View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1928 – England beat Australia by a record 675 runs in the Test at Brisbane.
1952 – The Great Smog. A cold fog descended on London, combining with air pollution and killed at least 12,000 in the weeks and months that followed.
1956 – Miss Rose Heilbron QC was appointed Recorder of Burnley to become Britain’s first woman judge.
1958 – The Queen dialled Edinburgh and spoke to the Lord Provost from Bristol, to inaugurate the first direct dialled trunk call, known as STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling)
1958 – Prime Minister Harold Macmillan opened the Preston bypass in Lancashire. It was the first stretch of motorway in Britain and is now part of the M6 and M55 motorways.
1973 – During a petrol shortage, the government imposed a 50mph speed limit to save fuel.
1989 – Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher defeated Sir Anthony Meyer in the first challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.
1991 – Robert Maxwell’s business empire collapsed with huge debts of more than £1bn and revelations about misappropriation of money in pension funds.
1993 – The record by Mr Blobby, a pink-and-yellow spotted BBC television star, reached number one in the charts.
2005 – The Civil Partnership Act came into effect in the United Kingdom. It gave same-sex couples rights and responsibilities identical to civil marriage. In addition a formal process for dissolving partnerships was put in place, akin to divorce.
2012 – The Audit Commission announced that English councils had increased their reserves by £4.5bn over the previous five years to £12.9bn despite cuts to funding. The money set aside was the equivalent of almost a third of their spending on services.
2013 – Reforms in Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement included that those in their twenties would have to work until they were 70, under sweeping changes to the basic state pension.
2013 – The death, aged 95, of Nelson Mandela, the towering figure of Africa’s struggle for freedom and a hero to millions around the world. There are more streets named after Nelson Mandela in the UK than anywhere in the world outside South Africa. He also shares one of London’s most high profile public spaces in Parliament Square, with his statue alongside great figures from British history, such as former prime ministers Winston Churchill and Robert Peel.
2014 – Scotland lowered the legal drink-drive limit in Scotland, from 80mg to 50mg in every 100ml of blood, lower than elsewhere in the UK.
2019 – The World Health Organization announced that 142,000 people died of measles around the world in 2018, nearly 20,000 more than in 2017.
Did you know that on this day in 2008, O.J. Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison for kidnapping and armed robbery? He was granted parole nine years later.
Happiness is a path, not a destination.
My friend keeps saying “cheer up man it could be worse, you could be stuck underground in a hole full of water.” … I know he means well.
Levi Strauss died on September 26, 1902, at the age of 73, and never married. Ironically he didn’t get to pass his genes on to the next generation.
Cicero – Real Name: Marcus Tullius
“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” – Goldmember #moviequotes
In 1830 students at Yale revolted over the introduction of chalk boards.
Tweety is and has always been a male character, in spite of what many people think.
Frank Lloyd Wright was specifically left off the architecture commission for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair due to his ‘inability to work well with others.’
The Capital of Bolivia is La Paz (administrative); Sucre (judicial)
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” – Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob, also narrated The Powerpuff Girls.
Never attempt to put out a grease fire with water. Doing so spreads it and makes it worse. If grease catches fire you have to smother it and cut off its supply of oxygen to put it out.
Birthday : quotes
“If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.” – Walt Disney
“There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as a mediator.” – Fritz Lang
“The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.” – Werner Heisenberg
“Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them.” – Werner Heisenberg.
“Gay people are the sweetest, kindest, most artistic, warmest, and most thoughtful people in the world. And since the beginning of time, all they’ve ever been is kicked.” – Little Richard
“Acting classes, I guess, are good and I would like to maybe sometime take one. But I would feel like I was learning someone else’s technique. I like mine.” – Frankie Muniz
I would rather have a good education and no money than to have a fortune and be ignorant.” – George Armstrong Custer
2018 – Xi’an, China, introduced a pedestrian lane for people who walk while looking at their phones.
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.