Issue ^#847 - 12^th December 2025

Edited by and copyright ©2025 Simon Lamont
( Facebook  /  Bluesky )

tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

The latest edition is always available at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/index.htm
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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 12th December     - Day 346/365		-		Pennsylvania ratified the US Constitution, the second state to do so, 1787. Mathematician Viktor Bunyakovsky died, 1889. Actress Jennifer Connelly born, 1970. Two crashes involving three commuter trains at Clapham Junction, London, killed thirty-five and injured hundreds, 1988. Runner Nixon Chepseba born, 1990. Writer Shirley Hazzard died, 2016.
Saturday 13th December     - Day 347/365		-		Artist Donatello died, 1466. Sir Francis Drake set sail from Plymouth, to sail around the world, 1577. Poet William Drummond of Hawthornden born, 1585. HMS Ajax, HMNZS Achilles and HMS Exeter engaged the Admiral Graf Spee in the Battle of the River Plate, the first naval engagement of WWII, 1939. Athlete Lilian Board born, 1948. Civil and human rights activist Ella Baker died, 1986.
Sunday 14th December     - Day 348/365		-		The Zuiderzee sea wall in the Netherlands collapsed, causing the St Lucia's flood which killed more than 50,000 people, 1287. Humanist and scholar Niccolò Perotti died, 1480. Astronomer Tycho Brahe born, 1546. A team led by Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole, 1911. Writer Shirley Jackson born, 1916. Actress Lupe Vélez took her own life, 1944. Monkey Day (unofficial).
Monday 15th December     - Day 349/365		-		Roman emperor Nero born, 37. Byzantine forces under Belisarius defeated the Vandals at the Battle of Tricamarum, 533. Artist Johannes Vermeer died, 1675. Contralto singer and professor of music Florence Jepperson Madsen born, 1886. Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 (the "New World Symphony") premiered in a public rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1893. Librarian Eliza Atkins Gleason died, 2009.
Tuesday 16th December     - Day 350/365		-		The coronation of King Henry VI of England as king of France at Notre Dame in Paris, during the Hundred Years' War, 1431. Catherine of Aragon, first wife of King Henry VIII of England, born, 1485. Allison Balfour was strangled and burned as a witch, 1594. Mount Fuji in Japan erupted, 1707. Composer and musicologist Zoltán Kodály born, 1882. Writer Peter Dickinson died, 2015.
Wednesday 17th December     - Day 351/365		-		The first account of a blood transfusion was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665. Chemist Humphry Davy, inventor of the miners' safety lamp, born, 1778. Hydrographer Francis Beaufort died, 1857. The first issue of Vogue was published, 1892. Mathematician Alicia Boole Stott died, 1940. Author Jacqueline Wilson born, 1945.
Thursday 18th December     - Day 352/365		-		Explorer Philipp von Hutten born, 1505. Luthier Antonio Stradivari died, 1737. Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker premiered in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1892. Actress Celia Johnson born, 1908. Project SCORE, the first purpose-built communications satellite, was launched from Cape Canaveral, 1958. Singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl died, 2000. International Migrants Day (UN).

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Jacqueline Wilson:

I have this belief that children become readers before they can read. They become hooked on books because they were read aloud to as a child.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films starring Jennifer Connelly. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• This class will be a waste of your - and what is infinitely worse - my time.
• Wait here. [...] Try not to kill anybody.
• Everything I've done, I've done for you. I move the stars for no one.
• - Have you done your homework?
  - School's cancelled on account of the aliens.
• - Why do you eat while you're working? Why do you eat all the time?
  - It's all psychological, Max. I eat so I don't think about food.

Last issue's quotations from films starring Maggie Smith were:

• Now, Jenny, do us a cartwheel for comic relief.
      -- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1969]
• Can there be anywhere else in the world that is such an assault on the senses? Those who know the country of old just go about their business. But nothing can prepare the uninitiated for this riot of noise and color. For the heat, the motion; the perpetual teeming crowds.
      -- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel [2011]
• I've always wanted to use that spell.
      -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 [2011]
• - Can I have a bit of earth?
  - A bit of earth?
  - To plant seeds in. To make things grow.
      -- The Secret Garden [1993]
• It's just not fair. Other daughters get to plan weddings, bake cakes, go shopping with their mothers. What do I do? Dispose of dead bodies.
      -- Keeping Mum [2005]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• A remote camera has recorded a wild beaver dragging logs and creating its lodge at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve on the River Wensum near Fakenham in Norfolk. How it got there is a mystery as no beavers have been released in, or near, the reserve. The last wild beaver seen in Norfolk was in the 16^th Century, before they were hunted to extinction in England. ● A team of scientists at Uppsala University in Sweden have issued a report suggesting that Vilesida, an order of sponges, appeared 100 million years earlier than previously thought, during the Mesozoic era. ● When an employee went to open a liquor store in Ashland, Vermont, they found smashed bottles lying on the floor, their contents all over the place. They soon found the culprit, asleep in the restroom. It was a small raccoon that had got in through a ceiling tile, fallen onto the shelf where the scotch and whiskey were, knocking several bottles onto the floor. The raccoon then drank some of the alcohol before passing out. It was taken to a local animal shelter, where a vet confirmed that it was drunk. After a few hours' sleep and with no injuries other than a sore head, it was released back into the wild.


• Footage of Comet C/2025 K1 Atlas, the interstellar object passing through the Solar System, taken by Italian astronomers using the Copernicus telescope at the Asiago Observatory, has shown it breaking into three pieces. Analysis of the newly-revealed interior of the comet will give an insight into the formation of solar systems. ● An incident on October 30^th, in which a JetBlue Airbus A320 aircraft being flown from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, suddenly lost altitude over Florida, injuring fifteen passengers and leading the pilots, who quickly regained control, to make an emergency landing at Tampa, has, in an official report by Airbus, been ascribed to "intense solar radiation" corrupting "data critical to the functioning of flight controls", although solar radiation levels that day were well below the levels that could affect electronics. It has been suggested that the high-energy particle stream that hit the aircraft's systems came from a distant supernova. ● In early September 1859 a flare from the biggest solar storm on record, dubbed the Carrington Event, caused electronic telegraph systems across Europe and North America to fail as sparks flew from cables and operators received electric shocks. Some systems were able to function despite their batteries being disconnected. A cluster of sunspots of comparable size to those that caused the Carrington Event has been seen on the surface of the Sun, facing Earth, although for now it is quiet. ● NASA has warned that the massive increase in near-Earth satellites could ruin up to 96% of images taken by low-Earth orbit and ground-based telescopes by 2040, when the number of satellites, boosted by Starlink and competing communications networks, is forecast to pass 500,000.


• A 2,700-year-old Phrygian temple has been discovered, cut into rock near Denzali, Turkey. ● Analysis of thirty pieces of birch tar, dating to around 6,000 years ago - the Neolithic period - has found traces of human saliva, food and oral bacteria, suggesting that they were used as chewing gum. ● Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the "lost" city of Imet, six miles (9.6km) south of Tanis in the eastern Nile Delta. Among their discoveries are the foundations of mudbrick "tower houses" that would have been several storeys high, as well as work yards and a dense network of alleys. ● A still-sealed 1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus has been discovered during an excavation in Budapest, Hungary. As well as a skeleton it contained grave goods including two intact glass vessels, 140 coins, bronze figures, jewellery and fragments of gold-threaded fabric in which the body would have been wrapped. ● Seven thin gold pendants depicting gods, monsters and horses have been discovered near Råde, Norway. They date to the Migration Period around 1,500 years ago. ● Isotope analysis of preserved human footprints found at a prehistoric mudhole in northern Saudi Arabia have been dated to around 115,000 years ago, making them the oldest evidence of humans in the area. ● The ruins of a medieval city that lay along the Silk Road, the network of trading routes across Asia for 1,700 years until the mid 15^th Century, has been found by underwater archaeologists working in Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. ● New research has suggested that a volcanic eruption in the years around 1345 might have triggered the Black Death, Europe's deadliest pandemic. Analysis of tree rings has suggested that temperatures plummeted as a result of ash and gases entering the atmosphere, causing crops to fail and forcing wealthy Italian states to import grain from countries around the Black Sea to the east of Greece. The imported grain brought with it rats and fleas carrying the plague to the northern Mediterranean and onwards to northern Europe including Britain. ● At an auction of film costumes and props the elf costume worn by Will Ferrell in the lift scene from Elf has sold for more than £200,000 ($266,400), while Leeloo's Multipass from The Fifth Element fetched £195,300 ($260,000), a fedora worn by Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade went for £365,400 ($486,800) and a lightsaber wielded by Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace sold for £289,800 ($386,000), considerably less than Boba Fett's EE-3 carbine blaster from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back that went for £459,900 ($612,700). ● Fabergé's Winter Egg, designed by Alma Pihl, the only female workmaster at the House of Fabergé, in 1913 as a gift to Maria Feodorovna, Empress consort of Russia, from her son Nicholas (later Tsar Nicholas II, the final Tsar), studded with 1,660 diamonds and containing a platinum and gold flower basket with white quartz flowers in gold moss, has been sold at auction in London for almost £23m ($30m), setting a new record for Fabergé's jeweled items.


• Another, smaller, Fabergé egg, one of fifty 'Octopussy' eggs, framed in gold and encrusted with 183 diamonds and two sapphires, which contain an 18-carat gold octopus with diamond suckers and eyes, has been safely recovered intact after being deliberately swallowed by a 32-year-old man in Partridge Jewellers in Auckland, New Zealand. Police cofirmed that "medical intervention was not required" as the egg passed through his digestive canal while the man was in police custody and monitored around the clock to make sure he did not destroy it - or try to swallow it again... The egg is valued at NZ$32,740 (£14,250; $19,000). ● Four people have been arrested after committing possibly the most British of crimes imaginable - throwing apple crumble and custard on the display case holding the Imperial State Crown in the Tower of London. They claimed to be part of a new non-violent civil-resistance group looking to "tax extreme wealth and fix Britain". They were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage. ● On Tuesday night CCTV in Southend caught someone flytipping two black bin bags. They were dressed as a large purple tyrannosaurus Rex to evade being recognised... ● Police in Kobe, Japan, have arrested a 32-year-old man on suspicion of robbing a convenience store of approximately ¥230,000 (£1,100; $1,470). They suspect that he is the person who had anonymously called 110 (the Japanese emergency phone number) beforehand to say that he was going to commit a crime... ● Two armed men stole eight engravings by Matisse and at least five by Brazilian artist Candido Portinari from a library in São Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday. The city has extensive CCTV and officials reported the arrest of one of the thieves a few days later.


• The protective steel shelter over the Chernobyl, Ukraine, nuclear plant that went critical and exploded in 1986, has been confirmed by the International Atomic Agency as being degraded to a point where it has lost its "primary safety functions", following a strike by a Russian drone earlier this year. While the load-bearing parts of the structure are intact temporary repairs were needed to the cladding. ● Climate change and overfishing has been blamed for the deaths of over 60,000 African penguins discovered off the coast of South Africa between 2004 and 2011. The penguins rely on sardines to build up fat reserves before the three-week moulting period when they have to stay on land and fast, but sardine populations have plummeted. ● Lithium, used in electric vehicle batteries, is a much-needed material, but for every ton of lithium mined nine tons of waste is created. A British team is testing whether the waste can be used to replace cement as a supplementary binding material in concrete, potentially reducing carbon emissions from the production of concrete by 50%. ● Parts of Lancashire and the southern Lake District were hit by a 3.3 magnitude earthquake on Wednesday night. ● A rare young pygmy sperm whale whose body was washed up on the Honduran island of Utila was found to have died after swallowing a plastic bag that became lodged in its digestive tract, leaving it unable to feed. ● The Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology has developed a solar-powered device that turns seawater into safe drinking water.

IN BRIEF: The earthquake that hit northwest England and other recent events including a mysterious beam of light (later acribed to a satellite launch) seen over the sea have reignited suggestions that Britain has its own "Bermuda Triangle" stretching between Wigtown in Dumfries and Galloway, Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire and Llay in North Wales. [If so, the Irregular office happens to be within it... -Ed] ● A giant golden statue of a naked Roman gladiator, originally used to promote the 2000 film Gladiator has been put up on the roof of a shop in Wigan. The 30'- (9m)-high statue used to stand outside the shop but was taken down after the local council received complaints and banned it in 2022. Local reaction to its return has been positive. ● An unnamed man using a cheap metal detector in Victoria, Australia, has discovered a 10lb (4.5kg) rock containing about 5.7lb (2.6kg) of gold, valued at AU$240,600 (£12,350; $160,000). ● Heathrow Express has teamed with Loved Before - a "sustainable soft toy adoption agency" - to launch Operation Teddy Rescue, aimed at helping return teddy bears and other soft toys lost while travelling, with their owners. ● A 30' 9"- (9.38m)-long 8' 1"- (2.46m)-tall piece of driftwood shaped like a large lizard that had been given googly eyes, a tongue and green spikes and dubbed Lizzy the Logness Monster has been washed away from her home on Porthcawl, Bridgend, beach, by stormy weather. She had become an informal mascot for the town. ● For the second time in two weeks a large chunk of the Internet went down, this time due to an outage at Cloudflare, a company that protects sites from distributed denial of service attacks among other things. The outage was caused by a badly implemented update rather than an attack. ● Three-year-old Sargawya Singh Kushwaha, from the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has become the youngest person in chess history to earn an official Fide chess rating. ● Network Rail halted train services across a bridge in Lancaster after last week's earthquake after a picture showing major damage to the structure was posted online. The picture was later discovered to have been generated using AI, and the rail services across the bridge were restored.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Ginger tabby cat Nala (unofficial station cat at Stevenage railway station and Internet celebrity, 5 or 6), author Sophie Kinsella (The Shopaholic series, The Undomestic Goddess, What Does It Feel Like?, 55), photographer Martin Parr (The Last Resort, Small World, Common Sense, 73), actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Licence to Kill, Mortal Kombat, Rising Sun, 75), elephant conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton (research into poaching helped lead to the international ivory trade ban, ambassador for the conservation charity Tusk, founded Save the Elephants, 83), guitarist and songwriter Steve Cropper (Booker T. and the M.G.'s, co-wrote "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "In the Midnight Hour", 84), architect Frank Genry (The Guggenheim Museum [Bilbao], The Dancing House [Prague], The Louis Vuitton Foundation [Paris], 96).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

1, 7, 14, 37, 44, 46

[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 discussing Christmas with the class. "Who is looking forward to Santa's visit on Christmas Eve," she asked.
    Little James put his hand up. "Santa isn't real, Miss. It's just Mummy and Daddy!"
    The rest of the class stared at him in shock, then Little Jennifer put her hand up. "Yes, Little Jennifer?"
    "Miss, he's disrepecting my religious beliefs!"

---

^{^} ...end of line