ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JULY 21, 1960 THE marriage of Rabbi Toledano, Israel’s 81-year-old Minister of Religious Affairs, to Miriam Sabag, an 18-year-old divorcee of Moroccan descent, has set off a political crisis. The rabbi, whose first wife died three months ago, said he would not have married her had he known it would stir up such a storm. [He died three months later.] JULY 21, 1969 MAN walks on the Moon! Astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the surface today as a breathless world watched the climax of a staggering feat of human and scientific endeavour. Like two children playing on the beach, Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin (right) bounced up and down. Armstrong said: ‘It’s fun … you’ve got to be careful you lean in the direction you want to go, or you seem inebriated.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
PALOMA FAITH, 36. Hackney-born singer, songwriter and actress, known for her retro and eccentric style. When she got her first record contract, Faith knocked four years off her age. ‘I blurted out that I was 23. I remember reading about KT Tunstall being old — and she was 27 at the time. I think if I’d said I was 27, I wouldn’t have got signed. One hundred per cent.’ She was ‘outed’ when her birth certificate was put online. WENDY COPE, 72. The poet from Kent, described as a ‘jet-age Tennyson’, is best known for her 1986 debut, Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis. The former primary school teacher has pointed out that a sonnet takes about 50 seconds to read — ‘which is a useful fact for boiling an egg. You can stand there and recite some sonnets if you haven’t got an egg timer’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961). The American Nobel prize-winning author (right) of For Whom The Bell Tolls was given a fishing rod by his father when he was three and a shotgun when he was ten. He said he woke at sunrise every day because his eyelids were especially thin: ‘My mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast — talk them or write them down.’ In 2009, it emerged that in 1941 he’d been recruited as a KGB spy and given the cover name ‘Argo’.
ON JULY 21 ...
IN 1796, Scotland’s bard Robert Burns died, aged 37, in penury, having run up debts of more than three times his annual wages. IN 2005, there were bungled bomb attacks on two London trains and a bus, exactly a fortnight after the 7/7 bombings killed 52.
WORD WIZARDRY
NEW WORD OF THE DAY Woopies (acronym): Well-off older people. GUESS THE DEFINITION Plastron (coined by Dryden: Juvenal 1693) A) The space between a bed and the wall. B) The padded jacket worn while fencing. C) Lower part of a rainbow. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Back to the drawing board: Start again on a new plan after the failure of an earlier one. Originated as the caption to a cartoon for the New Yorker magazine in 1941, showing various military men racing towards a crashed plane, and a designer, with a roll of plans under his arm, walking away saying: ‘Well, back to the old drawing board.’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
MY first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can’t make your children carry. Bill Bryson, American-born writer
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY did the witches’ team lose the cricket match? their bats flew away. Guess the Definition answer: B.