View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1937 – The first flight of the Vickers Wellington, a British twin-engine, long range medium bomber designed at Brooklands in Weybridge, Surrey. It was widely used as a night bomber in the early years of the Second World War, before being displaced as a bomber by the larger four-engine “heavies” such as the Avro Lancaster.
1956 – The United Nations Emergency Force took over in Egypt after British and French forces withdrew from Port Said and Port Fuad, thus ending the Suez Crisis.
1964 – The government announced that Dr. Richard Beeching, who instigated major and controversial changes to the rail network, was to quit his post.
1970 – The Mousetrap reached its 7511th consecutive performance to break the world record for the longest running play.
1972 – Plane crash survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 were rescued. Sixteen plane crash survivors were rescued after being stranded in the Andes for seventy days. Although 33 of the 45 onboard survived the crash, injuries and severe weather conditions killed many more. Survivors had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
1981 – Geoffrey Boycott becomes the leading run-scorer in test cricket with 8033.
1987 – The first ‘Scrooge’ award by the Low Pay Unit was made to a Wiltshire stable-owner who paid a qualified groom only £28 a week. The runner-up was a doctor employing a telephonist for 30p an hour. The prize was a copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
1992 – The BBC investigated a leak which led to the Queen’s Christmas speech being published in the Sun newspaper, ahead of its broadcast on the BBC. The leak led to a clampdown on the future advance availability of the speech to the world’s press.
1999 – George Harrison’s home in Maui is broken into by Cristin Keleher, who cooks a frozen pizza, drinks beer from the fridge, starts some laundry and phones her mother in New Jersey.
2011 – The Duke of Edinburgh was taken to Papworth hospital in Cambridgeshire after complaining of chest pains, and was treated for a blocked coronary artery. The procedure was declared a success but he was kept in for four nights so that doctors could keep a check on his recovery.
2013 – Grandfather John McCafferty (71) entered the record books as the world’s longest-surviving heart transplant patient at 30 years, 11 months and 11 days. At the time of his heart transplant in 1982 he was told that he might expect to live for another five years if the procedure was a success.
2014 – The death, aged 84, of Jeremy Lloyd who created comedy sitcoms including ‘Are You Being Served?’ and ‘Allo ‘Allo!
2014 – The death of 51 year old mulitple sclerosis patient Debbie Purdy. Ms. Purdy won a landmark ruling in the House of Lords in 2009 which resulted in guidelines on assisted suicide being published by the Government.
2014 – Ashley Stansfield, 48, a prisoner released on licence, was sentenced to spend Christmas in jail after he was punished for taking a job which started at 6.15 in the morning, 45 minutes before his night-time curfew expired.
Did you know that on this day in 1972, the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 plane crash were rescued? They had been struggling to stay alive for 72 days in a remote part of the Andes mountains.
The first movie to gross over $100 million was Jaws, 1975.
Since 1987 the fictional license plate # 2GAT123 has appeared in dozens of commercials and over 20 films
In a 1931 exhibition game between the New York Yankees and the Chattanooga Lookouts, a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Creator Chuck Jones said he created the Coyote-Road Runner cartoons as a parody of traditional “cat and mouse” cartoons like Tom and Jerry.
The first nativity scene staged was by St Francis of Assissi in 1223. He got permission from Pope Honorious III to set up a manger with hay and two live animals—an ox and an ass – in Grecio, an Italian village. He invited villagers to view it while he preached.
People with higher incomes generally prefer their toilet paper to come over the roll, while those with lower incomes prefer it to go under.
Due to an error by one of the creators of the HTTP specification, every web page request made contains the misspelling ‘Referer’.
“Alright, alright, Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog. What’s Goofy?” – Gordie in Stand By Me #moviequotes
Birthday : quotes
“Welcome, newcomers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it! For some people, the revelation comes too late that life is best kept to the essentials. Some people are given their last rites and that person might say in their last breath, ‘I should have celebrated Festivus.’” – Jerry Stiller, as Frank Costanza, on Seinfeld
“You know what my greatest personal stumbling block is? My shyness.” – Susan Lucci
“The final frontier is perhaps the most difficult, but it’s also the most important – and that’s the frontier of the human spirit. For too long, people have allowed differences on the surface; differences of colour, ethnicity, and gender – to tear apart the common bonds they share. And the human spirit suffers as a result. Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them. Imagine a world in which we finally recognized that, fundamentally, we are all the same. And imagine if we allowed that new understanding to build relations between people and between nations.” – Wesley Clark
“Too many in your state [Pennsylvania], as in this [New York], love pure democracy dearly. They seem not to consider that pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication, and with it a thousand mad pranks and fooleries.” – John Jay
1993 – The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, fell into the sea following a landslide, making news around the world.
1805 – The first Trooping of the Colour took place on Horse Guards Parade. It was Edward VII who moved Trooping the Colour to its June date, because of the vagaries of British weather.
2012 – The Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant took place on the Tideway of the River Thames, as part of the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.