View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1904 – The birth of the author, playwright and literary critic Graham Greene. His most notable works were Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.
1909 – The first rugby football match was played at Twickenham, between Harlequins and Richmond.
1925 – London’s first red buses with roofed-in upper decks went into service, but they had been in use in Widnes, Cheshire, since 1909.
1925 – John Logie Baird (Scottish born engineer born at Helensburgh) performed the first test of a working television system. Although Baird’s electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems, his early successes earned him a prominent place in television’s invention.
1942 – The British cruiser Curacao sank with the loss of 338 lives, after colliding with the liner Queen Mary off the coast of Donegal.
1950 – Legal Aid was introduced in Britain
1951 – The birth of Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, known by his stage name Sting. Prior to starting his solo singing career, he was the principal songwriter, lead singer and bass player for the rock band The Police.
1953 – A photograph of William Pettit, wanted for murder, was shown on BBC TV at the request of the police – the first time in Britain that television was used to help find a wanted man.
1968 – A woman gave birth to six babies in what was hailed as the first recorded case of live sextuplets in Britain.
1981 – The IRA hunger-strike at the Maze prison ended after after seven months and ten deaths.
1983 – Neil Kinnock was elected leader of Britain’s Labour Party, with Roy Hattersley joining him as deputy.
1991 – Ron Chassidy (who had been jailed for not paying his poll tax) was released after a ‘whip-round’ at his local pub so that he could play in a dominoes match!
1995 – British rock band Oasis released their second album, “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” The album sold a record 347,000 copies in its first week.
1996 – Mandy Allwood lost the last five of the octuplets she had been expecting after a 19 week pregnancy. She had refused ‘selective reduction’ and her case provoked a media storm in Britain.
2001 – Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the Taliban that it would be the target of military action unless it gave up Osama bin Laden.
2012 – The decision to award the West Coast Main Line rail franchise to FirstGroup was scrapped because of ‘significant technical flaws’ in the way the risks for each bid were calculated. FirstGroup, which beat current operator Virgin Trains to win the 13-year deal, said it had submitted its bid correctly and was disappointed at the news.
2020 – Two billionaire brothers from Blackburn won the battle to buy Asda from Walmart of the United States, in a deal valuing the supermarket chain at £6.8bn. Zuber and Mohsin Issa own EG Group (initially called Euro Garages) which was founded in 2001 on a single site in Bury, Greater Manchester. By 2020 they had more than 5,200 petrol stations across the UK, mainland Europe, the USA and Australia, along with 110 Starbucks stores and the largest franchise of KFC stores in the UK, with 125 sites.
Did you know that on this day in 1984, three Russian cosmonauts returned from space after spending a record 237 days in orbit? During the mission, six spacewalks, totaling 22 hours 50 minutes, had taken place.
The state of Michigan is only 58% land, with the other 42% being comprised of bodies of water.
7 authors have had a book hit #1 on both the New York Times Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Sellers list: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Mitch Albom, William Styron, Irving Wallace, Dr Seuss, and Jimmy Buffett.
Fredric Baur invented the Pringles can. When he passed away in 2008, his ashes were buried in one.
The difference between a cemetery and a graveyard is cemeteries are considered burial grounds while the older term graveyards is considered burial grounds attached to a church.
“give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” USED to be “give them an inch and they’ll take an ell”: an “ell” was a unit of measurement equal to about 37 inches
The Capital of Kyrgyzstan is Bishkek
Glass has been recycled for almost 3,000 years. It never wears out as a raw material.
I imagine that once computers develop genuine self-awareness they’ll also develop existential angst, insecurity, neurosis, low self-esteem, and generalized anxiety.
A group of Herons is called a Sedge or Siege or Hedge.
TV Quotes… “Say good night, Gracie” (George Burns) on “The Burns & Allen Show”
Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Warner Bros.
The language spoken in the last three lines of The Beatles’ “Sun King,” is actually nonsense. It is a mixture of faux-romance words that “sounded vaguely like something.”
Chipotle is not its own type of chili, it’s actually smoke-dried jalapeño.
“Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity.” – Nat Turner
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Carefully watch your thoughts, for they become your words. Manage and watch your words, for they will become your actions. Consider and judge your actions, for they have become your habits. Acknowledge and watch your habits, for they shall become your values. Understand and embrace your values, for they become your destiny.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person’s life and gives an account of it.” – Richard Hell
“Be sure that you first preach by the way you live. If you do not, people will notice that you say one thing but live otherwise, and your words will bring only cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head.” – Carlo Borromeo
“I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration – since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business – he is playwright, director, editor, and artist at once.” – Alex Raymond
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.