ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JANUARY 4, 1924 IT WAS possible today to open the doors of the remaining three shrines of the tomb of Pharaoh Tut-unkh Amen (right). With the opening of the final door came an exciting moment, there was revealed to the gaze of spectators a stone sarcophagus, colossal in size, magnificent in workmanship, and beyond question intact. JANUARY 4, 1969 BLUE PETER asked viewers for 144,000 bundles of old woollen and cotton clothes to raise £2,000 for a hospital truck to aid starving children in Biafra, West Africa [now part of Nigeria]. The BBC was sent 1.4 million — enough to buy ten trucks. Show editor Biddy Baxter said: ‘To have that much power over children is a terrible responsibility. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we tried to use it for evil ends . . .’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
CRAIG REVEL HoRWooD, 54. The Australian choreographer is dubbed ‘Craig Revel Horrid’ owing to his mean persona as a Strictly Come Dancing judge. He is so tall, at 6ft 2in, that fellow judge Shirley Ballas, who is a whole foot shorter, has to sit on a large cushion so she doesn’t appear dramatically smaller than him on television. DYAN CANNoN, 82. The American star of Heaven Can Wait has had three oscar-nominations, but is best known as the fourth wife of Cary Grant and mother to his only child, Jennifer. She was 28 when she married 61year-old Grant in secret in Las Vegas. Shortly afterwards, the couple travelled to his home town of Bristol to tell his mother Elsie of their wedding — but because it had been so hushhush, they were given separate hotel suites.
BORN ON THIS DAY
JAMES BoND (1900-1989). The U.S. expert on Caribbean birds found everlasting fame due to writer Ian Fleming, who came across Bond’s book Birds of The West Indies and adopted his name for 007. Fleming wrote to Bond’s wife: ‘It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.’ JACoB GRIMM (1785-1863). With his younger brother Wilhelm, Jacob was one half of The Brothers Grimm, famous for their grisly versions of fairy tales, including Little Red Riding Hood (right). Though their stories were later sanitised, in the first edition of their Kinder-und Hausmarchen (Children’s And Household Tales), Cinderella’s stepsisters are punished by having their eyes pecked out by pigeons.
ON JANUARY 4…
IN 2004, Britney Spears’s record label stated the singer and her friend Jason Alexander ‘took a joke too far by getting married’ a day earlier in Las Vegas. The marriage was annulled within 55 hours. IN 2010, the 2,716ft-tall Burj Khalifa — the world’s tallest building — opened in Dubai.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Asperitas (2017) A) Severity. B) A sore. C) Cloud formations shaped like waves. Answer below PHRASE EXPLAINED
On the ball — meaning responding quickly to new ideas; it came from baseball in 1909 and its original form was to ‘put something on the ball’, as in give it deceptive speed.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I FIND television very educational. The minute someone turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. Groucho Marx, U.S. comic (1890-1977)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT was stolen from the music shop? The lute. Guess The definition answer: C.