December 1st "2023" daily prep
Welcome to day 335 of the year! Known as Eat A Red Apple Day, National Christmas Lights Day and World Aids Day. If you were born on this day, you were likely conceived the week of March 10th. Your star sign is “Sagittarius” and your birthstone is Blue Topaz.
2010 – Large parts of the UK were brought to a standstill by the early freeze. Temperatures plunged again overnight to -16C (3F) in the Scottish Highland after one of the coldest starts to December in more than 20 years.
Todays birthdays
1935 – Woody Allen (88), American filmmaker, actor (Play It Again Sam, Deconstructing Harry), and comedian whose career spans more than six decades, born New York, United States.
1945 – Bette Midler (78), American singer (“Wind Beneath My Wings”), actress (Hocus Pocus), comedian and author, born in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States.
1946 – Gilbert O’Sullivan (77), Irish singer-songwriter (“Alone Again”, “Clair” and “Get Down”), born in Waterford, Ireland.
1948 – Neil Warnock (75), English football manager and former player who was most recently the manager of Championship club Huddersfield Town, born in Sheffield.
1988 – Zoë Kravitz (35), American actress (X-Men: First Class, Mad Max: Fury Road), singer and daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, born in Los Angeles, California, United States.
The day today
1966 – Britain issued its first special edition Christmas stamps. In 2006 the stamps were heavily criticized as they depicted no Christian images on any of the Christmas stamps.
1990 – Britain and France were joined for the first time in thousands of years as the last wall of rock separating two halves of the Channel Tunnel was removed.
1997 – 8 planets in our Solar System lined up from West to East beginning with Pluto, followed by Mercury, Mars, Venus, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn, along with a crescent moon, in a rare alignment visible from Earth that lasted until December 8.
2010 – Large parts of the UK were brought to a standstill by the early freeze. Temperatures plunged again overnight to -16C (3F) in the Scottish Highland after one of the coldest starts to December in more than 20 years. Some 4,000 schools were closed, the Forth Road Bridge was closed for the first time since it opened in 1964 and Edinburgh and Gatwick airports were shut. The Met Office issued heavy snow warnings for Scotland and north-east, eastern and south-east England.
2019 – The earliest traceable patient, a 55-year-old man, develops symptoms of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China.
Today in music
1966 – Tom Jones was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with his version of ‘Green Green Grass Of Home.’ It stayed at No.1 for seven weeks giving Decca records its first million selling single by a British artist. Also a No.11 hit in the US.
1984 – Jim Diamond was at No.1 in the UK singles chart with ‘I Should Have Known Better.’ The song was displaced after one week by Band Aid’s charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’’. Diamond publicly requested that people not buy his single, but instead buy Do They Know It’s Christmas.
1990 – Vanilla Ice started a four-week run at No.1 in the UK with the single ‘Ice Ice Baby’. The track sampled the bass intro to the Queen and David Bowie No.1 ‘Under Pressure’. ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was initially released as the B-side to the rapper’s cover of ‘Play That Funky Music’, and became the A-side after US DJ’s started playing it.
2008 – Wham’s Last Christmas was the most played festive track of the last five years. The Performing Right Society put the 1984 hit at the top of their chart of seasonal songs, just ahead of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? The Pogues came third with Fairytale of New York, recorded with the late Kirsty MacColl and first released in 1987. Other featured artists include Slade, Mariah Carey and Bruce Springsteen.
2016 – Drake was named Spotify’s most-streamed artist of 2016, with his single ‘One Dance’ the site’s biggest song of the year. The Canadian had 4.7 billion streams in this year, more than half of which were for his album Views. ‘One Dance’ alone was streamed 960 million times. Played consecutively, that would take more than 5,200 years.
Today in history
1135 – England’s King Henry I died. He had fallen ill seven days earlier after eating too many lampreys (jawless fish resembling eels). He was 66, and had ruled for 35 years.
1581 – Edmund Campion (later St. Edmund) and three other Jesuits were martyred. He was tried on a charge of treason for promoting Catholicism and was hanged in London.
1642 – The 1st English Civil War: A victory for Parliamentarian Forces when Colonel Sir William Waller stormed Farnham Castle in Surrey. It became his base for the remainder of the war.
1761 – Birth of Madame Marie Tussaud (Grosholz), Swiss-born French waxworks modeller. During the French Revolution she made death masks from the severed heads of the famous. In 1800, separated from her husband, she toured Britain with her waxworks, eventually setting up a permanent exhibition in London.
1887 – Beeton’s Christmas Annual went on sale, with ‘A Study in Scarlet’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which first introduced the detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Fact of the day
The tradition of putting tangerines in stockings comes from 12th-century French nuns who left socks full of fruit, nuts and tangerines at the houses of the poor.