ON THIS DAY
November 7, 2023
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
NOVEMBER 7, 1980
MISS World judges will have to figure out for themselves the statistics of the shapely contestants next week. For the first time in the competition’s history no details will be available about the girls’ measurements. And Mrs Julia Morley, the organiser, said: ‘The statistics are irrelevant... I want the Miss World girls to be judged for other things — their personality and talent and not just for their figure.’
NOVEMBER 7, 1992
ANDREW MORTON’S updated book on the royal marriage crisis went on sale in America yesterday. The paperback edition of Diana: her True Story landed like a bombshell in the stores and is expected to soar to No. 1 on the bestseller list.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SHARLEEN SPITERI, 56. The hairdresser-turned-singer- songwriter from North Lanarkshire is frontwoman of Texas, who have had hits with Say What You Want and Black eyed Boy. She said: ‘The best haircut I had was when Kate Moss cut my hair in the Groucho [Club].’ Spiteri said thank you by giving the supermodel ‘a pair of scissors for her birthday’.
TINIE TEMPAH, 35. The rapper has had seven UK No 1s, including collaborations with Rita Ora and Cheryl Cole. Born Patrick Okogwu in London, he said of his stage name: ‘I liked the word “temper” but it sounded too aggressive, so I softened it to Tinie Tempah.’ he is also a TV presenter and property developer.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ALBERT CAMUS (1913-1960). The Nobel Prize-winning Algerian-French existentialist philosopher wrote L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) — which saw a boom in sales during the recent Covid pandemic. he died in a car crash aged 46 but, in 2019, a new book claimed he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet views.
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ (1897-1953). The U.S. screenwriter wrote the story for James Stewart’s It’s A Wonderful World and won an Oscar with Orson Welles for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. Dubbed hollywood’s ‘resident loser-genius’, he was played by Gary Oldman in the 2020 film Mank, his nickname. When he was promoted at Paramount, he telegraphed a friend: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.’
ON NOVEMBER 7…
IN 1986, Berlin’s Take My Breath Away, from the Tom Cruise film Top Gun, was at UK No 1.
IN 1990, Mary Robinson (pictured) was elected the first female president of Ireland.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Sermocination (c 1753)
A) The use of ambiguous language.
B) A distemper peculiar to sailors.
C) A speaker answering his own question.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Cloud cuckoo land: refers to a state of absurdly over-optimistic fantasy. It derives from the Greek writer Aristophanes in his play The Birds, first performed in 414 BC, in which Pisthetaerus persuades the world’s birds to create a new city in the sky named Nubicuculia, or Cloud Cuckoo Land.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I’m as pure as the driven slush.
Tallulah Bankhead, U.S. actress (1902-1968)
JOKE OF THE DAY
HOW do mummies relax? They unwind. Guess The Definition answer: C.