The Saturday briefing
IS THERE anything you are desperately yearning to know? Are there any pressing factual disputes you would like us to help resolve? This is the page where we shall do our best to answer any questions you throw at us, whatever the subject.
HAS anybody else watched the film Fifty Shades Darker and noticed a scene blatantly copied from Working Girl? Both girls get new jobs and are told: “I don’t expect you to fetch me coffee unless you’re getting some for yourself and the rest we’ll just make up as we go along, OK?” Is such copying legal?
Mrs Lorna Copping, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset ONE fairly innocuous sentence does not generally speaking constitute breach of copyright but in this example a good case can be made for it being “homage” rather than “plagiarism”.
In Fifty Shades the line is spoken by the actress Dakota Johnson, in Working Girl it’s spoken by Melanie Griffith, who is Dakota Johnson’s mother. You can see it as a nice tribute for the actor to pay to her mum, or mom, as the Americans have it. WHEN I was growing up in the late 1940s and 50s I used to cut out pictures of footballers and others for my scrapbook. These were from newspapers of the time and I often wonder what happened to the Daily Graphic, Sunday Dispatch and Reynold’s News. Who was Reynold anyway? D Bolton, West Bridgford,
Nottinghamshire THE Daily Graphic was the first daily illustrated newspaper in England, running from 1890 to 1926, when it was incorporated into the Daily Sketch (which ran until 1971).
The Sunday Dispatch ran from 1928 to 1961 when it merged with the Sunday Express. Before 1928 it had run for more than a century as The Weekly Dispatch.
Reynold’s News, which began life as Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper in 1850, was renamed Reynold’s Illustrated News before becoming Reynold’s News in 1936.
Eight years later it became Reynold’s News And Sunday Citizen but turned from broadsheet to tabloid format in 1962 and dropped the Reynold’s News part of the name.
It finally ceased publication in 1967. The change from “Reynolds’s” to “Reynold’s” shows that we had trouble with apostrophes even a century ago.
George M Reynolds, the founder and first editor of the newspapers, was a naval officer, novelist and journalist whose works included a novel about a werewolf which made a pact with the devil.
IN 1997 Hong Kong was handed back to China. Before this many Chinese tried to cross the Sham Chun river to get a better life in
Hong Kong. Now Hong Kong belongs to China is this still happening?
A Beswick, Christchurch, Dorset IT certainly is but not on anything like the same scale. In 1978 an estimated 100,000 people crossed from China to Hong Kong and the following year a figure of 56,000 was reported before the end of March.
In December 2017 however “tightly organised syndicates” were reported to be smuggling people from China to Hong Kong, though police figures revealed only 290 cases of illegal immigration in almost a year. There were tens of thousands of people from other Asian countries found to be entering Hong Kong illegally, working their illegally or overstaying their visas, but all these figures are dropping.
HAS any ocean liner crashed into an iceberg and survived?
B Jay, Wanstead, London ACCORDING to a database of ships’ collisions with icebergs, only about 20 per cent of the hundreds of collisions of steam ships or motor vessels with icebergs since 1850 have resulted in the ship sinking. Generally the faster the ship is travelling, the more likely it is to result in severe damage or sinking. HOW does one know if eggs are double yolked before they are broken? Mrs HJ Currie, Newcastle upon Tyne THERE’S a process called “candling” which basically involves holding the egg up to the light and seeing through the shell.
I’m told that if you put a 100-watt bulb in a small box with a hole in it slightly smaller than the egg, then place the egg over the hole, you can see the yolks. by Apparently this sort of X-ray procedure is routinely done with eggs, which is how boxes of double-yolk eggs can be offered.
Although the chance of a double yolk is only about one in a thousand, young hens are far more likely to produce them. WHEN a road sign says “Worthing 10 miles” is it measured to the boundary of the town or to a specific point? I recall that miles to London were measured to Charing Cross. Fran Feltham, Worthing ROAD distances as they appear on signposts are a bit of a historical mish-mash. Generally speaking they are measured to the centre of the town but definitions of the centre are often based on ancient decisions taken locally. Some places chose the town hall, others the main post office. London is a good example of the mish-mash of distances. The official centre, from which distances are measured, is marked by a small plaque behind a statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square. However some signposts to London used different places with roads coming from the west often preferring to give the distance to Marble Arch.