ON THIS DAY
November 1, 2016
IT’S DAY 306 …
DUrING World War I, 306 men were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion. Tony Blair’s government twice rejected calls for them to be pardoned, before they finally received posthumous pardons in 2006. KENSINGTON and Chelsea council told its wardens to issue a minimum of 306,000 parking tickets a year, it was revealed in 2012. At £80 a ticket, that’s £24,480,000.
THERE ARE 60 DAYS LEFT
WIND speeds across the northern hemisphere have slowed by as much as 60 per
cent over the past 30 years, according to the journal Nature Geoscience. It is believed to be the result of urban development and increasing amounts of vegetation. NASA launched 2,500 jellyfish ( right) into orbit in the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1991 in flasks filled with artificial seawater. By the end of the mission, designed to test the effects of microgravity, they had proliferated and there were 60,000 jellyfish orbiting Earth. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN was fastidious about his breakfast brew. He required
60 coffee beans per cup and insisted they were individually counted out.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
JErEMY HUNT, 50. The Health Secretary, who is imposing controversial new contracts on junior doctors, was voted Britain’s sexiest MP in 2007. A multi-millionaire, he speaks fluent Japanese and has also taken lessons in Mandarin so he can communicate with his in-laws. His wife, Lucia Guo, comes from Xi’an in China. TONI COLLETTE, 44. The Australian actress, star of The Sixth Sense and About A Boy, hit the big time with Muriel’s Wedding, for which she had to put on almost three stone. Director PJ Hogan said: ‘Every time Toni opened her mouth, I put a doughnut into it.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
L.S. LOWrY (1887-1976). The Lancashire-born artist (right) famous for capturing Britain’s industrial landscape, worked for years as a rent collector while painting at night — though he kept this secret for fear that people would consider him to be merely a part-time painter. He said he started at 15: ‘Aunt said I was no good for anything else, so they might as well send me to art school.’ TED LOWE (1920-2011). The BBC snooker commentator became a household name as ‘Whispering Ted’. He devised the programme Pot Black, but was just as famous for gaffes, including telling viewers: ‘And for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.’
IN 1604, Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello was performed for the first time, by the King’s Men company at Whitehall Palace in London.
In 1990, deputy prime minister Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned over Mrs Thatcher’s approach to Europe. In his resignation speech to Parliament, he said her behaviour had been ‘ like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find... that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain’.
IN 1993, the European Union was officially born, with the Maastricht Treaty taking effect. It also led to the creation of the euro.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I don’t know what art is, but I do know what it isn’t. And it isn’t someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent. Brian Sewell, art critic (1931-2015)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY was the bee’s hair sticky? Because she used a honeycomb.
ON NOVEMBER 1 ...