October 29, 2021 ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE OCTOBER 29, 1971
BRITAIN bleeped her way into the space age at the third and final attempt yesterday. The 145lb ‘Prospero’ satellite now circling the globe is the first satellite made and launched by Britain. It will also be the last. The all-British Black Arrow rocket, which costs £2 million a year, has been cancelled to save money. Britain will still build satellites, but will charter U.S. rockets to send them into orbit.
OCTOBER 29, 1998
HER famous cleavage shot her to stardom as a sex symbol in the 1940s. But Jane Russell finds nothing uplifting about today’s Wonderbra models. ‘I’d say to these girls: “Just don’t do it.”’ said the actress, now a 78-year-old grandmother. ‘There is taste, even in this world, and people are getting sick of the lack of it.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KATE JACKSON, 73. The Alabama-born Charlie’s Angels actress — near right with co-stars Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith — made her name as Sabrina Duncan, ‘the smart angel’ in the original line-up of 1970s TV series. She said she was the only angel to refuse to wear a bathing suit, insisting: ‘It just wasn’t necessary to the story.’
RICHARD DREYFUSS, 74. The U.S. actor, who starred in Jaws and Close encounters of The Third Kind, says he keeps his best actor oscar (for The Goodbye Girl) in the fridge: ‘I didn’t want to brag, but I wanted everyone to know.’ He appeared on a celebrity version of The Great British Bake off and once spent four years as a senior research adviser at an oxford college, examining the decline of civics education.
BORN ON THIS DAY
FANNY BRICE (1891-1951). The New york comedienne, singer and actress (born Fania Borach) relied not on beauty but on her ‘36 facial expressions’ to entertain her audiences. America’s first female comedy superstar — immortalised on stage and screen by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl — found fame with the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. one critic praised Brice’s ‘crossed eyes, her flat-footed capers and her knees that are often not on speaking terms with one another’.
PETER GREEN (1946-2020). The Londonborn singer-songwriter and guitar hero was the founder of Fleetwood Mac, who for a period in 1969 purportedly sold more records than The Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. But Green also became one of rock’s most famous LSD casualties and spent time in many psychiatric hospitals.
ON OCTOBER 29…
IN 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded. IN 1966, Patrick Troughton made his debut as the second Time Lord in Doctor Who.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Rumen (c 1720s) A) A rustling of silk. B) The first stomach of a ruminant. C) A framework of hoops under a lady’s dress in the 1800s. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED Fluff one’s lines —
to fail to perform well; from the theatre of the 1870s when to ‘fluff one’s lines’ meant to forget them.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant — better left unstirred.
P.G. Wodehouse, novelist (1881-1975)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT did the Spanish farmer say to his chickens? Oh, lay!
Guess The Definition answer: B.