View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1919 – The first flight from England to Australia started at Hounslow, with Ross and Smith in a Vickers Vimy. They landed safely on 13th December 1919.
1928 – The birth, in South Africa of Bob Holness, English radio and television presenter. He is best known for presenting the British version of the quiz show Blockbusters, but also presented the quiz shows Take a Letter, Raise the Roof and Call My Bluff.
1933 – The first photograph of the ‘Loch Ness monster’ was taken by Mr Hugh Gray. He managed to take five pictures altogether but after processing, four of them were blank and the fifth was not confirmed as being Nessie.
1944 – The RAF launched 29 Avro Lancaster bombers in one of the most successful precision bombing attacks of war and sank the German battleship Tirpitz, the last of the major German battleships.
1974 – A salmon was caught in the Thames, the first since around 1840. It was an 8lb 4 1/2oz female and she was discovered entangled in the protective nets around West Thurrock power station It was regarded by Thames Water authority as a vindication of the £100m they had spent on effluent control.
1997 – Train robber Ronnie Biggs, was celebrating after Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected a British request to extradite him, for the 2nd time. The court in Rio de Janeiro ruled that because Biggs’ crime was committed more than 20 years previously he could not be extradited.
2001 – Greece held 12 plane-spotting British ‘spies’ to carry out further inquiries. All were arrested for allegedly taking photographs at an air show at a military base.
2014 – Police killer Harry Roberts was released from prison. Roberts, now aged 78, was jailed for life for murdering three unarmed officers in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, in 1966.
2015 – Storm Abigail, the first storm to be officially named by the Met Office, was upgraded to amber, with winds forecast of up to 90mph in the Western Isles, parts of Argyll and the north west Highlands and Orkney from 9:00pm on the 12th to midday on Friday 13th.
2018 – Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics characters, The Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, Thor, The Avengers, Iron Man, Doctor Strange and The Fantastic Four, dies aged 95.
2019 – The Disney+ streaming service was launched. The on-demand streaming video service gives viewers access to a wide range of Walt Disney Studios, Walt Disney Television, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic shows and movies.
Did you know that on this day, November 12, 2014, the space probe “Philae” became the first-ever probe to land on a moving comet?
In eastern Africa you can buy beer brewed from bananas.
The Capital of Egypt is Cairo.
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” – Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street, 1987
That’s a nice ham you’ve got there.
… it’d be a shame if somebody put an ‘s’ at the front and an ‘e’ at the end.
I decided to clean my kitchen today, but I had found that all of the stuff that gets kicked under the fridge had coalesced into a colony of angry fungus people and they made an attempt to escape. They had a wormhole generator and there were noodly arms coming out of it.
I fear for my life.
The smallest US state (Rhode Island) has a larger population than the largest U.S. state (Alaska).
The most lethal sports riot in history happened in Constantinople AD 532, was over chariot racing, and saw tens of thousands dead and half the city destroyed.
Birthday : quotes
“Getting angry doesn’t solve anything.” – Grace Kelly
“People are gonna believe what they want to believe And like I said before, I really don’t give a damn.” – Tonya Harding
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.” – George S. Patton
“To the artist, there is never anything ugly in nature.” – Auguste Rodin
“The more simple we are, the more complete we become.”
– Auguste Rodin
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.