal detectorist in the grounds of Alex Hollwood's Kent home. Hollywood, ex-wife of Bake Off's Paul Hollywood will receive half the sale value of the ring, estimated to fetch up to £30,000 ($34,700). ● Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) is to be the first Asian American to feature on US currency when a quarter (25c; 22p) coin bearing her image goes into circulation next week. ● Archaeologists working in Iraq to reconstruct the c.700 BCE Mashki gate in Ninevah, which ISIS militants destroyed in 2016, have discovered Assyrian rock carvings dating to the same period. ● The wreck of the 17^th Century Swedish warship Applet (Apple) has been found in waters just east of Stockholm. Applet was a sister ship of the Vasa which sank minutes into her 1628 maiden voyage and was raised in 1961. Unlike Vasa, Applet was built broader and more stable in the water and served for 30 years before being sunk in 1659 to form part of a barrier to protect Stockholm from enemy fleets. No decision has been made on whether to raise her. ● The earliest-known star map, dating to the second century BCE has been discovered on a parchment found in Sinai, Egypt. ● The Mary Ferrell Foundation, which holds the most detailed and complete directory of records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is suing the US government and the National Archives over their failure to release all the remaining withheld documents. President Clinton signed the JFK Records Collection Act 1992 into law, requiring them to be released by 26^th October 2017, but both the TIFG^* and President Biden postponed the release. ● A "virtual autopsy" of a 17^th Century mummified child, the only unidentified body in the crypt of an aristocratic Austrian family, using technology including CT scans, has identified him as Reichard Wilhelm, first-born son of the Count of Starhemberg. ● The Lowry arts centre in Salford has bought L.S. Lowry's iconic Going to the Match for £7.8m ($9m). The painting was sold by the Players Foundation which had loaned it to the Lowry but had to sell it because of the financial crisis. There had been fears that it would go abroad or be sold to a private owner and taken out of public display. ● A mysterious object first seen on sonar by a submersible pilot near the wreck of RMS Titanic 30 years ago and thought to possibly be another shipwreck has been identified as a volcanic reef.
  
  [^*Twice-Indicted Former Guy]


• Vatican police detained an American tourist who, angry at being told he could not have an audience with the Pope, threw one ancient Roman bust to the floor of the Museo Chiaramonti, then knocked over another as he tried to flee, pursued by staff members. One of the busts lost its nose. ● Fergus MacLeoud, an executive at the Saudi Aramco oil company, was arrested in India for taking a satellite phone to a yoga "wellness" retreat in the Himalayas; satellite phones are banned in India after the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbia terrorist attacks used them to communicate. ● A man who tried to rob a post office in Cowley, Oxfordshire, with an orange Sainbury's bag for life over his head fled empty-handed when the clerk pointed out all the CCTV security cameras surrounding him; he was later spotted by police and arrested while trying to shoplift chicken breasts in a Co-operative supermarket. ● A motorbike rider pulled over by an Arkansas state trooper after a pursuit burst into flames after the trooper tasered him as he tried to escape on foot, sparking a can of petrol in his backpack. Officers extinguished the fire and the man has been hospitalised, with charges including felony fleeing, reckless driving, failure to register a vehicle, driving with a suspended licence and with no insurance hanging over him. ● Liverpool police were "lost for words" when they seized a car being driven in Liverpool. The yellow BMW was badly damaged after having crashed on the M6, with its front smashed in and its bonnet bent in half, blocking the driver's view. ● A woman in Hadley, Massachusetts, has pleaded not guilty to assault and battery charges after unleashing a swarm on bees on sheriff's deputies who were trying to serve her with an eviction notice. At least one of the deputies was allergic to bee stings and had to receive hospital treatment as a result.


• The record low water levels on the Mississippi River have left more than 1,500 barges stranded between northern Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. ● Researchers have concluded that the wildfires that hit California in 2020 released about twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as the state had cut over the previous 17 years. ● At least nine electric vehicles spontaneously caught fire in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian as seawater formed a "salt bridge" between their batteries' terminals. ● Just Stop Oil protesters, whose exploits have included throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers [TFIr passim] and spraypainting car dealers' and oil companies' windows have thrown cake in the face of the waxwork of King Charles at Madame Tussaud's in London. The stunt has widely been seen as a shot in their own foot as, while Prince of Wales, the King had long been a vocal campaigner for environmental issues [We hope the cake did not contain palm oil... -Ed].

IN BRIEF: Scientists at the University of Denmark claim to have achieved a data transmission rate of 1.8 petabits/second (more than the total volume of global Internet traffic every second, per second) with a single laser and an optical processor. ● The University of York is being mocked as over-woke for using random strings of letters instead of students' names in their assigned email addressed because their names might "no longer reflect their identity" over the years they attend the university. ● Seventy-five years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) test flight NASA (NACA's successor) is launching ther Quesst [sic.] mission to develop a plane that will break the sound barrier without creating the tell-tale sonic boom. ● Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotherham were late for a dual press conference they had announced to call for the government to increase funding to train operators TransPennine Express and Northern; the train they were due to take to get to the conference had been cancelled... ● Soccer fan Santiago Sanchez, walking from his Spanish home to Doha in Qatar for the World Cup, has disappeared somewhere in Iran. ● Florida resident Kelsie Taylor, 30, found a novel way to tell her sister, Kendall Wright, that she was pregnant, thanks to a colleague of Wright's. Wright is a sonographer and first found out when she walked in on a patient to perform a sonogram and discovered it was Kelsey. "I knew it would be a huge shock and extremely emotional, because we're so close," Taylor told reporters.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Investigative journalist Arshad Sharif (Dunya News, Aaj News, ARY News, 49), actor and comedian Leslie Jordan (Will and Grace, American Horror Story, Murphy Brown, 67), politician Ash Carter (US Secretary of Defense [2015-2017] who oversaw the pushback of IS in Syria and Iraq, and lifted the ban on transgender people serving in the US military and women serving in all military occupations and roles, 68), bassist Gregg Philbin (REO Speedwagon, 75), businessman Dietrich Mateschitz (co-founder of Red Bull, the Wings for Life spinal cord research foundation and the World Stunt Awards, 78), actor Ron Masak (The Twilight Zone, Murder, She Wrote, Ice Station Zebra, 86), TV animation producer Jules Bass (co-founder of Rankin/Bass Productions, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Thundercats, 87), Iranian hermit Amou Haji (dubbed "the world's dirtiest man" for not washing or bathing for more than 50 years, 93-94), singer Janet Thurlow ("I Can't Believe You're in Love With Me", Lionel Hampton's Orchestra, gave a career boost to Quincy Jones, 96).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

2, 7, 11, 20, 38, 45

[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 had been to her grandmother's house to watch The Wizard of Oz. After her father had picked her up and driven her home her mother said to her "My mother, your Granny, loves that film, Little Jennifer, and I know she will have enjoyed watching it with you. What did you think of it?"
    "Well, Mummy," Little Jennifer said, "it was good but that wicked witch was really scary."
    "Don't worry, Little Jennifer," her mother smiled comfortingly, "witches like that don't exist outside of stories."
    Little Jennifer thought for a moment. "But, Mummy," she said, "I once overhead Daddy telling Uncle Steven that Granny didn't let you go out with him for weeks after he first met her, and he said she was a real old witch!"

---

^{^} ...end of line