Dye job was an own goal
QUESTION Why did the Romanian football team bleach their hair during the 1998 World Cup?
The hair bleaching episode is seen as a disaster in Romania. It marked a farcical end to the team’s most successful era in international football.
In the Nineties, Romania had a glorious World Cup run, qualifying for Italy ’90, USA ’94 and France ’98.
They were led by their iconic captain Gheorghe hagi, the Maradona of the Carpathians, regarded as the greatest Romanian footballer of all time.
The 1998 World Cup got off to a terrific start. They defeated Columbia 1-0 and england 2-1 in their opening group matches. having qualified after two games and feeling full of confidence, the entire team bleached their hair.
According to former Romania and Valencia winger Adrian ‘Cobra’ Ilie, the idea had cropped up at a strategy meeting before the World Cup.
The team had persuaded manager Anghel Iordanescu to shave his head if they qualified after two group games. As an act of solidarity with their manager, the players agreed to bleach their hair.
The night before their final group game against Tunisia, two hairdressers were summoned to the team hotel. The next day they shocked the world with their bizarre barnets.
In a 2010 interview, striker Gheorghe Craioveanu revealed that the bleach burned his scalp: ‘They butchered us. It was so painful I could only sleep on one side of my body for three nights.’
It also destroyed the team’s winning mentality: ‘The players had slipped into a relaxed, holiday mood.’
The team secured a 1-1 draw with lowly Tunisia before they were dumped out of the tournament by Croatia in the round of 16. Anghel Iordanescu resigned and it was the last time Romania qualified for the World Cup.
L. D. Fischer, London NW11.
QUESTION How are birds able to fly at speed into hedges without causing harm to themselves?
IT hAS long been assumed birds have incredibly fast perception and thus can avoid collisions. This was finally proven in Ultra-Rapid Vision In Birds, a 2016 study by Swedish researchers.
They took three wild species, blue tits, collared and pied flycatchers, and investigated their critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF).
When a light flashes at a slow rate, vertebrates see a distinct series of flashes separated by dark intervals. As the flash rate increases, the distinctness of the flashes changes to a continuous flicker.
A further increase in the flash rate leads to the appearance of a steady light. In humans, these changes occur within a range from 5 hz to 50 hz.
A TV screen or movie projector is viewed as steady because the light is flickering faster than our CFF. For the purposes of presenting moving images, the human flicker fusion threshold is taken at 60 hz.
The researchers trained wild- caught birds to receive a food reward by distinguishing between a pair of lamps, one flickering and one shining a constant light. Temporal resolution was determined by increasing the flicker rate to a threshold at which the birds could no longer tell the lamps apart.
The birds were able to resolve alternating light-dark cycles at far greater rates than humans, on average 127 hz for collared flycatchers, 129 hz for blue tits and 137 hz for pied flycatchers.
One pied flycatcher could distinguish flashes at 145 hz — 50 hz over the highest frequency for any other vertebrate.
For birds, the world might to be said to be in slow motion compared to how humans see it. This means small birds can pluck fast-moving insects out of the sky, avoid swaying branches or rapidly seek sanctuary in a hedgerow without fear of impaling themselves.
Brian Stern, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
QUESTION How many times did the Germans surrender at the end of World War II?
FIeld Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the first major surrender, encompassing German forces in holland, northern Germany and denmark, at luneburg on May 4, 1945.
German generals pushed for local surrenders to the western Allies to shield their men from a more vengeful Russia, but Allied Supreme Commander dwight d. eisenhower rejected this and took the surrender of all remaining German forces in europe early on May 7 in Reims.
A ceasefire was due to start on May 9 so Russia could be informed. The country was not properly represented at Reims as its army was pushing on from the east. Though embargoed, the news was leaked by a U.S. reporter and it was announced that the next day, May 8, 1945, would be Victory in europe day.
Senior German commanders were made to sign again that day in Berlin to confirm the surrender for the Soviet Union, which still marks Ve day one day after the rest of the world. The war in europe was over, but the resentment caused in Russia was one of many steps towards the Cold War. Chris Rogers, Edgware, Middlesex.
QUESTION What was a comptometer?
FURTheR to earlier answers, I worked for a large audit practice in the Nineties and I remember one job in 1995 when I arranged for a comptometer operator to check the stock list of a client. It was A3 sized and 3 in thick.
The financial director complained this was a waste of time and money because the computer print-out would add up.
The operator added it up three times and got the same answer each time, but it didn’t match the total on the print-out.
It turned out that the client’s stock program had ‘glitches’. The stock was massively overvalued and this resulted in a significant audit adjustment. The financial director was left red-faced.
Eddie Green, Southport, Merseyside.
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