ON THIS DAY
October 21, 2017
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE OCTOBER 21, 1944
MESSAGES reaching official French circles indicate Hitler is contemplating one of the most fiendish mass murders in history. This is the slaughter of over 2,500,000 French prisoners and deportees who cannot be moved back with the retreating germans.
OCTOBER 21, 1969
THE Queen will not broadcast her traditional message to the Commonwealth this year — the first time since she came to the throne in 1952. A Buckingham Palace official said yesterday: ‘It was felt that this was a good year not to broadcast as she has been constantly in touch with members of the Commonwealth through television.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
GEOFFREY BOYCOTT, 77. Theresa May recently complained that the former cricket star had kept her Tupperware after she took brownies to the Test Match Special commentary team. This week he sent her new boxes with labels reading ‘Property of Theresa May’.
MARTIN CREED, 49. The Wakefield-born artist, who numbers all his work, won the 2001 Turner Prize for Work No 227: The Lights going On And Off — a room in which the lights went on and off. One critic dubbed it ‘the worst winner of all time’. When he sent Work No 88, a crumpled sheet of A4 paper, to the director of the Tate, a secretary returned it flattened out.
BORN ON THIS DAY
CARRIE FISHER (19562016). The daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie reynolds claimed to have got the part of Princess Leia in Star Wars by sleeping with ‘some nerd’. Fisher died last December aged 60; her mother, 84, died a day later.
MANDY RICE-DAVIES (1944-2014). The dancer who had been ‘Miss Austin’ at the 1960 Earls Court Motor Show was at the centre of the Profumo Scandal in 1963. In the resulting court case, when told of Lord Astor’s denial that he had been having an affair with her, she replied: ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ — now in the Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations. Police and lawyers sometimes say of statements ‘MrDA’, meaning Mandy rice-Davies Applies.
ON OCTOBER 21…
IN 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson died on the day his forces won the Battle of Trafalgar.
IN 1921, Warren Harding became the first U.S. president to condemn the lynching of black people — but it didn’t stop.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION Bodkin (coined 1638) A) The youngest of a litter of pigs. B) A person wedged in between two others when there is only properly room for two. C) A spur on the heel of a fighting cock.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To blow hot and cold: Meaning to be inconsistent. From an Aesop fable in which a traveller blows on a satyr’s cold fingers to warm them and on his hot broth to cool it. The satyr feels he can’t trust someone who blows hot and cold in the same breath.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
ThE World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for. Douglas Adams, English writer (1952-2001)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT’S the best way to forget about indigestion? Take Milk of Amnesia. Guess The Definition answer: B.