Issue ^#846 - 5^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 5th December     - Day 339/365		-		Many cities across the Levant were destroyed in an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, 1033. Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, 1791. Poet and author Christina Rossetti born, 1830. Flight 19, a group of TBF Avengers being flown on a training mission, disappeared in the hypothetical Bermuda Triangle, 1945. Snooker player Ronnie O'Sullivan born, 1975. Lawyer, activist and politician Nelson Mandela, 1st President of South Africa, died, 2013. International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development (UN). World Soil Day (UN).
Saturday 6th December     - Day 340/365		-		King Henry VI of England born, 1421. Royalist sympathisers were blocked from entering Parliament, clearing the way for the trial of King Charles I, 1648. Poet, songwriter and domestic accounts keeper Lady Grizel Baillie died, 1746. Actress Agnes Moorehead born, 1900. Ireland was partitioned one year after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1922. Nobel laureate economist Sir Richard Stone died, 1991.
Sunday 7th December     - Day 341/365		-		Roman philosopher, orator and politician Cicero was executed, 43 BCE. Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, born, 1545. The Great Storm of 1703 made landfall in the south of Great Britain, 1703. Actress Ellen Burstyn born, 1932. The Imperial Japanese Navy launched an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 1941. Astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin died, 1979. International Civil Aviation Day (UN).
Monday 8th December     - Day 342/365		-		The coronation of Louis the Stammerer as king of the West Frankish Kingdom, 877. Journalist, writer and opium addict Thomas De Quincey died, 1859. Pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès born, 1861. The Galileo spacecraft slingshotted around Earth for the first time, 1990, and the second time, 1992. Actress Kim Basinger born, 1953. Computer scientist and programmer Betty Holberton died, 2001.
Tuesday 9th December     - Day 343/365		-		Byzantine general Belisarius entered Rome unopposed, during the Gothic War, 536. Mathematician and cartographer Gemma Frisius born, 1508. Artist Sir Anthony van Dyck died, 1641. Douglas Engelbart publicly debuted the computer mouse, hypertext and the bit-mapped graphical user interface in The Mother of All Demos, 1968. Singer-songwriter Imogen Heap born, 1977. Archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey died, 1996. International Anti-Corruption Day (UN).
Wednesday 10th December     - Day 344/365		-		Artist Paolo Uccello died, 1475. The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published, 1768. Librarian Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System, born, 1851. The United Nations signed the Human Rights Convention, 1948. Actress Susan Dey born, 1952. Writer and educator Olivia Coolidge died, 2006. Human Rights Day (International).
Thursday 11th December     - Day 345/365		-		King James II of England threw the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames while attempting to flee to France during the Glorious Revolution, 1688. Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon born, 1863. Businessman Oliver Winchester, founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, died, 1880. Actress and comedian Mo'Nique born, 1967. The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions reduction opened for signatures, 1997. Author Anne Rice died, 2021. International Mountain Day (UN).

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Nelson Mandela:

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films starring Maggie Smith. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• Now, Jenny, do us a cartwheel for comic relief.
• 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.
• I've always wanted to use that spell.
• - Can I have a bit of earth?
  - A bit of earth?
  - To plant seeds in. To make things grow.
• 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.

Last issue's quotations from films starring Sam Neill were from:

• I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle". And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
      -- The Hunt For Red October [1990]
• One understands why some animals eat their young.
      -- Bicentennial Man [1999]
• They're not your crew any more. They belong to the ship.
      -- Event Horizon [1997]
• What have they got in there, King Kong?
      -- Jurassic Park [1993]
• - You have a gun?
  - Yep. This is an official NASA installation, after all.
  - Does mum know you have a gun?
  - No. And don't you go telling her, either! Or else she might come and take it off me.
      -- The Dish [2000]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

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

• Altadena, California, resident Ken Johnson, had noticed items in his yard by the house had been moved or knocked over so he installed cameras. What he saw was a 500lb (227kg) black bear going through his rubbish, but what he saw the next day was even more shocking. The bear was emerging from the crawlspace under his house. There have been at least two other instances of bears moving into crawlspaces in California since early 2024. Police advised Johnson to stay indoors for safety while officials decide what to do about the bear. ● While evidence suggests that dogs became domesticated between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, new research suggests that cats, perhaps not surprisingly, were more fussy. Analysis of bones found during archaeological digs in Europe, Africa and Anatolia suggests that cats started associating with humans just 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, in Africa. All modern domestic cats are descended from the African wildcat. ● Colossal Biosciences, the company that controversially claimed to have brought dire wolves back from extinction (they did not; they created slightly DNA-modified grey wolves) has announced their next project - the dodo... They plan to edit the DNA in pigeon germ cells, the precursors of sperm and eggs, to match dodo traits, then use chickens modified to carry the pigeon cells, to produce offspring that look like dodos (but are not...). The last confirmed sighting of a live dodo was in 1662. ● A 69-year-old Japanese man has escaped with minor leg injuries after being attacked by a bear while he was using a public toilet in Gunma Prefecture [We presume he was in or near to the woods... -Ed]. ● Researchers have long known that pigeons, like bats, turtles and migratory birds, navigate using the Earth's magnetic field, and have now discovered that it is the pigeons' vestibular system, the three fluid-filled loops in the inner ear which, as well as sensing movement in the three spatial dimensions, that can also sense the magnetic field. ● A reindeer who fled from a festive event in Formby, Merseyside, early on Saturday afternoon was tracked to the beach where lifeboat crew used quad bikes to shepherd it into the dunes where police monitored it with a thermal imaging drone. Knowing that it would be getting tired they waited until it lay down, at which point a vet supported by Royal Marines who had been on exercise nearby, managed to sedate the reindeer at 01:20 on Sunday morning so he could be loaded onto a trailer and returned to his owner. ● A programme to clear roadside drains in Hertfordshire saw council workers deploy remote video cameras to check for blockages. They removed items including a trampoline, trousers and a live hand grenade before the video feed from one drain showed a family of squirrels nesting in it. ● Little Elm, Texas, police have released bodycam footage from an officer sent to investigate reports of a stray goat. It shows him approaching the goat and asking where it was from (no answer) before trying to persuade it to get into the back of his patrol car. The goat tried to get into the front of the car but was lured into the back with a handful of grass. Posting the video on Facebook the department commented that "[The goat] demands grass. Receives grass. Accepts his rights with zero remorse" as the goat is seen lying on the backseat eating grass while the officer read it its Miranda rights. They added "If this is your goat, please retrieve him. He's already trying to promote himself to Sergeant." ● Video recorded by Indonesian botanist Septian Andriki and Chris Thorogood of Oxford Botanic Garden as they trekked through a rainforest in West Sumatra has recorded the moment Mr Andriki broke down in tears of joy after finding a rare Rafflesia hasseltii plant after "13 years of waiting".


• Samples returned from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 haave been confirmed to contain 14 amino acids including tryptophan as well as five nucleobases, suggesting that the parent body Bennu broke off from contained liquid water. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, while nucleobases are the genetic basis of RNA and DNA. The confirmation of their presence adds weight to the theory that life on Earth developed from molecules carried by asteroids that collided with the young planet. ● Next year a Pegasus XL rocket will be launched by Katalyst Space Technologies on behalf of NASA, on an audacious mission to stop the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope, which has been studying gamma rays from low Earth orbit for two decades, crashing back to the planet late in the year. The rocket will be launched from a Northrop Grumman L-1011 Stargazer aircraft at an altitude of 39,000' (11,900m). Once near the telescope the rocket will release a robotic spacecraft that will, if all goes to plan, grasp the telescope and drag it back to a stable orbit. ● A team of astronomers have claimed the first detection of dark matter, the matter believed to make up 80% of the universe, but which does not interact with ordinary - or baryonic - matter other than by its gravitational effect. Dark matter is thought to consist of WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles), which should have antimatter equivalents, just like ordinary matter. When WIMPs collide with their antimatter particles they should annihilate each other and release energy as gamma rays. Gamma rays are also given off by many baryonic matter interactions including supernovas and neutron stars. The team, who analysed 15 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, claim to have found gamma rays for which there was no identifiable baryonic source. The findings are yet to be peer-reviewed. ● NASA's Perseverence rover has recorded what is being claimed is the sound of lightning on Mars, something the scientists have long thought existed. Unlike lightning on Earth though, which consists of large jagged bolts, Martian lightning consists of tiny discharges similar to static you might experience by touching a metal door handle after rubbing your feet along a carpet.


• Archaeologists in China have discovered the remains of almost 600 stone fortresses dating back as far as 2800 BCE, in the mountains near Yulin. ● A 3,000-year-old gold mine has been discovered in Egypt's Sukari Mountains, with evidence of a large camp around it, including processing and purification facilities. ● A life-sized human statue has been discovered inside a wall at a 12,000-year-old sanctuary in Gobeklitepe, sourthestern Turkey. ● Radiation monitors at Chernobyl have detected a spike in neutron emissions underneath the protective sarcophagus built over the former nuclear reactor which exploded in April 1986. It is thought that the spike was caused by moisture moving about in the abandoned reactor rather than being the start of a chain reaction that could lead to another explosion. ● A forensic team has claimed to have extracted DNA from a shawl said to have been found near the body of Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper, in 1888, and matched it to descendents of Aaron Kosminski, who was a named suspect in the case. Others have criticised the published claim, which does not specify the genetic sequences matches. The team blamed British privacy laws for preventing them publishing the details, despite mitochondrial DNA posing no privacy threat. There is also no clear evidence that the shawl was actually at the crime scene, and it could have been contaminated multiple times in the intervening years. ● Archaeologists are to restart digging at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney after reporting that 3D radar scanning had led to an "extraordinary discovery" that might not be Neolithic, like the rest of the site, but have not said what they expect to find. ● A series of huge regularly-spaced Neolithic pits, 33' (10m) in diameter and more than 16' (5m) deep has been confirmed at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. ● A new study of Easter Island's Moai, the 13'- (4m)-tall monolithic human figures, many on stone platforms, has suggested that they were carved by cooperating independent family groups without any central oversight between 1250 and 1500. ● Christ on the Cross, a 1613 painting by Peter Paul Reubens, which was considered lost for more than 400 years before being discovered during an inspection of a Paris home that was due to be auctioned, sold at the Osenat auction house in Versailles on Sunday for €2.3m (£2.04m; $2.7m).


• A wannabe car thief in Atlantic County, New Jersey, was arrested on Thursday night after being unable to start the car or to reopen the doors, which were faulty and had jammed shut. Police managed to open them before arresting Henriquez Sanchez, 19, on a charge of attempted burglary. ● Belgian police are searching for whoever stole the baby Jesus from a controversial nativity scene on the Grand Place in Brussels. The figures in the scene were crafted out of cloth and have no facial features in the hope that "every Catholic, regardless of their background or origins can identify themselves", according to artist Victoria-Maria Geyer. Others have compared them to "zombie-like" people at train stations. ● A couple from Kazakhstan have been accused of using a hidden camera and earpieces to fraudulently win almost A$1.2m (£593,000; $784,000) at a casino in Sydney, Australia. ● Thieves broke into L'Escargot Des Grands Crus, a snail farm in Bouzy, near Reims, France, last week and stole €90,000- (£79,000; $104,000)-worth of fresh and frozen edible snails, a French delicacy especially in demand at this time of year. The farm's client include Michelin-starred restaurants, delicatessens and private individuals. ● Two women who assaulted the driver and ran off without paying a £38 ($50) taxi fare in Bournemouth, Dorset, were identified and arrested after police posted dashcam pictures of them to Facebook, and one of the women reposted them with the comment "go like it guys xxx". They pled guilty and were ordered to pay the driver almost three times the fare each plus costs.


• Researchers have found that Africa's forests, long considered a major carbon sink, are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb, largely due to deforestion. ● The village of Cumberland, in British Columbia, Canada, is planning to heat and cool its buildings using the water which fills the maze of abandoned coal shafts beneath it. The mine was operational from 1888 until the late 1960s and scientists have found that the water maintains a higher temperature than the air above ground during the winter and stays cooler in the summer. A project will use heat pumps to warm or cool buildings by transferring heat to or from the mine water at almost no carbon cost. ● The European Space Agency's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service has reported that this year the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic was the smallest and shortest-lived since 2019. ● Geologists have reported that ice loss due to climate change has probably dropped the summit of Mount Rainier in Washington State, USA, by more than 20' (6m) since the mid-20^th century, and moved the location of the summit 400' (122m) to the south. ● Scientists monitoring alligators in Florida's Everglades have expressed concern that many low-lying islands used by the alligators for their nests are being subsumed by rising water levels caused by climate change and hurricane storm surges.

IN BRIEF: An AI-enhanced teddy bear that uses ChatGPT to interact with children has been withdrawn from sale. Kumma (yes, that is really its name...), made by FoloToy, was found to be offering dangerous and graphic sexual advice... ● An Air India Boeing 737-200 that has sat idle at Kolkata airport for more than 13 years is being moved on a trailer the 1,180 miles (1,900km) to Bengaluru where it will become a training platform for engineers. It is notable because Air India had forgotten that they owned it; its status only came to light after the airport made plans to clear the area around it for new buildings. ● Fifteen-year-old Laurent Simons, from Belgium, is possibly the youngest person to have ever completed a PhD in quantum physics. The youngest person to gain a PhD in any subject was the German Karl Witte, who received his doctorate in 1814 at the age of 13. ● It is, perhaps, the subject of some of the most heated arguments at this time of year, but a recent survey of British people for the British Board of Film Classification has found that a majority consider that Die Hard, the 1988 John McTiernan film in which Bruce Willis' NYPD officer John McClane fights a terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve, is not a Christmas film... ● The Scottish Languages Act, voted through by the Scottish Parliament in June, came into effect on St Andrew's Day, making Gaelic and Scots official languages in Scotland. ● Ash Lambell, 33, has completed a 26-year mission to attend soccer games at all 92 English football league (72 English Football League and 20 Premier League) stadiums. He ended his journey watching Northampton Town, his home team, defeat Plymouth Argyle 3-0 at Home Park in Plymouth. ● Oxford University Press has named 'rage bait' (using manipuative tactics to drive engagement on social media) as their word or phrase of the year. ● Speed eater Travis Malouf choked to death while trying to eat a half-pound (250g) glazed doughnut in under 80 seconds during a competition at Voodoo, an American bakery chain. ● A 37.41 carat rough diamond, half pink, half clear, has been discovered at the Karowe mine in Botswana.

UPDATES: The three octagenarian Austrian nuns who ran away from an old people's home to return to their former convent have been told by Church authorities that they can stay there as long as they keep off social media.

^{^} OBITUARIES

Cricketer Robin Smith (Natal, Hampshire, England, 62), author Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone, Give Us a Kiss, Tomato Red, 72), guitarist Bob 'Bongo' Starkie (Skyhooks, 73), actor John Eimen (Leave It to Beaver, McKeever and the Colonel, The Twilight Zone, 76), playwright and screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Shakespeare in Love, 88), journalist Sir Andreas Whittam Smith (The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, co-founder of The Independent, 88), actress Jill Freud (Love Actually, Torchy, the Battery Boy, the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia books, 98), actress Lise Bourdin (Love in the Afternoon, Dishonorable Discharge, The River Girl, 99).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

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

6, 7, 24, 28, 44, 45

[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 telling the children about percentages. She had explained what they were and asked the class "OK, suppose I gave you a test with 20 questions and you got 10 right. What would you get?"
    The children thought for a moment then a hand shot up. "Yes, Little Simon?"
    "50%, Miss!"
    "Very good. Now, who can tell me what they would get if they got all 20 answers right?"
    Another hand went up. "Yes, Little Jennifer?"
    Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Accused of cheating, Miss!"

---

^{^} ...end of line