View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
May 14th is a special day, as it’s the day we celebrate National Buttermilk Biscuit Day and Dance Like A Chicken Day.
1940 – The birth of the Scottish yachtsman Chay Blyth. He made the first solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe from east to west against the prevailing winds and currents aboard the 59 ft. British Steel.
1951 – Trains ran on the Talyllyn Railway in Wales for the first time since preservation, making it the first railway in the world to be operated by volunteers.
1957 – The lifting of restrictions on fuel consumption imposed during the Suez crisis.
1965 – The field at Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, was dedicated by the Queen as a memorial to the late John F Kennedy, US President.
1967 – The consecration of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (see picture). The architect, Frederick Gibberd, winner of a worldwide design competition was sued soon after its opening for £1.3 million on five counts, the two most serious being leaks in the aluminium roof and defects in the mosaic tiles, which had begun to come away from the concrete ribs.
2013 – Stuart Hazell, aged 37, was jailed for a minimum of 38 years after he was given a life sentence for murdering the 12 year old schoolgirl Tia Sharp. He denied killing the youngster and hiding her body in the loft of the home he shared with her grandmother. Tia’s family sat through days of shocking and graphic evidence at the Old Bailey before Hazel eventually changed his plea to guilty, in a dramatic turn of events.
2013 – The London offices of BP and Shell were raided by European regulators investigating allegations they had ‘colluded’ to rig oil prices for more than a decade.
2013 – Dan Brown released his fourth novel in the Da Vinci Code series, Inferno, an instant success.
2014 – Google added coast-to-coast public transport information for the whole of Great Britain to its Google Maps app. The data included departure times and routes for buses, ferries, trains and trams in England, Scotland and Wales.
2014 – Teenage cancer fundraiser Stephen Sutton died peacefully in his sleep. The 19-year-old, from Burntwood in Staffordshire, raised more than £3.2m for charity after news of his plight spread on social media. (By 7th April 2015 the figure had rsien to more than £4.5m.)
Did you know that on this day in 1948, Israel declared independence from Britain? David Ben-Gurion made the announcement and went on to be the first Israeli Prime Minister.
Anybody suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner are good examples.
When someone says “9 out of 10 forest fires are caused by humans,” all I hear is… “There’s a bear out their that knows how to use matches.”
The Capital of Suriname is Paramaribo
There are three types of people. Sheep, Wolves, and Sheep Dogs.
Somebody who has an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony has an EGOT while somebody who has won an Emmy, a Grammy, and an Oscar just has an EGO.
Anosmia is the inability to smell – it is the nose’s equivalent to blindness or deafness.
“The stuff that dreams are made of.” – Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in Maltese Falcon, The Maltese Falcon, 1941
The word “mortgage” means “death pledge” in Old French.
“Fools talk of imitation and copying, all is imitation.” – Thomas Gainsborough
“Forget the audience, make what you want to see.” – Sofia Coppola
“It isn’t true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times if you know how.” – Bobby Darin
“People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.” – David Byrne
“The one way the world hasn’t changed: teaching is still the most important job.” – George Lucas
“No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to accept them and to live through them.” – Robert Zemeckis
“If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.” – Cate Blanchett
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.