CONTENTS |
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^ WORD OF THE WEEKParwhobble |
Friday 29th March
- Day 89/366- The Ottoman Empire captured Thessalonika from the Republic of Venice after a siege, 1430. Adventurer Jørgen Jørgenson born, 1780. Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall in London, 1871. Artist Georges Seurat died, 1891. Tennis player Jennifer Capriati born, 1970. Geologist Janet Watson died, 1985. Saturday 30th March
- Day 90/366- Mathematician Adam Ries died, 1559. Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, born, 1820. Ether anesthesia was used for the first time, 1842. Musician, composer and bandleader Ted Heath born, 1902. The Dalai Lama fled the Chinese occupation of Tibet for India, 1959. Actress Myra Frances died, 2021. Sunday 31th March
- Day 91/366- Poet John Donne died, 1631. Composer Johann Sebastian Bach born, 1685. Great Britain ordered the closure of the port of Boston, Massachusetts, in response to the Boston Tea Party, 1774. Writer and abolitionist Mary Abigail Dodge born, 1833. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was officially opened, 1889. Baseball player Shirley Burkovich died, 2022. World Backup Day. International Transgender Day of Visibility. Monday 1st April
- Day 92/366- Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France [1137-1152] and Queen of England [1154-1189], died, 1204. Physician William Harvey born, 1578. Frederick Muhlenberg was elected as the US House of Representatives' first Speaker, 1789. Librarian Augusta Braxton Baker born, 1911. Ragtime pianist and composer Scott Joplin died, 1917. The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merged to form the Royal Air Force, 1918. April Fools' Day. Fossil Fools' Day. Edible Book Day. Tuesday 2nd April
- Day 93/366- Arthur, Prince of Wales, died, 1502. Explorer Juan Ponce de León landed in what is now Florida, 1513. Explorer, writer, lover and librarian Giacomo Casanova born, 1725. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, 1982. Diver Nóra Barta born, 1984. Actress Estelle Harris died, 2022. International Children' Book Day. World Autism Awareness Day. Wednesday 3rd April
- Day 94/366- The coronation of Edward the Confessor as King of England, 1043. Diarist and traveller Anne Lister born, 1791. Outlaw Jesse James was shot dead by Robert Ford, 1882. Gottlieb Daimler was granted a patent for the engine he would use to create the first motorcycle seven months later, 1885. Actor Marlon Brando born, 1924. Jazz singer and pianist Sarah Vaughan died, 1990. Thursday 4th April
- Day 95/366- Queen Elizabeth I of England knighted Francis Drake for his circumnavigation of the world, 1581. Writer, illustrator and composer Bettina von Arnim born, 1785. Astronomer Jérôme Lalande died, 1807. Napoleon abdicated conditionally, 1814. Actor Robert Downey Jr born, 1965. Computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones died, 2007.
This week, Marlon Brando:To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
A selection of quotations from films containing the word 'seven' in the title, either as a whole word or part of a word. Answers next issue or from the regular address.Last issue's 'king' quotations were from:
- Nobody throws me my own guns and says run. Nobody.
- Well, Pa used to say love is kind of like the measles. You only get it once. The older you are, the tougher it goes.
- Nothing wrong with a man taking pleasure in his work. I won't deny my own personal desire to turn each sin against the sinner.
- This guy just telephoned a psycho-killer to come down and psycho-kill us!
- Hah! Women! A fine kettle of fish.
- Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?
-- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [2003]- There's three things in this world that you need: Respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer.
-- The Fisher King [1991]- Monsters belong in B movies.
-- King Kong [2005]- Why not me? Why not? A guy can get anything he wants as long as he pays the price. What's wrong with that? Stranger things have happened.
-- The King of Comedy [1982]- What do you want me to do, dress in drag and do the hula?
-- The Lion King [1994]
Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- After heavy rain created a temporary lake in the bear enclosure at Woburn Safari Park keepers decided to give the residents a swan-shaped pedalo to play on as part of the enrichment programme for the black bears, and footage shows a group of them climbing on it. ● A jogger in Bangkok found himself being followed by a flock of 15 ducks and no matter what he did they kept following him. ● A ring-tailed lemur, endangered in the wild, has been born at Woburn Safari Park. ● A 270-million-year-old fossil in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has been identified as a previously-unknown ancestor of amphibians. It has been given the name Kermitops gratus after the Muppet. ● Firefighters in New Jersey were called in last week to rescue Daisy, an 11-year-old labrador who had got her head stuck in a spare wheel. They tried dish soap and water without success, then vegetable oil and plastic wrap, which also failed. Finally one of the firemen remembered that he had plasma cutters for cutting metal at home, so Daisy was carefully loaded onto a truck then had a fire blanket put over her head and neck to calm and protect her before the cutter was fired up. She was freed five minutes later. ● Scientists who unearthed a huge fossilised skull in the Amazon have identified it as a 16-million-year-old ancestor of the river dolphin. ● Drivers in Seongham, South Korea, were stunned last Tuesday morning to see an ostrich running between their cars. Police and firefighters managed to capture it and return it to the ecological park from which it had escaped. ● There have been two significant cases of mistaken identity this week. A researcher in Queensland saw what he thought was a bird dropping until it moved, and he realised it was a new species of beetle covered in white mohawk-like hairs. In Knutsford, Cheshire, a woman who found an unresponsive baby hedgehog in her garden took it to the Lower Moss Nature Reserve and Wildlife Hospital where they discovered that the hoglet was actually the bobble from a woolly hat...
- Two researchers are claiming to have identified a 280 mile- (451km)-long, 30,000' (9,144m)-high volcano on Mars. The study, presented at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Texas recently, has yet to be independently verified. The bulk of the claimed volcano, which, like the rest of the Martian surface, is inactive, has been severely eroded which, the researchers claim, is why it has not been identified before. ● The UK Space Agency ["Per Tetley et tortulas ad astra" -Ed] has announced plans to open four new bases, including a headquarters in Oxford and offices in Cardiff, Leicester and Edinburgh.
- Divers off Guernsey have solved a mystery from over 100 years ago by locating the wrecks of the First World War U-boat UC-18 and the experimental Royal Navy ship Lady Olive. They were long thought to have been the only submarine and target ship to have sunk each other, and the discovery of their wrecks close together - with further study pending - confirms the legend. ● A wreck discovered in 1993 off the Florida Keys has been identified as the Royal Navy ship HMS Tyger, a 50-gun Fourth-Rate frigate built in 1647 which sank in 1742 after running aground on reefs while on patrol during the Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins Ear. ● An oval-shaped 1943 sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth, titled Sculpture With Colour Pale Blue and Red, has sold at auction for £3,549,000 ($4,476,000). In the same auction L.S. Lowry's painting Sunday Afternoon, which has been held in a private collection for decades, sold for almost £6.3m ($7.94m). ● The prop panel (part of a door frame, rather than an actual door) on which Kate Winslet floated as Rose at the end of Titanic has sold at auction in America for $718,750 (£569,739). When the film came out there was fierce debate over whether Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jack, could have climbed onto the panel and saved himself, but the listing described it as being "approximately 8' long (2.4m) and 41" (1m) wide", besides which, as James Cameron said at the time, Jack had to die because it was in the script - "Maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a tiny bit smaller, but the dude's going down"...
- A man has been arrested in Wasco, California, after allegedly taking a severed human leg from the scene of a rail crash last Friday and taking a bite out of it. ● A discarded piece of chewing gum has led to the arrest and conviction of a suspect in a 1980 cold case murder in Oregon. On January 15, 1980, student Barbara Tucker was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Swabs taken from her body during autopsy were preserved and later used to build a DNA profile of the killer. In March 2021 CeCe Moore, Chief Genetic Genealogist at DNA technology company Parabon NanoLabs, combining contemporary reports with data from the DNA lineage and physical descriptions on World War II draft record cards, identified Robert Plympton as the likely suspect and investigators started surveilling him. When they saw him spitting out some chewing gum they collected it, and DNA from his saliva on the gum matched that from the swabs. Earlier this month Plympton was found guilty of one count of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder. ● Three boys, aged 11, 12 and 16, have been arrested for robbing a bank in Houston, Texas. Security footage showed them entering the bank wearing hoodies, passing a threatening note to a teller, then fleeing on foot with an undisclosed sum of money. After the footage was made public the parents of two of the boys identified them, while the third was identified by a police officer following another incident.
- Some farmers in Canada have begun trialling selective breeding of cattle and changing dietary provision to reduce the amount of methane the cows belch. Cow belching is the primary source of methane, a greenhouse gas, in agriculture. ● While the Chicago River and a river in Devon turned green, deliberately and coincidentally, just before St Patrick's Day, a river in Dongguan, China, briefly turned bright blue. While a nearby petrol station was initially falsely accused of dumping chemicals, later unconfirmed reports suggested that the culprit was a worker at a nearby delivery point who had emptied drums of paint into the water. ● Soil is a natural carbon sink but as the climate warms the ability of soil to absorb and retain carbon falls and it will eventually begin emitting it as carbon dioxide. In Australia, where 70% of the estimated 28 gigatons of carbon stored in soil is in the rangelands, new research suggests that more than 14% of the stored carbon could be released within 20 years. The report does offer hope though, suggesting the use of improved management of grazing, encouraging the growth of native vegetation and controlled burning could enhance the sequestration of carbon in the soil.
IN BRIEF: As any fans of British heavy metal group Iron Maiden (or readers of a certain book) will know, 666 is the number of the Beast. Horror film Late Night with the Devil certainly had a suitably Beastly opening domestic box office last weekend. It came 6th, taking a reported $666,6666 on Sunday. ● Two Canadian men who were accidentally switched at birth in 1955, and only discovered the truth after using at-home DNA testing kits, have received a formal apology from the President of Manitoba. ● The Complete Crockpot Cookbook for Beginners, a book by Luisa Florence, "the author of various recipe books, some of which are bestsellers", has been heavily slammed by users of Amazon as being obviously created by an AI system with AI-generated favourable reviews. One of her other titles - she appears to have written more than 20 recipe books in the last two years - being sold is "1,001 Easy and Foolproof Recipes", which contains a mere 500 recipes, her profile picture looks like an AI-generated image, there are no links to professional sites such as LinkedIn, and her actual recipes are somewhat questionable: garlic chicken recipes do not list garlic as an ingredient and despite showing beef on the cover none of the recipes include it. Amazon have an ongoing problem with people using AI to crank out poor quality books. ● North American pancake eaters, brace yourselves. Canada's maple syrup reserve - the only maple syrup reserve in the world - is at a 16-year low thanks to a rise in demand and production issues caused by climate change. Designed to hold up to 133m pounds of maple syrup it currently holds just 6.9m pounds... ● Cath Bowie, a 75-year-old Scottish grandmother, has become a global sensation in Fortnite, the online battle royale combat game. Her tag? Grumpygran1948, naturally. ● An international team of researchers has achieved an Internet transfer speed of 301 terabits per second, 4.5 million times faster than standard broadband and enough to transfer 9,000 HD films per second, or every film listed on the Internet Movie Database in one minute, using a standard fibreoptic cable. ● Gardener and broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh has appeared on North Korean television. It is not known if the episode of the BBC programme Alan Titchmarsh's Garden Secrets was pirated or included as part of a "soft-power" gift, but most notable was the blurring of Titchmarsh's jeans, which are viewed (denim jeans in general, that is, not just Mr Titchmarsh's) as a symbol of Western "bourgeois culture"... ● Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, has been named the fifth most boring places on Earth by The World Bucket List. Bratislava, Slovakia, was named the most boring in Europe while Lubbock, Texas, took the top (or bottom spot) as the most boring on the planet. Criteria included attractions and cultural offerings. ● Research at the University of Liverpool suggests that tactile souvenirs like fridge magnets may be better at helping people recall holidays than photographs. ● British runner Jasmin Park has become the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons in Tennessee. The event, inspired by a famous prison break, involves running five loops of a course approximately the length of a marathon (26 miles, or 41.8km), both clockwise and counterclockwise, within 60 hours. Runners have to remember the route and tear out pages of books along the route corresponding to their race number. Only a few dozen of hundreds of applicants are chosen to run each year, and the starting signal is one of the co-founders lighting a cigarette. Park crossed the finish line with under two minutes to spare and fell to the ground, completely exhausted and unable to talk. Only 20 runners have completed the race since its inception in 1989.
UPDATES: The Rothschild giraffe calf born at Chester Zoo is a female. She has been called Edie, after Uganda's Lake Edward where giraffe conservation groups are active. ● The 8'- (2.4m)-high fibreglass gorilla statue stolen from a garden centre in Lanarkshire last year has been recovered after road workers found it in bushes in a layby on the A92 near Dundee. It had been cut in half vertically, presumably to fit it through a door. 'Gary the Gorilla' has now been returned to his owner.
Royal Television Society Awards 2024
Comedy Performance, Female: Gbemisola Ikumelo, Black Ops (BBC Studios Comedy Productions & Mondo Deluxe Productions for BBC); Comedy Performance, Male: Hammed Animashaun, Black Ops (BBC Studios Comedy Productions & Mondo Deluxe Productions for BBC); Entertainment Performance: Hannah Waddingham, Eurovision Song Contest 2023 (BBC Studios Entertainment Productions & Windfall Films for BBC); Leading Actor, Female: Tamara Lawrence, Time (BBC Studios Drama Productions for BBC); Leading Actor, Male: Kane Robinson, Top Boy (Cowboy Films, Easter Partisan Films, Dream Crew & SpringHill Entertainment for Netflix); Supporting Actor, Female: Bella Ramsey, Time (BBC Studios Drama Productions for BBC); Supporting Actor, Male: Éanna Hardwicke, The Sixth Commandment (Wild Mercury Productions & True Vision for BBC); Presenter: Chris Packham, Inside Our Autistic Minds (BBC Studios Specialist Factual Productions for BBC); Sports Presenter, Commentator or Pundit: Alex Scott, FIFA Women's World Cup (IMG for BBC); Writer, Comedy: Jack Rooke, Big Boys (Roughcut TV for Channel 4); Writer, Drama: Sarah Phelps, The Sixth Commandment (Wild Mercury Productions & True Vision for BBC).
Children's Programme: A Kind of Spark (9 Story Media for BBC); Comedy Drama: Juice (Various Artists Limited for BBC); Comedy Entertainment: Rob & Romesh Vs (CPL Productions for Sky Max); Daytime Programme: Scam Interceptors (BBC Studios Documentary Unit for BBC); Documentary Series: Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (KEO Films & Walk on Air Films for BBC); History: White Nanny, Black Child (Doc Hearts/Tigerlily Productions for Channel 5); Live Event: Eurovision Song Contest 2023 (BBC Studios Entertainment Productions & Windfall Films for BBC); Science & The Natural World: Chimp Empire (Keo Films & Underdog Films for Netflix); Single Documentary: Otto Baxter: Not a F***ing Horror Story (Story Films & Archface Films for Sky Documentaries); Sports Program: All Ireland Senior Football Championship Final (BBC Northern Ireland for BBC); Formatted Popular Factual: Sort Your Life Out (Optomen Television for BBC).
Arts: Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World (BBC Studios Specialist Factual Productions for BBC); Breakthrough Awards: Lucy Edwards, The Travel Show: Japan - The Way I See It (BBC Current Affairs for BBC); Drama Series: Happy Valley (Lookout Point in co-production with AMC for BBC); Entertainment: Squid Game: The Challenge (Studio Lambert & The Garden for Netflix); Limited Series: The Sixth Commandment (Wild Mercury Productions & True Vision for BBC); Scripted Comedy: Extraordinary (Sid Gentle Films Ltd for Disney+); Single Drama: Partygate (Halcyon Heart Films for Channel 4); Soap and Continuing Drama: EastEnders (BBC Studios Drama Productions for BBC).
Judges' Award: Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV Studios & Little Gem for ITV).
Royal Television Society Gold Medal: Dame Esther Rantzen.
Actor M. Emmet Walsh (Blade Runner, Blood Simple, Critters, 88), actor Ron Harper (Planet of the Apes, Land of the Lost, Laramie, 91), tailor Martin Greenfield (survived Auschwitz as a teenager, moved to America, clients included six presidents and numerous film/TV characters, 95).
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DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!
Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:7, 10, 14, 25, 27, 57[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.
Little Jennifer was sitting at the kitchen table busily scribbling away with a pencil on a piece of paper. "What are you drawing, Little Jennifer?" her mother asked.
Little Jennifer looked up. "I'm not drawing, Mummy. In school today Miss told us about other languages, so I'm writing a letter to Little Mary in French!"
Her mother laughed, "Oh, Little Jennifer, you don't know how to write in French yet!"
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "That's OK, Mummy, Little Mary can't read French either!"
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