ON THIS DAY
October 20, 2015
IT’S DAY 293 OF 2015
AFTER host Stephen Fry’s swearing at the Bafta awards in February — at one stage he introduced the star of Mission: Impossible as ‘Tom f***ing Cruise’ — the BBC received 293 complaints.
THE average American watches 293 minutes of TV per day, while the average person in the UK watches 232 minutes.
WHEN MPs voted in 1989 on whether to allow the House of Commons to be televised, 293 voted for and 69 against. Among the ‘no’ voters were the Tories’ Norman Tebbitt and Labour’s Dennis Skinner.
CLARENCE the Angel says he’s ‘ 293 years old . . . next May’ in the classic 1946 film It’s A Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart.
THERE ARE 72 DAYS LEFT
CANADIAN fighter pilot William ‘Billy’ Bishop VC shot down 72 German aircraft to become the British empire’s top fighter ace of World War I.
AROUND 72 per cent of 18 to 25-year- olds use emojis — symbols showing different emotions (right) — when sending messages.
FOR every letter in the name of British computer genius Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, there are 72 million functioning websites online.
METEOROLOGISTS define a blizzard as a snowstorm with winds of 56 km/h (35mph). A severe blizzard has winds of more than 72 km/h (45 mph) and visibility near zero.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
TIMOTHY WEST, 81. When he starred as the Prince of Wales in the 1975 drama series edward The Seventh, his mother Queen Victoria was played by Annette Crosby. In real life they were born in the same year.
DANNII MINOGUE, 44 (right). The Melbourne-born singer and former X Factor judge is the younger sister of Kylie Minogue. Their mother, Carol, was born in Maesteg in South Wales, where the family ran the Post Office.
DANNY BOYLE, 59. The Oscar-winning director of films Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire and the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. He says Trainspotting, about the lives of edinburgh junkies, taught him to ‘really take risks . . . That’s what people go to the movies for. They don’t go to see what’s acceptable’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
KATHY KIRBY (1938-2011). The Sixties singer came second in the eurovision Song Contest in 1965 singing I Belong. At one point the highest-paid female entertainer in the UK, after marital and financial problems, she spent much of her last 25 years as a recluse in her London flat.
JAMES CHADWICK (1891-1974). The Cheshire-born physicist won the Nobel Prize for discovering the neutron in 1932, which was the catalyst for the Manhattan Project, producing the first nuclear weapons during World War II.
CHRISTOPHER WREN (1632-1723). The architect of the rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London has a giant crater on Mercury named after him.
ON OCTOBER 20th . . .
IN 1349, Pope Clement VI outlawed the Flagellants, a sect within the Church who enjoyed whipping themselves too much.
IN 1910, the Titanic’s sister ship, RMS Olympic, was launched from the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast. She didn’t sink, earning the nickname ‘Old reliable’.
IN 1968, John F. Kennedy’s widow Jackie stunned the world by marrying Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, 23 years her senior.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.
Joan Collins
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY was Cinderella rubbish at football?
Because she ran away from the ball.