Issue ^#805 - 14^th February 2025

Edited by and copyright ©2025 Simon Lamont
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tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

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Unless otherwise indicated dollar values are in U.S. 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 February     - Day 45/365		-		King Richard II of England died, 1400. Lucrezia de' Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, born, 1545. Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London was founded, 1852. Abolitionist and businesswoman Lydia Hamilton Smith died, 1884. Magician and actor Teller born, 1948. The Voyager 1 spacecraft took the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth from approximately 3.7bn miles (6bn km) away, 1990. Valentine's Day.
Saturday 15th February     - Day 46/365		-		An English invasion force led by King John landed at La Rochelle in France during the Anglo-French War of 1212-1214, 1214. Polymath Galileo Galilei born, 1564. Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom [1801-4], died, 1844. The red-and-white maple leaf design was adopted as the flag of Canada, 1965. Actress Sarah Wynter born, 1973. Computer scientist and engineer Thelma Estrin died, 2014. Singles Awareness Day.
Sunday 16th February     - Day 47/365		-		Cartographer and instrument maker Georg Joachim Rheticus born, 1514. Physician Richard Mead died, 1754. The British invasion of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was completed with the capture of Colombo, 1796. Model and actress Margaux Hemingway born, 1954. CBBS, the first computer bulletin board system, was created in Chicago, 1978. Writer Angela Carter died, 1992.
Monday 17th February     - Day 48/365		-		Myles Standish was appointed the first military commander of the Plymouth Colony in North America, 1621. Playwright Molière died, 1673. Antiquarian John Pinkerton born, 1758. Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, was launched, 1959. Mountaineer Alison Hargreaves born, 1963. Actress and singer Kathryn Grayson died, 2010.
Tuesday 18th February     - Day 49/365		-		Artist Fra Angelico died, 1455. Queen Mary I of England born, 1516. A Spanish fleet intercepted an Anglo-Dutch merchant convoy off the coast of Cornwall, during the Eighty-Years' War, 1637. Filmmaker John Hughes born, 1950. Singer Maria Franziska von Trapp died, 2014. The Perseverence rover carrying the Ingenuity mini-helicopter landed successfully in Jezero crater on Mars, 2021.
Wednesday 19th February     - Day 50/365		-		Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus born, 1473. The Third Anglo-Dutch War ended with the Treaty of Westminster, including the transfer of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island to England, 1674. Philanthropist Mary, Countess of Harold, died, 1785. Explorer William Smith discovered the South Shetland Islands, claiming them for Britain, 1819. Burlesque performer Lydia Thompson born, 1838. Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld died, 2019.
Thursday 20th February     - Day 51/365		-		Eleanor of Aragon, Queen Consort of Castile and Léon, born, 1358. Norway pawned Orkney and Shetland to Scotland in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark, 1472. Artist Jan de Baen born, 1633. Physicist Laura Bassi died, 1778. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened, 1872. Journalist Steve Hewlett died, 2017. World Day of Social Justice.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Carl Sagan, on the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

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

• - You wouldn't let me play!
  - Dude! You were playing 40-minute bass solos. No one but you could play!
• When a woman's got a husband, and you've got none, why should she take advice from you? Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare and all them other high-falutin' Greeks.
• I'm Liesl. I'm sixteen years old and I don't need a governess.
• I'll show you the roof. It's upstairs.
• We need to save our show from people who don't know the difference between a Tony Award and Tony Hawk.

Last issue's 'midnight' quotations were from:

• I find loneliness is the physical pain which hurts all over. You can't isolate it in one part of your body.
      -- Midnight Express [1978]
• We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
      -- Midnight in Paris [2011]
• The two basic items necessary to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk. Didya know that? That's a fact! In Florida, they got a terrific amount of coconut trees there. In fact, I think they even got 'em in the, eh, gas stations over there.
      -- Midnight Cowboy [1969]
• To understand the living, you got to commune with the dead.
      -- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil [1997]
• You two are the dumbest bounty hunters I have ever seen! You couldn't even deliver a bottle of milk!
      -- Midnight Run [1988]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A rare and endangered Mayalan tapir calf was born last weekend at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. Malayan tapirs, related to horses and rhinos were thought to number just under 2,500 in the wild at the last assessment ten years ago. ● Cleo, a 15-year-old Bengal cat was rescued by Scottish SPCA officers after becoming trapped in the foundations of a block of flats for five days during Storm Éowyn. Her owner was found through social media requests. ● Daisy, a Labrador dog, was stolen from Rita and Philip Potter's garden in November 2017, but they never gave up hope of getting her back. An RSPCA officer over 200 miles (322km) away was carrying out a routine investigation and found untreated masses on the body of a Labrador so took her to a vet for treatment, where they found that she was microchipped and belonged to the Potters. They were reunited. ● Last month it was four lynx, now a drove of eight feral pigs appear to have been abandoned in the same area of the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Forestry and Land Scotland officers captured the pigs and controversially "humanely" culled them. ● The first ever daylight sighting and recording of a Melanocetus johnsonii or "black demon" fish has been made off the coast of Tenerife. The fish normally live at depths between 660-6,560' (200-2000m) and use a dorsal appendage as bait to catch their prey. It is not known how it came to be in shallower waters. ● Researchers off the coast of Georgia have tagged what may be the largest Great White Shark ever recorded, at 13.8' (4.2m) long and weighing an estimated 1,653lb (750kg). ● Charlecombe Lane, near Bath in Somerset is to be closed for six weeks to allow thousands of toads, frogs and newts to cross it to reach their breeding grounds. Volunteers wearing latex- and powder-free gloves will patrol the road at night with torches and buckets to help the amphibians reach their destination. Before the road was closed annually starting in 2003 over half of the animals were killed during crossing period. ● A study of whale song at the University of St Andrews, comparing recordings made over eight years to how babies discover words has found that the 'songs' contains a repetitive "language-like structure" previously thought to be unique to humans. ● Almost 5,000 young yellow-spotted river turtles, or tracajás, have been released into the Igapó-Açu River in Brazil to boost their numbers in the wild.


• Astronomers taking test images from the Euclid space telescope have accidentally photographed an "Einstein ring", a circle of light created by the gravity of galaxy NGC 6505 bending the light of another galaxy over 4 billion light years directly behind it. The phenomenon is named after Albert Einstein, who predicted that gravity will bend light around objects in space. Euclid was launched in 2023 to create a 3D map of two billion galaxies. ● Scientists studying the Earth's solid inner core have mostly looked at how it rotates within the molten outer core, but new analysis of seismographs, done in the hope of discovering how and why it appears to be slowing, has shown that its surface and outer shape also appear to change, suggesting a previously unknown interaction between the inner and outer cores. ● Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 YR4 will most likely pass by the planet on 22^nd December 2032. The rock, thought to be up to 295' (90m) across, was originally given a 1% chance of impacting Earth, later raised to 2.3% - about a 1 in 43 chance, not enough to panic over, but enough for NASA to use the James Webb Space Telescope to study it and assess the effect of an impact. Early estimates suggest such a strike could be comparable to the Tunguska impact, in which a mid-air exploding asteroid flattened 830 square miles (2,150km²) of remote uninhabited Siberian forest in 1908.


• Archaeologists in Denmark have found fragments of an "exceptionally rare" Roman helmet, the first one found in Denmark, and a cache of weapons in the postholes of two 1,600-year-old houses. It is thought that the residences belonged to a chieftain and the helmet and weapons were a ceremonial deposit. ● A new study by researchers at Vienna University, who looked at DNA samples taken from 435 skeletons dating from between 6,400 BCE and 2,000 BCE, sited across Eurasia, suggests that the Indo-European languages spoken by almost half the world's population today originated with people living near the North Caucasus mountains and Lower Volga, the areas roughly west of present-day Kazakhstan. ● An ancient papyrus, ignored for year because it was misclassified, has been found to be a legal record of how the Roman government dealt with two forgers and fraudsters called Gadalis and Saulos in around 130 CE. ● A rolled-up scroll recovered from Herculaneum where it had been badly burned in the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius was too damaged to unroll, but a combination of X-ray imaging using the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) software has allowed it to be unrolled virtually. While more work needs to be done to clean up the images early results suggest that it is a philosophical text. Hundreds of scrolls, carbonised in the heat of the eruption, were discovered in Herculaneum, some of which were destroyed in attempts to unroll them, but the new approach gives hope that others might be read. ● Work to expand a playground in Wooler, Northumberland, was halted in January after the discovery of an unexploded World War II bomb. More than 170 similar bombs, thought to be practice devices containing small charges, have been found at the site since. It is thought that the location was a training ground for the Home Guard, and the unused ordnance was buried after the war ended. Only a third of the site has been excavated so far... ● A woman who took - with permission - a table from a skip has discovered that it is a Danish teak coffee table from the 1950s or 1960s, designed by Peter Hivdt and Orla Molgaard-Nielsen and worth around £3,000 ($3,720).


• After he found that his pickup truck had been removed a Colorado man called 911 to report it missing, and gave his location. He was wanted by police on suspicion of the theft of lumber from a house under construction, and they had taken the truck as evidence. Officers arrived and arrested him... ● Chiltern Railways has recovered £12,000 ($14,900) from an unnamed fare dodger who had made almost 750 trips without paying for an appropriate ticket. ● Jacksonville, Florida, Sheriff's Office has released bodycam footage from mounted police officers who pursued a suspected drug dealer across traffic and through a fast-food drive-through and a car park before catching him.


• The environmentally-ignorant felon in the White House has signed an executive order ending the US government's programme to replace plastic drinking straws with paper ones. Paper straws are not ideal; they do not last as long in use and may still contain "forever chemicals" but are still significantly better for the environment and wildlife than plastic ones. Even better are reusable metal straws. ● Much more environmentally-friendly is six-year-old Teddy from Netley in Hampshire, who has collected more than 2,500 plastic confectionary tubs of the type sold at Christmas, after learning that they could not be recycled from the county council's kerbside recyclable rubbish collection. He wrote to his school, which wrote to parents, and he put up posters with his mum Laura. The tubs will be taken by a specialist recycling company. Teddy, whose hero is Sir David Attenborough, wants to be a marine biologist - or a stuntman - when he grows up. ● A Bryan Adams concert in Perth, Australia, last weekend had to be cancelled after a "large" fatberg made of conglomerated "fat, grease and rags" was found blocking a sewer under the RAC Arena, threatening to backup up the venue's toilets. ● A canal in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which flows through both residential and industrial districts has turned bright red. Authorities have taken samples to identify the pollutant but speculate that it could be dumped textile dye. ● A 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit the Caribbean last weekend, centred about 20 miles (32km) north of Honduras, triggering a tsunami warning for waves of up to 10' (3m), which was later cancelled. It was the biggest quake to hit the area since 2021.

IN BRIEF: Woe betide any recovering alcoholics or caeliac Anglicans. The Church of England synod, already under fire for its failure to properly address the issue of abusive priests and safeguarding their victims, has banned the use of non-alcoholic wine and gluten-free bread from holy communion. ● Google had to re-edit its Super Bowl advert for its Gemini AI tool after the ad, showing a Wisconsin cheesemonger using Gemini to write a product description, had the software telling him that Gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption". Gouda is nowhere near that popular but Gemini is trained on the Worldwide Web, where the false statistic is widespread [Gemini's "intelligence" is, well, cheesy... -Ed]. ● It emerged this week that one of the uncredited backing singers on Carly Simon's 1972 hit "You're So Vain" was... Mick Jagger... ● Infrared photography has revealed that Picasso's 1901 painting "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto" was painted over another painting, of a woman. Picasso often painted over old canvasses, especially in his early career. ● After the Volusia, Florida, Sheriff's office received a report of a boat spinning out of control on Lake Dias a marine unit managed to manoeuvre their boat close enough for an officer to jump across, bring the other boat under control and tend to its unconscious driver who was given medical attention and expected to make a full recovery.

UPDATES: Computer engineer James Howells, who lost his court attempt to be allowed to search a rubbish tip for a hard drive he said contained 8,000 bitcoins, which his girlfriend had accidentally thrown out, has announced that he wants to buy the site when the council closes the landfill tip in the 2025-26 financial year. The council has planning permission to convert the site into a solar farm to power their new electric bin lorries. ● The two men accused of cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree will begin at Newcastle Crown Court on April 28^th. The two are charged with causing criminal damage to the tree and with causing damage to Hadrian's Wall, which the tree hit as it fell. ● More earthquakes and aftershocks have been felt on Santorini and nearby islands amid growing concerns that they are connected to the nearby underwater Kolumbo volcano. Nea Kameni, the dormant volcanic crater on Santorini is not thought likely to be reawaking.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Screenwriter and novelist Nigel McCrery (Silent Witness, New Tricks, Backup, 71), artist Chris Moore (known for illustrating SciFi book covers and album covers, 77), actor Bruce French (Passions, Star Trek: Insurrection, Jurassic Park III, 79), actor Tony Roberts (Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three ,85), author Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, B is for Beer, 92), computer engineer Raymond Bird (designer of the Hollerith Electronic Computer, the UK's first mass-produced business computer, 101).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

3, 16, 30, 31, 48, 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...

    The teacher was handing the children's geography homework back to them. "Well done, Little Mary. Little Simon, you need to revise your capital cities, Little Jennifer... Little Jennifer, you only answered a few of the questions. Why?"
    Little Jennifer looked thoughtful, then smiled as only she could. "Mummy and Daddy were watching the news last night, Miss, and Daddy said the world was changing every day, so I thought I'd wait for it to settle down!"

---

^{^} ...end of line