ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 263...
The high-tech pilot’s helmet for the £100 million F-35 jet — which will fly from Britain’s aircraft carriers from 2018 — costs £263,000. Its visor displays the plane’s altitude, speed and infrared night-vision images from a camera on the underside of the jet. The U.S.made F-35 has been described as the most expensive weapon in history, but has faced technical problems and production delays. The world’s shortest stuntman is Londoner Kiran Shah — 1m 26.3cm (4ft 1.7in). he has been in more than 50 films since the Seventies, including as a stand-in for a nine-year-old in 1977’s Candleshoe. he was also a ‘perspective stunt-double’ for Christopher reeve as Superman, filmed against a smaller set.
THERE ARE 103 DAYS LEFT
The first Chelsea Flower Show was held in London 103 years ago. A century later, in 2013, organiser the royal horticultural Society lifted a ban on gnomes (and other coloured sculptures) in display gardens — and 150 gnomes were lined up for the Queen to inspect. IN 2000, a former U.S. Olympic athlete, aged 103, returned the flag he stole from the 1920 Games. harry Prieste had shimmied up a 15 ft flagpole as a dare in Antwerp, Belgium, after winning a diving bronze medal. he hadn’t realised the International Olympic Committee was desperate to recover the flag because it was the first one to feature the five-ringed motif.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KATE ADIE, 71. The former reporter and presenter of radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent covered many conflicts for the BBC, including the Falklands and Balkan wars. She was adopted as a baby and decided, when going to the first Gulf War in 1990, that she would try to track down her birth mother if she made it back. They were reunited a few years later, and stayed in close contact until her mother Babe’s death, aged 94, in 2014.
DAME ZANDRA RHODES, 76. The fashion designer from Kent opened her first shop in London in 1967 and her clothes have since been worn by Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, elizabeth Taylor and helen Mirren. Zandra’s mother walked to hospital during a World War II air raid to give birth to her.
BORN ON THIS DAY
JACKIE COLLINS (19372015). The British-born author started writing stories aged nine, which big sister Joan Collins illustrated. Jackie (right) revealed she had an affair with movie icon Marlon Brando when she was 15.
BRIAN EPSTEIN (19341967). The Liverpool-born manager of The Beatles was considered crucial to their worldwide success but made key business mistakes. ‘he looked to his dad for business advice,’ Paul McCartney said years later, ‘and his dad knew how to run a furniture store in Liverpool.’
ON SEPTEMBER 19 . . .
IN 1952, the U.S. Immigration Service blocked Charlie Chaplin from returning to his hollywood home, at the height of the McCarthy anti-Communist investigations. IN 1970, the first Glastonbury Festival was held at Michael eavis’s Somerset farm. Tickets cost £1 and included free milk. IN 2010, Deepwater horizon, BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, was finally sealed with a cement plug — five months after it exploded and sunk, killing 11 workers and sending millions of gallons of oil gushing into the sea.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
the truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
Sir Terry Pratchett, author (1948-2015)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY won’t banks let kangaroos have accounts? their cheques always bounce.