ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 261 OF 2015
MOST battery hens lay an average of 261 eggs a year. LAST year, the Football Association made a profit of £261 million. THE wingspan of the world’s biggest airliner, the Airbus A380, is just over 261ft — as long as four cricket pitches.
THERE ARE 104 DAYS LEFT
THE average couple has sex 104 times before a woman becomes pregnant with her first child. A VOTER thinks about politics for an average of just four minutes a week during an election campaign. As the UK’s fixed-term parliament effectively means a campaign of six months, most voters put just 104 minutes of thought into who runs the country. DR HOWARD JONES, the great IVF pioneer whose work helped the birth of five million babies, was 104 when he died in July.
IT’S THEIR BIRTHDAY
RUSS ABBOT, 68. The El le s mere Port -born comedian, singer and actor i s best known f or his Eighties Saturday night Tv shows and his creations Basildon Bond, Cooperman, and See You Jimmy, right — a character who came third in a 2003 Glasgow newspaper poll to find the most Scottish person in the World. LANCE ARMSTRONG, 44. Texan-born cyclist who won the Tour de France seven consecutive times before having his titles stripped following a doping scandal. In 1994, an asteroid, 12373 Lancearmstrong, was named in his honour. Only later did people realise that this could read as ‘A Steroid Lance Armstrong’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
MO MOWLAM ( 19492005). The Watford-born MP, right, who served as Secretary of State f or northern Ireland in Tony Blair’s government, died from a brain tumour. Her ‘atheist funeral’ was conducted by her close friend, Richard Coles, an Anglican vicar, who was one half of the Eighties pop group The Communards and also has a Radio 4 show. JAMES GANDOLFINI (1961-2013). Before finding success as an actor and stardom as a mafia boss in Tv’s The Sopranos, he was a bouncer at new York’s famous Blue note jazz club. He died of a heart attack while on holiday in Rome. WRITER Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). Staffordshire-born, he is famous for his aphorism about the capital: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ The creator of the f i rst English l anguage dictionary, which took nine years to complete, was forced to leave his studies at Oxford University through lack of funds. He finally received his degree 25 years later.
ON SEPTEMBER 18 . . .
IN 1918, during the closing stages of World War I, British and Empire troops fought the Turks at Megiddo, the site of Biblical Armageddon. Only 6,000 of the 35,000 Turks who took part escaped death or capture. IN 1879, the seaside resort of Blackpool introduced ‘artificial sunshine’, a series of arc lights that provided illumination in the darker autumnal months. They’re now known as the Blackpool Illuminations and comprise more than one million bulbs. IN 1988, the oil-rich desert state of Kuwait lifted its 21-year ban on the sale of CocaCola. The company had been blacklisted because it had a bottling plant in Israel.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
You can pretend to be serious. You can’t pretend to be witty.
French actor Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY did Hansel and Gretel eat the front door of the gingerbread house? Because it was jammed.