Issue ^#730 - 25^th August 2023

Edited by and copyright ©2023 Simon Lamont
( Facebook  /  Twitter / Mastodon )

tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

The latest edition is always available at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/index.htm
The archives are at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/archive/index.htm

The Friday Irregular does not set any cookies or tracking, but our host and linked sites out of our control might.

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 25th August		-		Ivan the Terrible, first Tsar of Russia, born, 1530. The Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British Army, was formed, 1637. Engineer James Watt died, 1819. The New York newspaper The Sun published the first Great Moon Hoax article, reporting the discovery of civilised life on the Moon, 1835. Writer Juliette Adam died, 1936. Singer-songwriter Amy Macdonald born, 1987.
Saturday 26th August		-		An English army easily defeated a French army twice its size at the Battle of Crécy, during the Hundred Years' War, 1346. Artist Frans Hals died, 1666. Chemist Antoine Lavoisier born, 1743. The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, giving women the right to vote, took effect, 1920. Actress Jane Merrow born, 1941. Singer-songwriter Laura Brannigan died, 2004.
Sunday 27th August		-		The Visigoths' sacking of Rome ended after three days, 410. Artist Titian died, 1576. Engineer and Nobel laureate chemist Carl Bosch born, 1874. The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records was published, 1955. Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White died, 1971. Heptathlete Denise Lewis born, 1972.
Monday 28th August		-		King John issued letters patent establishing the borough of Liverpool, 1207. Artist Elisabetta Sirani died, 1665. Writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe born, 1749. The Carrington event, the strongest geomagnetic storm on record to strike the Earth caused widespread disruption across the electrical telegraph network, 1859. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and lynched in Mississippi, 1955. Actress Jennifer Coolidge born, 1961.
Tuesday 29th August		-		The Treaty of Picquigny ended a brief conflict between England and France, 1475. Inca Emperor Atahualpa was executed by Spanish conquistadors, 1533. Philosopher John Locke born, 1632. John Cage's 4'33" premiered at Maverick Concert Hall in Hurley, New York, 1952. Actress Rebecca De Mornay born, 1959. Philanthropist Ruth Goldbloom died, 2012. International Day against Nuclear Tests (UN).
Wednesday 30th August		-		Novelist Mary Shelley born, 1797. The entire Dutch fleet was captured by the British during the War of the Second Coalition, 1799. Radio DJ and broadcaster John Peel born, 1939. Social reformer Alice Salomon died, 1948. Space Shuttle Discovery took off on STS-41-D, its maiden voyage, 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev, final leader of the Soviet Union, died, 2022. International Day of the Disappeared.
Thursday 31st August		-		The capital of Norway was moved from Bergen to Oslo, 1314. King Henry V of England died, 1422. Educator Maria Montessori born, 1870. Nazi Germany mounted a false flag attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, giving themselves a reason to invade Poland and precipitate World War II, 1939. Golfer Pádraig Harrington born, 1971. Actress and burlesque dancer Sally Rand died, 1979.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Goethe:

Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without knowing in the least what it wants.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• - Do you play chess?
  - Yes, but I prefer a game with a better chance of cheating.
• Tea can do many things, Jane, but it can't bring back the dead.
• Ray! I'm gonna say it once. I had nothing to do with your brother's death!
• - What's bonking?
  - Well, it's kind of like table tennis, only with slightly smaller balls.
• We ended up giving the fish to the patrolmen. It's a shame to waste good trout.

Last issue's 'London' quotations were from:

• See you're not allowed to do more than one thing which is why a polymath such as myself prefers to do nothing.
      -- London Boulevard [2016]
• Have you tried talking to a corpse? It's boring.
      -- An American Werewolf in London [1981]
• The car is bullet proof, not politician proof.
      -- London Has Fallen [2016]
• Regret do not understand English - only American.
      -- Charlie Chan in London [1934]
• You have executed a most trusted woman of this court without trial. You say that your motives are honorable? Those that suspect treason in others, should first look into their own hearts for loyalty.
      -- Tower of London [1962]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A farmer in Tayport, Fife, called the SSPCA after seeing a young squirrel, or kit, regularly getting into their henhouse. They found that the kit, which had probably become separated from its mother, was snuggling under a chicken for warmth to sleep. The chicken was not bothered in the slightest. The kit, which was dehydrated, was taken to a wildlife hospital where it will be cared for before being released. ● A tiny river fly called the scarce yellow sally was thought to have died out at the end of the last century but a small number were recently discovered in the River Dee in Cheshire. They were taken to Chester Zoo and a new viable population bred, but there are no plans to release them back into rivers until the waterways' health improves. ● Two crewmembers from a tourist boat off Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, donned scuba gear after a passenger reported a distressed whale. The men spent several hours in the water cutting away ropes and netting that the whale had become tangled in. ● For years crowds gathered near the Albert Bridge in Belfast to watch the murmurations (flying as a flock) of thousands of starlings before they roosted for the night under the bridge, but new lighting on the top and sides of the structure are thought to have discouraged the birds from roosting there, so the council have fitted colour filters and blackout screening to the lights in the hope that the birds will return. ● Police investigating a power outage in Sayerville, New Jersey, are looking for a flying suspect after electricity workers reported finding a fish on the transformer. The suspect is a bird, probably an osprey, "last seen flying south" according to Sayerville Police Department's Facebook page. ● A rare two-headed snake has hatched at a pet shop in Exeter, Devon. ● A baby giraffe with no spots was born at Brights Zoo in Tennessee on July 30^th. She is thought to be the only known solid-coloured reticulated giraffe in the world. ● More than 200 water voles have been released close to Haweswater in the Lake District in an attempt to repopulate the species in the area.


• Astronomers are baffled by the disappearance, over the last four years, of almost all the clouds in Neptune's atmosphere. It is speculated as being connected to the 11-year solar cycle, thought quite how, given that Neptune is the outermost of the major planets, receiving 1/900^th the level of sunlight as the Earth, remains a mystery. ● As this issue is being written it is being reported that India's Chandrayaan-3 has successfully landed near the Moon's south pole. The mission cost less than half the cost of a Russian attempt which went out of control and crashed on Sunday. India has become only the fourth country - after the US, the then-Soviet Union and China - to successfully land a craft on the Moon, and the first to do so in the south polar region. ● A student project at Brown University, Rhode Island, has successfully demonstrated that a deployable sail can be used to de-orbit satellites once their service life has ended. A small CubeSat launched as part of the payload of a SpaceX Transporter 5 in May was fitted with a Kapton polyimide sail and aluminium supports that "popped open like an umbrella" once the satellite reached its target height of 323 miles (520km) above Earth. While some had predicted that the satellite would take around 17 years to deorbit and burn up it seems to have happened in about 15 months.


• An ancient hip bone, or ilium, excavated from a cave in the Grotte du Renne cave system in France in the last Twentieth Century appears to be from a previously unknown species of human. ● The burned-out shell of a Ferrari Mondial Spider Series 1 racing car, once driven by Franco Cortese, Ferrari's first racing driver, and with a body designed by Phin Farina, has sold at auction for nearly $2m (£1.5m). Only 13 of the cars were made. ● Ferry House, a Thames riverbank property in the village of Sunbury, southwest of London, is for sale for £2.25m ($2.84). The house is mentioned in Charles Dickens' 1838 story Oliver Twist. ● It has long been speculated that Paul McCartney was not present at the shoot for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, as he is only seen from behind, but a press pack - including PR notes, mocked-up artwork and unreleased photographs for both Sgt Pepper's and the unreleased Sessions album - that is due to be auctioned in Wiltshire has disproved the myth, as one photograph from the same shoot shows the side of his face. The pack is expected to fetch up to £7,000 ($8,840).


• Seventeen items that once belonged to Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing, which were stolen from Sherborne School in Dorset in 1984, are to be returned. The items came to light when Julia Turing (no relation) from Conifer, Colorado, offered to lend them to the University of Colorado for display, claiming to be a relative of his. Julia Turing, who changed her name from Julie Schwinghamer in 1988, took the items, including a miniature OBE medal and a letter from King George VI, from the school archives, but then settled a civil case brought against her by the school in 2020. Alan Turing was a pupil at the school and his family had presented the items to the archives. ● Greek claims that the Elgin Marbles are no longer safe at the British Museum after it emerged that more than 1,500 items had been stolen, damaged or destroyed - many by a single employee over many years, are being described as "blatant opportunism" by the chair of the British Museum All-Party Parliamentary Group. While a full list of the missing items has not been published it is thought that they are all small, including gold, jewellery and gemstones. The C5^th marble sculptures were removed from the Acropolis in Athens on the orders of Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, between 1801 and 1812 and their presence in the British Museum has long been a source of controversy. ● A woman in California who thought she heard noises from her roof went outside to investigate and instead discovered a man emerging from the crawlspace under her house, where he had been living for months. He was arrested.


• A majority of Ecuadorians have voted in a referendum to ban oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth, covering about 2.5m acres (1m hectares) of rainforest where the Amazon, Andes and equator meet. ● A partially-wind-powered cargo ship has set sail from China to Brazil to test the feasibility of using rigid British-designed sails to replace or augment fossil fuels for powering shipping. The 123'- (37.5m)-tall 'Windwings' sails are made of the same material as wind turbine blades and fold down when the ship is in dock. The voyage is expected to take six weeks. The shipping industry is estimated to account for about 2.1% of global carbon dioxide emissions. ● The city of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories is effectively a ghost town after almost all of its 20,000 residents heeded evacuation warnings as wildfires closed in last week. Of the 2,600 who remained it is thought that about half are essential workers. The fire appeared to stall about 9 miles (15km) from the city limits over the weekend. On Monday there were 1,037 wildfires burning across Canada, although cooler weather in the west gave firefighters hope of damping down some of them.

IN BRIEF: Eight people were rescued after spending 12 hours stuck in a makeshift cable car in Pakistan that got stuck over a ravine when cables broke. One child was lifted off by helicopter, the other children, who had been on their way to school, and adults were taken off by zip line after nightfall made helicopter use impractical. ● A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that AI-created art cannot be protected by copyright. ● A brother and sister who were adopted separately a year and a half apart by the same family have discovered that they are full biological siblings after their adoptive mother gave them Ancestry.com DNA kits to help them discover their origins. ● Comedian Lorna Rose Treen has won the Dave's Funniest Joke of the [Edinburgh] Fringe award with "I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah." ● A fruit farm on Hayling Island, Hampshire, which also sells sunflowers to visitors and allows people to pose for photographs amidst their sunflower fields has found that it has a rather unusual problem this year - more and more people are taking their clothes off to pose naked or semi-naked amidst the flowers, often for social media photographs... ● A 64-year-old man has been rescued after being stranded on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas for three days when his boat became disabled. He was spotted by a routine US Coast Guard flight looking for stranded Cuban migrants. ● Audio streaming service Spotify is trying to steer people away from "white noise" podcasts, which contain sounds such as waves, rain or static played on a loop as a form of relaxation, rather than spoken content. ● A suspected Chinese dissident has been detained after apparently riding a jet ski about 250 miles (400km) from China to South Korea. He had tied five 6.6 gallon (25 litre) fuel containers to the jet ski and carried binoculars and a compass. ● More than 200 people wearing inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex costumes took part in a 100-yard (91.2m) race at Emerald Downs racecourse in Seattle. The event, which was started in 2017 as a corporate team-building exercise, was won by 'Ocean Kim' from Hawaii. ● The first womb transplant in the UK has been performed, with a woman who has had two children donating her womb to her sister who was born without a functioning uterus.

UPDATES: GM's self-driving taxi subsidiary Cruise has been told to immediately halve its San Francisco fleet less than two weeks after being granted an operating license, after its cars came to a standstill blocking a busy road [as reported in an earlier issue], drove into wet cement, getting stuck, and collided with a car and an on-call fire engine.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Clothing store owner Laura Ann Carleton (Mag.Pi, 66), comic book artist Dan Green (Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Wolverine, 70), computer scientist John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe Inc., devised the Warnock algorithm for determining hidden surfaces in 3D image generation, co-developed PostScript, 82), film editor Garth Craven (Legally Blonde, Straw Dogs [1971], Bring Me the Head of Aldredo Garcia, 84), US TV producer & writer David Jacobs (creator of Dallas, Knots Landing and Paradise, 84), music executive Jerry Moss (co-founder of A&M Records, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 88), journalist and broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson (Ghostwatch, Parkinson, Give Us A Clue, 88).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

2, 7, 25, 26, 28, 54

[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 come home from her afternoon sports at school. "Did you have fun, Little Jennifer?" her mother asked her.
    "Well, Mummy," Little Jennifer said, "we played soccer and my team would have won if wasn't for Cinderella!"
    Her mother looked bemused. "Cinderella?"
    "That's what we called Little Mary, Mummy."
    "Why Cinderella?"
    Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Because she kept running away from the ball!"

---

^{^} ...end of line