ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 337 OF 2015
A yOuNG Humboldt penguin known only as 337 spent two months at large in Tokyo in March 2012 after scaling a wall and slipping through a fence at the Sea Life Park. It was recaptured on a riverbank, none the worse for its life on the run. CRuCIfIxION was officially abolished in the Roman Empire in 337 AD by Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. A WEASEL can be pregnant for anything from 35 to 337 days. Once an egg has been fertilised, implantation of the embryo — when the young weasel, or kit, begins to grow in the womb — is often delayed until closer to spring, and warmer weather, giving it a greater chance of survival.
THERE ARE 28 DAYS LEFT
THE average woman starts to worry about losing her looks at the age of 28. CASTAWAy Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor whose story inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe, was 28 when he was marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island 400 miles off Chile in 1704. More than four years later, his smoke alerted a passing vessel, whose crew rescued the goatskin-clad ‘wildman’. MARTIN SCORSESE’S foul-mouthed mob movie Goodfellas, starring Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, averaged an f-word once every 28 seconds. A COuRAGEOuS group of 28 people — copying Vanuatu natives who ritualistically jumped from wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles — took the plunge on the day the world’s first bungee jump opened in New Zealand in 1988.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DARyL HANNAH, 55, right. Made of strong stuff, the actress lost a fingertip in an accident on her grandmother’s stairlift aged three. Then, when filming the sci-fi film Blade Runner, she put her elbow through a car window, breaking her arm, but carried on with the scene. EAMONN HOLMES, 56. The breakfast news host called in his lawyers in 2010 after a BBC comedy show portrayed him as a presenter given to eating everything in sight, including a sofa. The BBC apologised and dropped the character. DAN SNOW, 37. The well- connected historian is the great-great-grandson of former prime minister David Lloyd George, and is married to Lady Edwina Grosvenor, daughter of Britain’s richest landowner, the Duke of Westminster.
BORN ON THIS DAY
MEL SMITH ( 1952- 2013, right). The son of a miner turned bookie, Smith grew up above a fish and chip shop in Chiswick, West London. He got his comedy big break on Not The Nine O’Clock News, for which he was paid just £100 an episode. ANDy WILLIAMS (1927-2012). The silkyvoiced crooner notched up 18 gold and three platinum albums. In his own theatre, called Moon River after one of his best-known hits, he performed twice a day, six days a week, for nine months of the year.
ON DECEMBER 3 . . .
IN 1967, Louis Washkansky, a Lithuanian grocer who had emigrated to South Africa aged nine, received the world’s first heart transplant, performed by surgeon Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town. He died 18 days later from pneumonia, but Barnard hailed the surgery a success because the heart was ‘not being stimulated by an electrical machine’, but completely by the patient.
IN 1976, gunmen broke into reggae star Bob Marley’s mansion in Jamaica and shot the singer, his wife and manager. All three survived.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
Comedian Victor Borge (1909-2000)
JOKE OF THE DAY
DID you hear about the man who stole an Advent calendar? He got 25 days.