Issue ^#762 - 12^th April 2024

Edited by and copyright ©2024 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 12th April     - Day 103/366		-		The Union Flag became the standard flag of English and Scottish ships, 1606. Luthier Nicola Amati died, 1684. Photographer Imogen Cunningham born, 1883. Nurse Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, died, 1912. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to enter outer space, aboard Vostok 1, 1965. Comic book artist J. Scott Campbell born, 1973. International Day of Human Space Flight.
Saturday 13th April     - Day 104/366		-		Krum, khan of the Bulgarian Khanate, died, 814. Constantinople fell to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade the day after they breached its walls, 1204. Catherine de' Medici, queen of King Henry II of France, born, 1519. The CIA launched the MK-Ultra mind-control program, 1953. Singer Lou Bega born, 1975. Writer Muriel Spark died, 2006.
Sunday 14th April     - Day 105/366		-		Mark Antony was defeated by legions loyal to the Roman Senate at the Battle of Forum Gallorum, 43 BCE. Cartographer Abraham Ortelius born, 1527. Philanthropist Lady Catherine Jones died, 1740. John Wilkes Booth shot US President Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre, 1865. Actress Julie Christie born, 1940. Singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley died, 1999. World Quantum Day.
Monday 15th April     - Day 106/366		-		Polymath Leonardo da Vinci born, 1452. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published, 1755. Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, died, 1865. Singer and actress Bessie Smith born, 1894. The RMS Titanic sank 160 minutes after hitting an iceberg, 1912. Supercentenarian Emma Morano, the last surviving person verified as having been born in the 1800s, died, 2017. Universal Day of Culture. World Art Day. Hillsborough Disaster Memorial in Liverpool.
Tuesday 16th April     - Day 107/366		-		The Revolt of the Comuneros against the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V began in Castile, 1520. Astronomer and cartographer Jacques Cassini died, 1759. Artist Ford Madox Brown born, 1821. The Nazi high security prisoner of war camp Oflag IV-C, better known as Colditz, was liberated, 1945. Biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, whose work led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, died, 1958. Actress Claire Foy born, 1984. World Voice Day.
Wednesday 17th April     - Day 108/366		-		Explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano reached what is now New York Harbor, 1524. Inventor, publisher and politician Benjamin Franklin died, 1790. Ufologist George Adamski born, 1891. Apollo 13 returned to Earth safely after experiencing an accident four days earlier while on the way to the Moon, 1970. Actress Jennifer Garner born, 1972. Photographer and musician Linda McCartney died, 1998. World Hemophilia Day.
Thursday 18th April     - Day 109/366		-		Italian noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, born 1480. The British advancement by sea began during the American Revolution, 1775. Lawyer Clarence Darrow born, 1857. Artist Gustave Moreau died, 1898. The RMS Carpathia arrived at New York City carrying 705 survivors from the RMS Titanic, 1912. Journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead during rioting, 2019. World Amateur Radio Day. International Day for Monuments and Sites (UNESCO).

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Leonardo da Vinci:

An instant has no time, for time is formed by the movement of the instant and instants are the boundaries of time.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• She is nothing fair and I like her not!
• You're going to wake up one day, and the temporary job you picked up just to stay alive is going to be your full-time life.
• This is not a good island for airplanes.
• If this wasn't my house I'd go home!
• The US Navy. It's not just a job, it's an adventure!

Last issue's 'white' quotations were from:

• Made it, Ma! Top of the world!
      -- White Heat [1949]
• - We came up here for the snow. Where're you keepin' it?
  - Well, we take it in during the day!
      -- White Christmas [1954]
• - Quiet night?
  - We're under attack by squirrels, sir. They are organized and they have the numbers.
  - Little stinkers trying to get into the bird feeder again?
      -- White House Down [2013]
• I change my cars as regularly as a snake sheds its skin.
      -- The Lair of the White Worm [1988]
• Look man, you can listen to Jimi but you can't hear him. There's a difference man. Just because you're listening to him doesn't mean you're hearing him.
      -- White Men Can't Jump [1992]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• Three Asiatic lion cubs have been born at London Zoo as part of an international conservation breeding programme. The population of the subspecies in the wild is thought to be just 600-700. ● When an articulated lorry overturned at a corner on the bank of the Lookingglass Creek in Oregon at the end of last month it spilled most of its cargo. Its cargo was 102,000 Chinook salmon smolts (young salmon), about 77,000 of which slid down the bank into the creek and swam off. The salmon were being taken to the Immaha River to be released as part of a programme to boost levels of wild salmon. Some of the smelts were sighted in the lower Grande Ronde River withing 48 hours of their accidental release, from where they will head to the ocean then back to the creek to spawn once they have matured.


• XTE J1810-197, the closest magnetar - a highly magnetic neutron star - to Earth at just 8,000 light years away, has begun emitting radio signals unlike any other previously-observed magnetars. The signals appear to be spiralling through space, suggesting some kind of interaction with superheated plasma above the star's north pole, but further study will be needed to confirm it. To add to the mystery the star had been dormant for more than a decade. ● If you are the sort of person to get excited about the number of megapixels in your phone's camera, you might like to know that the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera which will be installed in the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile has been completed. It has 3,200 megapixels, making it the most powerful camera yet built. It is a bit big to go a phone though; it is the size of a small car and weighs 6,600lbs (3,000kg). The camera will image the entire visible sky every 3-4 nights and should lead to the discovery of up to 20 billion stars and galaxies over a decade. ● Solar eclipses are not especially rare, but this week's was, in that it passed over land, tracking a line from Mexico to Canada's eastern seaboard. One unexpected result of its passage was a significant spike in searches for, and in streaming services playing, Bonnie Tyler's 1983 power ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart". It is thought that the eclipse could have netting her about £1m ($1.26m).


• Archaeologists working on the site of a housing development in Grove, near Wantage, Oxfordshire, have discovered a "remarkable" Roman villa as well as evidence of the site having been occupied since the Bronze Age. ● A remarkable flat in Birkenhead, Merseyside, has been granted Grade II listed status. The flat was occupied by Ron Gittins, an untrained artist who built a lion's head and a minotaur's head around two fireplaces, painted Egyptian and Greek murals from floor to ceiling in various rooms and created a Roman altar in the kitchen. The "Outside Art" was discovered after Gittins died in 2019, after which a campaign was launched to preserve it. An anonymous donor provided the funds for the campaign to buy the building, which will now become a creative arts and mental wellbeing centre. ● The Crosby-Scheyen Codex, the earliest extant Christian liturgical text and one of the earliest books still in existence is to be auctioned later this year. Thought to have been written by a single scribe over 40 years the codex consists of 52 leaves, written on both sides. It is expected to sell for at least $2.6m (£2m) at Christie's in New York. ● Proving somewhat more valuable than an early religious book a near-pristine copy of the first issue of Action Comics, dated June, 1938, has been sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for $6m (£4.76m). Action Comics #1 is possibly the most significant comic book ever published, as it marked the debut of Superman. There are only thought to be about 100 copies still in existence, with just two known to be in better condition.


• A French couple have been given a one-year suspended sentence for keeping 169 cats and 7 dogs in their 861 sqft (80m²) [about a third the size of a tennis court] flat in Nice. Many of the animals were dehydrated, malnourished and infected with parasites. A psychiatrist had diagnosed the woman as having "Noah's syndrome", a compulsion to take in animals, even when incapable of properly caring for them. ● New York state investigators have identified the skeletal remains of a man which were washed up on a Lake Ontario shore in 1992. In 2008 a DNA profile was uploaded to the FBI's national DNA database but failed to find a match. A new sample obtained two years ago was compared with unsolved cases in Canada and the Lake Ontario region and matched to family members of Vincent C. Stack, who went missing around December 4^th 1990, believed to have gone over the Niagara Falls. His body is thought to have been carried about 15 miles (24km) to the mouth of the Niagara River then another 130 miles (209km) across Lake Ontario. ● New York City authorities are being mocked for having created an AI chatbot to help small business owners, only for it to give them incorrect advice on local policies and advise them to break the law. ● A Sacremento, California, resident whose parcels were stolen from his porch was stunned when he checked his home security camera footage to see that a man had disguised himself by hiding in a bin bag, waddled up to the door and taken the packages. ● On Easter Sunday thieves got into a Los Angeles cash storage facility and made off with at least $30m (£24m). No alarms were triggered and the theft was not discovered until the next day. It is thought that they had got in through the roof to commit one of the biggest cash thefts in Los Angeles history. There are, as yet, no identified suspects.


• The introduction of the ultra-low emissions zone (ULEZ) in London has been controversial from the start, with cameras installed by Transport for London (TfL) to monitor vehicles, using license plate identification technology to identify polluters. Protesters have come up with a novel response. Several cameras have been damaged and bat boxes fitted just below them. Bats are protected under British law and it is illegal to disturb their roosts, meaning that TfL engineers should not be able to legally access the cameras to repair them. ● Climate scientists are warning that climate change could be moving "into uncharted territory", with the last ten months running each breaking records. According to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service March 2024 was 1.6^oC (2.9^oF) warmer than pre-industrial levels.

IN BRIEF: Google Books' practice of indexing published material could be backfiring. Nothing to do with authors or publishers not giving consent, the problem is the vast amount of AI-generated rubbish being published online. Google's Ngram language-tracking tools, used by academics, is based on data from Google Books, so its results and value are considerably reduced. ● No, it is not just old(er) folk complaining that "things aren't as good as they were"; analysis of over 12,000 songs in the English language and across different genres, released over the last 40 years, has found that "vocabulary richness, readability, complexity and the number of repeated lines" of lyrics has become simpler, and lyrics have become increasingly focused on negative emotions and "me" or "mine". ● Royal Mail has delivered a card to a house in Hull 27 years after it was posted. The current occupier of the house is still in touch with the former occupant to whom the card was addressed, so was able to pass it on. ● Russell Cook, 27, nicknamed "The Hardest Geezer" is claiming to be the first person to run the full length of Africa, passing through 16 countries and raising more than £570,000 ($719,000) over the 352 days it took. His claim is being challenged by the World Runners Association, a group of seven athletes who have circumnavigated the globe on foot, and who claim that Jesper Kenn Olsen, one of their members, ran the length of Africa during a "world run" challenge between December 2008 and 2010.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Guitarist Michael Ward (School of Fish, The Wallflowers, "I Don't Wanna Be", 57), actor Adrian Schiller (Victoria, The Last Kingdom, The Musketeers, 60), designer and modelmaker David Barrington Holt (Jim Henson Company's Creature Shop, produced Dinosaurs [TV, 1991-94], Cats & Dogs, 78), racing driver and TV director Bruce Kessler (24 Hours of Le Mans, The Monkees, The Rockford Files, 88), singer, actor and voice actor Jean-Paul Vignon (The Devil's Brigade, Shrek, 500 Days of Summer, 89), journalist and author Lynn Reid Banks (one of the first female news reporters on British TV, The L-Shaped Room, The Indian in the Cupboard, 94), theoretical physicist Peter Higgs (theorised the Higgs boson elementary particle which was later confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider, 2013 Nobel Physics laureate, 94), BBC TV executive Sir Paul Fox (commissioned Dad's Army and The Two Ronnies, conceived Sports Personality of the Year, founding editor of Grandstand, 98).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

4, 18, 24, 35, 45, 57

[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...

    It was nearly the end of term and the children were being told their grades before their reports went out. Little Jennifer had come home and was sitting at the kitchen table eating a biscuit. "Well, Little Jennifer," her mother said, "did you get any of your grades today?"
    "Oh, yes, Mummy, Miss told us how we did in maths and history."
    "And how did you do?"
    "I got a 'C' in maths, Mummy, which is the same as last term and Miss said I was like Queen Elizabeth I, King Harold and Julius Caesar!"
    Her mother looked puzzled. "How so?"
    Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Because I've gone down in history, Mummy!"

---

^{^} ...end of line