ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JANUARY 22, 1938
SIxTEEN hundred professional footballers in Britain are asking for more pay. An increase of the minimum wage of £4 to £5 a week and of the maximum of £8 to £9 a week is requested for players in the Football League. Mr James A. Fay, secretary of the Association Football Players’ and Trainers’ Union, said: ‘Terms offered in many of the cases were disgraceful.’
JANUARY 22, 1981
AMErICA’S jubilation began turning to anger yesterday when it realised just how badly some of its 52 hostages were treated by the Iranians. It was revealed that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionaries played russian roulette with American women prisoners…and men were lined up before firing squads.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
LINDA BLAIr, 62. The U.S. actress was nominated for an Oscar for playing the possessed child regan in the 1973 film The Exorcist. She said the role, which saw her head spin 360 degrees, ‘was one of the hardest jobs probably ever, ever, ever in history’. She had wanted to become a vet but instead set up a dog rescue charity, to which Simon Cowell used to donate $50,000 a year.
DIANE LANE, 56. The U.S. actress starred in Chaplin and Unfaithful and played Superman’s mother in three films, starting with Man Of Steel. At 12, she was acting opposite Meryl Streep and at 14 appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Her mother was a cabaret singer who posed for Playboy.
BORN ON THIS DAY
SAM COOKE (1931-1964). The U.S. singer-songwriter and King of Soul had hits with You Send Me and Bring It On Home To Me. He was shot dead, aged 33, by a Los Angeles motel manager. Cooke was friends with Muhammad Ali and Black Nationalism leader Malcolm x, and his first posthumous single, A Change Is Gonna Come, became an anthem for the civil rights movement.
BEATrICE WEBB (1858-1943). The social reformer from Gloucestershire, born Beatrice Potter, was a co-founder — along with husband Sidney and playwright George Bernard Shaw — of the London School of Economics. The Webbs spent their honeymoon researching trade unions.
ON JANUARY 22 . . .
IN 1901, Queen Victoria died, aged 81. IN 1946, U.S. President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group, latterly the CIA.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Spud (coined early 15th century) A) Nothing, nought, zero. B) A weeding tool, like a small spade. C) A performer with a frog in the throat.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED Keep the wolf from the door: meaning to have sufficient money to pay one’s bills and keep the bailiffs at bay; the original 1470 phrase was to ‘keep the wolf from the gate’ and by the 1500s it referred to having enough money not to starve.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back. Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian-born actress (1917-2016)
JOKE OF THE DAY
HOW did the hipster burn his mouth? He ate the pizza before it was cool. Guess The Definition answer: B