ON THIS DAY
August 17, 2018
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
AUGUST 17, 1940 COWS don’t like air raids — they undermine their morale. So claimed farmer Charles James at Barry Police Court yesterday, when accused of offering for sale milk deficient in fat. He said hours before the sample was taken, eight bombs fell on his farm, making the cows nervous when milked. AUGUST 17, 1966 THE Government is urged today by the Food Standards Committee to protect fat people by banning over-enthusiastic claims that a food is a ‘slimming food’ or has weight-reducing properties.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
JOHN HUMPHRYS, 75. The Cardiff-born BBC journalist (pictured) has presented Radio 4’s Today programme since 1987. Last year, he earned £650,000 a year, but agreed to take large pay cuts amid a gender pay gap row. Meanwhile, he has been economising on shampoo, shunning it for 15 years: ‘The first couple of weeks are pretty horrible — more grease than a chipshop fryer — but then the good bugs go to work and the grease gradually vanishes.’ ROBERT DE NIRO, 75. The double Oscarwinner, star of The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull, joined a New York street gang as a boy and was nicknamed Bobby Milk, as ‘he was pale and strange as milk’. He and Marlon Brando are the only actors to have won Oscars for playing the same character (The Godfather’s Vito Corleone).
BORN ON THIS DAY
SIR VIDIADHAR (VS) Naipaul (19322018). The Nobel and Booker prize-winning British author of In A Free State, who died this month, was known as much for his sharp tongue as his books. He described his birthplace, Trinidad, as ‘unimportant, uncreative, cynical...a dot on the map’, while Britain was home to ‘bum politicians, scruffy writers and crooked aristocrats’. His dark outlook led Nobel laureate Derek Walcott to dub him ‘VS Nightfall’. MAE WEST (1893-1980). By the mid-1930s, the U.S. actress (pictured) was the highest-paid Hollywood star. She was known for her one-liners, including: ‘Marriage is a great institution. I’m not ready for an institution yet.’ When asked by The Beatles for permission to feature her photo on their Sgt Pepper album cover, she joked: ‘What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?’
ON AUGUST 17 . . .
IN 1962, 18-year-old East German bricklayer Peter Fechter was shot and killed by border guards as he tried to cross the Berlin Wall.
IN 1989, directors Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron married, but later divorced. In 2010, she was the first female to win a best director Oscar, beating her ex to it.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Volitation (1646) A) Flying. B) Indecision. C) To steal. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Blighty: Means Britain and comes from when British soldiers in India corrupted the Hindi word bilayati for foreign.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
RemembeR, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.’ Sylvia Plath, American poet and novelist (1932-1963)
JOKE OF THE DAY
POLICE have arrested two children — one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks . . . They charged one and let the other one off. Guess The Definition answer: A