Issue ^#779 - 9^th August 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 9th August     - Day 222/366		-		The Visigoths defeated a larger Roman army under Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople during the Gothic War, 378. Irene of Athens, empress consort, regent then empress of the Eastern Roman Empire, died, 803. Architect and engineer Thomas Telford born, 1757. Henry David Thoreau published Walden, 1854. Author Tove Jansson born, 1914. Physicist James Van Allen died, 2006. International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples (UN).
Saturday 10th August     - Day 223/366		-		Queen Elizabeth I of England and Dutch rebels fighting against Spanish rule signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, 1585. Businessman Henri Nestlé born, 1814. Aviator and engineer Otto Lilienthal died, 1896. David Berkowitz was arrested in Yonkers, New York, for the "Son of Sam" killings over the previous year, 1977. Chef and broadcaster Jennifer Paterson died, 1999. Soccer player Sophia Smith born, 2000. World Lion Day. International Biodiesel Day.
Sunday 11th August     - Day 224/366		-		Hadrian was proclaimed Roman emperor, 117. Writer Enid Blyton born, 1897. Philanthropist Mary Sumner died, 1921. Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil were granted a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio communication, used today for wi-fi, mobile phones and two-way radio communications, 1942. Computer scientist Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., born, 1950. Actor and comedian Robin Williams committed suicide, 2014.
Monday 12th August     - Day 225/366		-		The border between Sweden and the Novgorod Republic (now part of Russia) became regulated for the first time by the Treaty of Nöteborg, 1323. Poet William Blake died, 1827. Theosophist Helena Blavatsky born, 1831. The IBM Personal Computer was released, 1981. Boxer Tyson Fury born, 1988. Actress Lauren Bacall died, 2021. World Elephant Day. International Youth Day (UN).
Tuesday 13th August     - Day 226/366		-		Cardinal Richelieu was appointed prime minister of France by King Louis XIII, 1624. Physicist and mathematician Rasmus Bartholin born, 1625. Artist Eugène Delacroix died, 1863. Actress Jane Carr born, 1950. East Germany closed the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin and began construction of the Berlin Wall, 1961. Chef and television presenter Julia Child died, 2004. International Lefthanders Day. World Organ Donation Day.
Wednesday 14th August     - Day 227/366		-		King Duncan I of Scotland was killed in the Battle of Bothnagowan, 1040. John Davis made the first recorded sighting of the Falkland Islands, 1592. Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, born, 1642. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game relocated 76 beavers from Northwestern Idaho by parachuting them into the Chamberlain Basin in Central Idaho, 1948. Tennis player Elena Baltacha born, 1983. Actress Gale Sondergaard died, 1985.
Thursday 15th August     - Day 228/366		-		Macbeth, King of Scotland, was killed at the Battle of Lumphanan, 1057. Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, born, 1615. The Tivoli Gardens amusement park opened in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1843. Sculptor and illustrator Leonard Baskin born, 1922. The Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York City, widely accepted as the birth of stadium rock, 1965. Computer and information research scientist Kateryna Yushchenko died, 2001.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Robin Williams:

You're only given a little spark of madness; you mustn't lose it.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• I'm the Guy. The real Guy. And l say we go in, we beat this unwinnable level, and get to the other side. Where untold riches and a bounty fit for 10 kings awaits us!
• I need to find out if I'm as gifted at peace as I am at war. They've awarded me the rank of Admiral and left me to my own devices, which suits me fine. I'll travel the universe and carry with me a precious cargo. Because I have a promise to keep.
• Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.
• Wanna see what I got you today? It's a mockingjay pin, to protect you. And as long as you have it, nothing bad will happen to you, okay? I promise.
• Did you ever pick your teeth up with broken fingers?

Last issue's 'bomb' quotations were from:

• We've landed totally undetected, thanks to the my genius in creating the noiseless shush-copter.
      -- The Nude Bomb [1980]
• There are days I'm invisible, I can do whatever I want. I must be careful not to lose that ability.
      -- Louder Than Bombs [2015]
• Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.
      -- Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964]
• That's not Rosanna. That's a jigsaw puzzle.
      -- Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs [1966]
• You have to adopt the mentality of an Irish street cop: the world is a bad place, people are lazy morons, minorities are criminals, sex is sick but interesting. Ask yourself, what would scare my grandmother or piss off my grandfather? And that's a Fox story.
      -- Bombshell [2019]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• The mummified body of a woolly rhinoceros, complete with horns, has been found by gold miners in Kolyma, in the far northeast of Russia. The rhinoceros, which lived during the last ice age (115,000-11,700 years ago), was preserved in permafrost, and will now be studied by scientists. The bodies of extinct mammoths and bison have previously been found in the same region. ● A Persian onager has been born at Chester Zoo. The species, related to domestic donkeys, is one of the rarest in the world. ● In Cornwall a farmer-led four-year trial of vaccinating badgers against bovine tuberculosis has suggested that it would be a viable way of protecting cattle from the disease and sparing badgers from controversial culling. ● The recent torrential rain in Brazil's Rio Grande du Sol state has uncovered an "almost complete preserved" fossilised dinosaur skeleton which scientists believe could be around 233 million years old, belonging to one of the earliest known species of dinosaur, a member of the Herrerasauridae family which lived during the Triassic period when the Earth's land was a single continent called Pangea. ● Police in Palmhurst, Texas, were called out this week to rescue a cat that had its head stuck in a jar. They managed to capture the cat and take it to an animal welfare centre where the jar was removed and the cat is being looked after. ● A humpback whale which is missing its tail has been seen in the Salish Sea, between Washington State and British Columbia. Researchers at The Whale Museum on nearby San Juan Island suggest that the tail probably became entangled in something like fishing ropes and was amputated. There were 16 confirmed sightings of humpback whales with their tales entangled off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington last year. ● A humpback whale has been sighted off Burleigh Heads, on the Queensland coast of Australia, with its tail entangled in commercial fishing rope. Divers managed to cut away most of the rope but part of it was so deeply embedded in the whale's skin that it could not be safely removed without endangering the whale further.


• NASA is sending a repair kit to the International Space Station (ISS) for the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope, which is attached to the station. The telescope has 56 X-ray photon detectors to study neutron stars, with the aim of allowing astronomers to calculate their size, but in late May its thermal shielding developed a number of light leaks ranging in size from pinholes to the size of a postage stamp, rendering the telesope less functional while the ISS is in daylight. To repair the damage NASA are sending a number of wedge-shaped patches (including spares) to be stuck over the holes by astronauts.


• Archaeologists working at an ancient Egyptian necropolis at Tel el-Deir near Lebanon have discovered dozens of intact unrobbed tombs containing bronze coins, gold, amulets, scarabs, canopic jars and figurines representing gods including Isis, Horus and Bastet. The tombs belonged to a range of individuals from ordinary citizens to the wealthy. ● Former showman and self-proclaimed mystic Uri Geller has bought a pair of John Lennon's blue-tinted glasses at auction for £40,000 ($50,100). The seller had been given the glasses by Lennon for his birthday 55 years ago, at Abbey Road Studios. Geller plans to display the glasses in his museum in Tel Aviv, alongside an "alien egg" Lennon had given him.


• Australian police have arrested and charged a man for the theft of more than A$600,000 (£309,000; $393,500) worth of A$1 collectible coins featuring the popular children's character Bluey. It is thought that more than 60,000 of the 64,000 coins, stolen while being prepared for transit to a storage facility, have already been sold online. The coins were taken from the back of a lorry at the warehouse where the arrested man worked. ● Layton Richards, 29, who stole £3,460 ($4,400) worth of stock, including 798 Cadbury's Creme Eggs, from 19 shops across Hampshire, Dorset and West Sussex, has been jailed for eight months. ● Police using an unmarked lorry for an operation to catch people committing driving offences in South Yorkshire for a week in July caught more than 240 people. Forty-five of those were using mobile phones while driving, 74 were not wearing a seatbelt, one was transporting uncaged livestock and one man was trimming his beard with no hands on the steering wheel and using the vehicle's rear view mirror to check his work...


• Iceberg A23a, weighing almost a trillion tonnes, broke off the Antarctic ice shelf in 1986 and then became grounded in the Weddell Sea until 2020 when it refloated and started to drift north. In April it entered the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which was expected to carry it into the South Atlantic where it would eventually melt. Instead of that though, it has been slowly spinning in place, caught inside the edge of a rotating column of water around the Pirie Bank, a 62 mile- (100km)-wide 'bump' in the seafloor. ● Insect conservation charity Buglife has reported that there has been a significant decrease in the number of wasps across the UK this summer. While people might find wasps little more than annoying stinging things, the 7,000 species of wasps are apex predators which are essential for balancing the ecosystem; for one thing wasps eat insect larvae, which will otherwise eat plants. The wet winter and damp spring severely impacted wasp nests, which are often at ground level. ● Energy think tank Ember has reported that solar and wind power have accounted for more energy production than fossil fuels across the European Union for the first time, while a report by the researchers at the University of Exeter and University College London last October suggested that solar power will become the world's main source of energy by 2050.

IN BRIEF: Artist Fin Brown has created a working speedboat that looks like a great white shark. Based on a 1970s jet boat frame the shark boat has layers of wood and fibreglass to form the shark. ● An ITV racing presenter interviewed a man at a recent Goodwood event but completely ignored the woman with him; it was only later that someone pointed out she was Liz Truss, disastrously Prime Minister for 45 days until her mini-Budget crashed the stock markets... Needless to say the clip went viral on social media. ● A juror being sworn in at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London has been allowed to swear the oath to tell the truth on a vial of water taken from the River Roding, after telling the judge that "the river was effectively my god, and that I hold the river to be sacred". Jurors normally swear on either a religious book or make a secular promise. ● A 14-month-old boy in Kansas has been rescued after falling down a 10' (3m) pipe while playing outside his home. A makeshift "catch pole", similar to ones used to capture animals, was used to pull him out unharmed. ● In the evening of September 24^th part of Frankfurt Airport in Germany lost power after a dormouse ate through a power cable. Eleven flights were cancelled; the dormouse was not so lucky - its body was found by firefighters investigating the smoking location. ● The Royal Mint has started processing old circuit boards to recover gold from them. At its site in Llantrisant, Wales, the boards are heated to separate the components which are then filtered and the gold extracted. According to the UN 62m tonnes of electrical waste was created in 2022, with the UK the second largest producer of electronic waste per capita after Norway. The Royal Mint aims to eventually process over 4,000 tonnes of e-waste annually, which should produce up to 990lbs (450kg) of gold. ● Two new Banksy artworks have been unveiled. The first is of a silhouetted mountain goat perched atop a buttress on a wall in Kew Green, Richmond, as rocks fall below it, the second is of two silhouetted elephants seemingly greeting each other through two boarded-up windows in Chelsea.

UPDATES: Eight new shoots have grown around the base of the stump of the Sycamore Gap tree ten months after it was illegally felled, giving hope that it might regrow as new trees. The National Trust plans to leave the shoots untouched for a few years to see how they develop. Seedlings taken from the felled tree are growing well at the Trust's Plant Conservation Centre and could be suitable for planting in the next two years. Two men will appear in court later this month on charges of criminal damage for felling the iconic tree.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Cricketer Graham Thorpe (Surrey, England, coaching in England and Australia, 55), actress Patti Yasutake (Star Trek: The Next Generation franchise, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 70), makeup artist Leonard Engelman (Moonstruck, Rocky IV, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 83), actor Charles Cyphers (The Fog, Halloween franchise, Wonder Woman [TV], 85), particle physicist Tsung-Dao Lee (became the second-youngest recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1957, Albert Einstein Award in Science, the Galileo Galilei Medal, 97), writer and Broadway performer June Walker Rogers (Guys and Dolls, 45 Minutes From Broadway, How to Make It in Showbiz: A Survival Kit, 97).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

5, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36

[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...

    A policeman was patrolling the town's shopping area when he was approached by a small child. "Hello, young lady," he said, "Can I help you?"
    Little Jennifer looked up at him. "I've lost my Mummy! Can you help me find her?"
    "I certainly can. What's she like?"
    Little Jennifer thought for a moment then smiled as only she could, "Cake, soppy films and telling me to go to bed!"

---

^{^} ...end of line