Tuesday 31 July 2018

31 July: Lynne Reid Banks Quotes

The author Lynne Reid Banks was born on this date in 1929. Here are some words of wisdom from her.

  1. Love lost by one moment’s explicit unfairness can’t be won back by trying to justify it.
  2. Love-relationships need a certain minimum of proximity to keep them going.
  3. If the ending is messy, one doesn’t remember anything good about any of it.
  4. Even to be impaled by a happy fate makes you jerk against the knowledge of inevitability, of final commitment.
  5. It's funny how, when you really want to say something bitchy and cutting to someone who's been bitchy to you, you can't think of anything till afterwards. When there's no real call for it, you come suddenly out with a piece of 9-carat bitchery that shakes even you.
  6. Innocence is ignorance.
  7. The only way we women can get through our lives honourably is with courage and resignation.
  8. There’s nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?
  9. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried.
  10. It’s as if the future threw back a shadow—a great black shadow of years of loneliness, and it terrifies me so much that I keep lighting little futile lights to try to drive the shadow away.


More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Monday 30 July 2018

30 July: Henry Moore

Sculptor Henry Moore was born on 30th July 1898 in Castleford in Yorkshire. He is known for his large bronze sculptures, usually abstract versions of the human form which often contain hollow spaces. Many of his sculptures are public artworks. Here are some things you might not know about him:


  1. He was the seventh of eight children born to a Yorkshire coal miner. His father wanted his children to have a better life than working in a coalmine, and encouraged them to pursue higher education.
  2. Henry Moore decided he wanted to become a sculptor at the age of eleven. He had a gift for art at school. However, his father disapproved of this choice of career, because it seemed to him to be too much like manual labour. So he encouraged Henry to become a teacher instead. He taught at his old school in Castleford.
  3. He didn't like teaching much, and when the First World War broke out, he joined up. He he was badly injured during a gas attack in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, and spent the rest of the war as a PT instructor.
  4. His injury had some benefit, though, because he qualified for an ex-serviceman’s grant, which he used to go to art school. In 1919 he became a student at Leeds School of Art, working in the sculpture studio set up especially for him. During his time there, he met another sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, who became a friend as well as a professional rival.
  5. He went on to attend the Royal College of Art in London in 1921, where he later taught. It was here he met his wife, Irina Radetsky, They married in 1929.
  6. During World War 2, Henry Moore was commissioned as a war artist. He drew Londoners sheltering from air raids in the London Underground.
  7. When his flat was bombed in 1940, he and Irina moved to Perry Green in Hertfordshire. They bought a farmhouse, Hoglands, where they would live for the rest of their lives. Moore developed outbuildings into studios while Irina created beautiful gardens.
  8. Henry Moore's middle name is Spencer.
  9. Wishing to create a legacy, Henry Moore gave away a lot of his sculptures with the condition that they be installed in public places. He also accepted commissions to produce sculptures for public places. Some of the places his work was installed include outside the Paris UNESCO building, and London’s Parliament Square.
  10. His work wasn't always appreciated by the people he intended it for. He sold a sculpture called Draped Seated Woman (nicknamed Old Flo) to London County Council at a reduced price on condition it was placed in a socially deprived area so the people living there could have some art. It was placed on a council estate in Tower Hamlets. Not everyone there appreciated it – it was vandalised and eventually moved to a sculpture park in Yorkshire.


More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Saturday 28 July 2018

July 29: NASA

NASA Day Celebrates the anniversary of the birth of NASA in 1958, 60 years ago. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1 of the same year. NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's vision is "To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind."

  1. NASA Headquarters is at Two Independence Square in Washington DC. NASA is an independent agency that is not a part of any executive department but reports directly to the President.
  2. NASA has 2 satellites chasing each other around the Earth. Their purpose is to track the distance between themselves to measure gravitational anomalies. They are nicknamed Tom and Jerry.
  3. NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection in case we ever find life on other planets. It also has its own special agents who are armed, have arrest authority and can execute search warrants.
  4. The projects NASA is currently working on include getting humans near or on the surface of Mars by the early 2030s. In preparation for this, a team of NASA scientists have been living and working in a dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano for a year to simulate what it would be like to live in a base on Mars. They only go outside in spacesuits. Since getting to Mars, or any other planet for that matter, would involve spending weeks in a confined space with limited opportunity for movement, NASA is looking into what effect that is going to have on the human body – so they will pay people about $9,000 per month to lay in bed, doing absolutely nothing for up to 70 days. NASA is also working on a Star Trek style warp drive that would get people to Alpha Centurai in a couple of weeks.
  5. Some of the NASA staff responsible for getting humans into space have remained virtually unknown until 2017 when a film, Hidden Figures, was made about them. While part of the reason was that they were working on classified stuff, rather like the ladies at Bletchley Park, another reason was that Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson were black women who started working at NASA in 1943. The fact that women of any race were employed was because a lot of the men were either away fighting in the Second World War or working on war related projects. They were known as computers because their job was to compute – do calculations. African American men didn't start working at NASA until 1951.
  6. The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is, by volume - 3.7 million cubic meters (130 million ft3) - the fifth largest building in the world. The only buildings which are bigger are other assembly sites such as those for Boeing and Airbus. This building is so big it has its own weather system. The humidity of the climate in Florida causes clouds to form inside the building, which isn't great if you are building spacecraft and precision is vital. NASA have solved the problem by installing a huge air conditioning system weighing 10,000 tons. Another problem they are constantly dealing with in Florida is the alligators which are always getting through the fences and into the buildings.
  7. There have been a few lawsuits thrown at NASA. When the space station Skylab fell to Earth in 1979, it landed in Esperance, Western Australia. The Shire of Esperance fined NASA $400 for littering. The fine was unpaid for 30 years until a radio host raised the money and paid it on NASA's behalf. On another occasion, three men from Yemen sued them for trespassing on Mars, claiming they'd inherited the planet from their ancestors 3,000 years ago.
  8. Another strange job opportunity at NASA is currently occupied by a man called George Aldrich: that of “nasalnaut.” His job, basically, is to sniff everything before it can be sent into space. The reason behind this odd seeming task? Well, if you end up with something smelly in your house or your car there's an easy way to get rid of the pong – open a window. You can't do that in space, so it's necessary to make sure nothing on the space craft smells offensive.
  9. NASA has its own Radio station. Third Rock Radio is broadcast from the International Space Station and includes not only informative broadcasts about space discovery but it also plays Music – new rock music. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/third-rock-radio). You can also get NASA to text you whenever the ISS is passing over your location. https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/signup.cfm
  10. Some information about the Moon landings to finish. There is a conspiracy theory that states NASA never sent men to the moon at all and it was all filmed in a Hollywood studio, but, in 1969, while NASA had the technology to get men to the moon it didn't have the technology to fake it. NASA admitted in 2006 that they no longer had the original recording of the First moon landing – they'd erased the tape and re-used it. The Apollo astronauts were embarking on such dangerous missions that it was impossible to insure them. So, before departure, they would sign their autographs, on the assumption that if there was a fatal accident, their autographs would become so valuable it would raise as much as an insurance claim.



More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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28 July: Post Codes

On this date in 1959 Ernest Marples, then Postmaster General, announced that Norwich had been selected as the first place in Britain to receive a postcode as we know it today. Norwich was selected as it already had eight automatic mail sorting machines in use. Here are 10 things you might not know about postcodes.


  1. The UK has 1.8 million postcodes which cover 29 million addresses.
  2. UK postcodes are written in the format AA0 0AA. The first two letters relate to the nearest large town or city, eg. BS = Bristol. There are 124 of these. The first number refers to a district in that area. There are 3,000 of these. This part of the postcode is known as the outward code. The second part of the postcode is called the inward code and is used by the sorting office in the receiving area. The number here represents the sector and the letters the individual unit.
  3. In 2003 people in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead decided they wanted their postcode changed from SL because it linked them with Slough. They were unsuccessful.
  4. An individual unit usually contains about 17 addresses, although HD7 5UZ in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, covers seven streets, more than any other in the UK.
  5. Postcodes were first introduced in London in 1857. The city was divided into 10 postal districts based on compass points: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, EC for East Central and WC for West Central. In the modern system London no longer uses all these codes. NE stands for Newcastle and S for areas of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire around Sheffield. The first city other than London to use a postcode system was Liverpool, from 1864.
  6. Following the trial in Norwich, in 1965, Tony Benn, who was Postmaster General at the time, decided that the system should cover the whole country. The creation and application of a postcode for every home in Britain took eight years, starting with Croydon, and ending with Norwich, which was re-coded to bring it into line with the rest of the system.
  7. Why do we have letters and numbers rather than a fully numeric code like they have in the US? Two reasons. Using letters and numbers allows for a greater number of combinations; the current alpha-numeric system has enough potential combinations to create 48 million postcodes; and letters and numbers are easier to remember than just numbers.
  8. Optical recognition machines read the postcodes and automatically convert them to phosphor dots which can be read by the sorting machines. Mail correctly addressed with a postcode can be sorted 20 times faster this way than by hand.
  9. That said, about a fifth of non-business mail is sent without a postcode. There's no excuse as there is a website, the Royal Mail online postcode finder, which can tell you the postcode you need. It one of the most used web pages in the UK, with around 100,000 visits a day - more than 40 million hits per year.
  10. Writing a letter to Santa? His postcode is either SAN TA1 or XM4 5HQ (HOH OHO in Canada). Other postcodes include Buckingham Palace, SW1A 1AA; Ten Downing Street SW1A 2AA; House of Commons, SW1A 0AA; House of Lords, SW1A 0PW (PW for Palace of Westminster); London's Olympic Stadium, E20 2ST; The World Snooker Championships at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, S14 7UP (147 up is the maximum lead a snooker player can have, from a maximum break); Wembley Stadium, HA9 0XX. Even the space ship Red Dwarf in the TV series has a postcode: RE1 3DW.


More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Friday 27 July 2018

27 July: Hilaire Belloc Quotes

Today's birthday is Hilaire Belloc, writer, poet, satirist, born in 1870. Here's what he had to say about life, love, death and... tea.

  1. We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.
  2. When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
  3. Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
  4. I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time.
  5. Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.
  6. The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
  7. These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.
  8. Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.
  9. If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus.
  10. If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language.


More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Thursday 26 July 2018

26 July: New York (State)

On 26 July 1788 New York became the 11th state of the original 13 to ratify the US Constitution and was admitted to the Union. Here are some things you might not know about the state of New York.

New York
  1. New York is the third most populous state in the United States after California and Texas. The population is about 19 million. 8 million of them live in New York City.
  2. New York is the 27th largest state. Rhode Island would fit into New York over 35 times.
  3. New York City is the largest city in the state, of course, but it isn't the capital. The capital is Albany which is an eightieth the size of NYC. Albany has gone through a series of name changes. The first inhabitants of the area were the Mohicans, who called the city PempotowwathutMuhhcanneuw, or "the first fireplace of the Mohican nation." Dutch settlers called it Beverwijck or "Beaver District," and also Fort Orange. The name Albany came from the British settlers who named it after the Duke of Albany.
  4. The Woodstock music festival in 1969 took place in this state, but not in the town of Woodstock, which actually refused to host it, as did the town of Wallkill. It was actually held on a dairy farm in Bethel.
  5. Presidents Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Millard Fillmore were all born in New York. Other famous people from New York include singers Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Maria Callas and Barbara Streisand; actors Jennifer Lopez, Denzel Washington, Adam Sandler, Lucille Ball and Tom Cruise; composer George Gershwin; The Marx Brothers; writers Arthur Miller, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and L Frank Baum, who wrote Wizard of Oz. In his home town of Chittenango there are yellow brick sidewalks leading up to a number of Wizard of Oz themed businesses. There's also an annual Munchkins parade.
  6. New York is home to the world's smallest church. The Cross Island Chapel in Oneida measures just 51" x 81", big enough for two people to sit inside.
  7. New York is known as the "Empire State" due to growth and prosperity early in its history. The state motto is Excelsior (Ever Upwards); State Bird - Eastern Bluebird; State Mammal - Beaver; State Insect - Nine-spotted ladybug; State Fish - Brook Trout; State Shell - Bay Scallop; State Flower - Rose; State Gem - Garnet; State Fossil - Sea scorpion; State Tree - Sugar Maple; and the state fruit is the Apple.
  8. New York has a national park which is bigger than Yellowstone, Glacier, Everglades, and Grand Canyon National Parks combined. Adirondack Park has an area of 6 million acres. It was also the first state to have a state park - Niagara Reservation.
  9. New York firsts: the first railroad in America ran between Albany and Schenectady and was 11 miles long; New York was the first state to require license Plates on cars; the first United States pizzeria opened in New York City in 1857; the first women's rights convention in the United States was held in Seneca Falls in 1848.
  10. Jumping off a building in New York carries the death penalty, although given the height of a lot of them, few people would survive to face the consequences. In Carmel it is against the law for a man to go outside wearing a jacket and Trousers that don’t match, but until relatively recently it was perfectly legal for women to go topless in parts of the state as long as they weren't promoting a business. It's illegal for a blind man to drive a car. It's also illegal in some parts of the state to wear slippers after 10pm, throw a ball at someone's head for fun, talk to other people in Lifts, eat Peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalks during a concert or greet your friends by “putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers”. Flirting and “looking at a woman in that way” results in a $25 dollar fine for the first offence. A second offence means the man will be required to wear horse blinkers when he goes out in public.

Related posts:
New York City



More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Wednesday 25 July 2018

July 25: National Merry-Go-Round Day

Today is National Merry-Go-Round Day, so here are ten things you might not know about carousels.

  1. Another word for a merry-go-round is a carousel. This word is French and refers to a jousting game played by knights, which in turn comes from the Italian and Spanish words for "a little battle". “Merry-go-round” and “round about” are words mostly used in the United Kingdom.
  2. The merry-go-round probably originated some time in the seventeenth century. The first ones weren't a children's ride but a game devised for knights to practice their jousting skills, where they'd ride wooden horses and toss balls to one another. Later they would spear small rings suspended from poles. While the knights were playing their game on wooden horses, real Horses would be used to make the platform go around.
  3. The first steam-powered mechanical roundabout, invented by Thomas Bradshaw, appeared at the Aylsham Fair in about 1861. A newspaper report of the time expressed wonder that "the daring riders are not shot off like cannon-ball, and driven half into the middle of next month."
  4. Horses are the most popular animals on carousels or merry-go-rounds. Eighty percent of animals carved for carousels in America are horses. However, other animals, and birds such as Swans sometimes appear, along with Disney characters and sometimes model cars or aeroplanes.
  5. There are usually 16-20 horses or other animals on a carousel. Each horse weighs about 100 lbs (45 kg).
  6. The side of the horse facing outwards is more decorative than the side facing the middle of the merry-go-round. The outside face is known as the "romance" side.
  7. The average length of a carousel ride is two to three minutes at a velocity of about five rounds a minute.
  8. In the United Kingdom, merry-go-rounds usually turn clockwise as viewed from above, and viewed from the outside, the animals face left. In America it's the opposite way around. The carousel turns anti-clockwise and the animals face right.
  9. The oldest existing carousel was made in 1779 to 1780 and is at the Wilhelmsbad Park in Hanau, Germany.
  10. The president of the National Carousel Association, Bette Largent and carousel historian, Ronald Hopkins, founded National Merry-Go-Round-Day in 2014. The date commemorates the first US patent for the modern carousel, issued in 1871 to William Schneider of Davenport, Iowa. The purpose of the day is to highlight beautiful and historic carousels.



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Tuesday 24 July 2018

24 July: Alexandre Dumas Quotes

10 quotes from someone born on this date in 1802: Alexandre Dumas, French novelist and playwright, whose works include The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo.

  1. All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.
  2. Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives and remembering what one receives.
  3. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
  4. For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.
  5. There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.
  6. One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.
  7. Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.
  8. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one.
  9. Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.
  10. Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.


More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Monday 23 July 2018

23 July: Lions

On or around this date, the sun moves into the zodiac sign of Leo, the Lion. Here are some fascinating facts about lions.


Lion
  1. The scientific name for lion is Panthera leo. The other species in their genus are Tigers, jaguars, leopards and snow leopards.
  2. A male lion weighs about 500 pounds and grows to eight feet in length. This makes lions the second largest big cat after the tiger. A lion's claw is as long as a human finger, about three inches, and they have big mouths. They can open their jaws by up to a foot. They also have the loudest roar of any big cat, which can be heard up to 5 miles or 8km away.
  3. Lions are the only species of big cat in which the male looks different to the female. Males are not only bigger, but have those magnificent manes. The mane starts to grow at the age of about 18 months and will continue to grow until a lion is 5 years old. After that, the mane gets darker in colour, so the darker a lion's mane, the older he is. Female lions prefer to mate with males which have thicker, darker manes. Lions are also the only members of the cat family to have tasselled tails.
  4. Talking of mating, lions can be randy beasts. A male lion can mate up to 100 times a day although each encounter will only last about 10 seconds. Male lions have backward facing spikes on their penises (as do all cats) which may stimulate ovulation in the female. It's not unknown for both male and female lions to simulate sex with lions of the same gender. Neither is it unknown for a female to sneak off and mate with a male which isn't a member of their pride. This invariably ends in a fight between the established males and the unfamiliar one. Female lions can actually delay conception of cubs until the fighting is over. Cubs, by the way, can also be referred to as whelps or lionets. Lionet is an old middle French word for a small lion, while whelp is a word for the young of any carnivorous species.
  5. Lions are sometimes randy enough to breed with other types of big cat, especially in captivity. If a lioness breeds with a male leopard, their offspring is called a leopon. A lioness and male jaguar hybrid is called a jaglion. If a lioness breeds with a male tiger, the result is a tigon. Male lions have been known to breed with female tigers, and in that case, the offspring is called a liger.
  6. The song which goes "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight" is actually completely wrong. Although lions are often called the kings of the jungle, they don't live in jungles at all, but on plains and grasslands. Also, they are more likely to be hunting than sleeping at night.
  7. Talking of hunting, the females do most of that, while the males are left to guard the territory. However, the females hand over their kills to the males so they can eat first. A female lion needs 5kg of meat a day; a male 7kg or more. They are well-adapted for hunting, of course. The skin of their bellies is loose so that they can survive being kicked by the hoofed animals they prey on. Their tongues are so rough that they can use them to peel the skin off their prey. If you let a lion lick your hand it could easily take your skin off. Lions have about a 50% success rate in their hunting. They also scavenge - more than half their food is scavenged rather than hunted. Although a lion can run at 50 mph (81kmph), they can only do it in a straight line and only for a few seconds at a time - so they have to get as close as possible to their prey before starting the chase. A lioness may bring back a small animal alive so her cubs can practice their hunting skills.
  8. Lions are more sociable than most cats. They live in prides which typically have about 15 members. Female lions usually stay with the same pride for life, and their female offspring will stay with them. Males, however, get thrown out of the pride at the age of two and have to fend for themselves. Hence only about one in eight survive. Their best hope is to take over another pride, kill the resident male and all their cubs. Sometimes they will team up with other lone males to achieve this.
  9. Lions have a Black spot at the base of each of their whiskers. These spots form a pattern which is as unique to each lion as our fingerprints are to us. They also have a White patch of fur under their eyes, which, along with a reflective coating on the back of their eyes to capture moonlight, helps them see in the dark six times better than we do. They have large pupils, too, three times as big as ours, but they can't move their eyes from side to side so well, and have to turn their entire heads to look in a different direction.
  10. Lions are seen as noble, powerful and brave, and are often adopted as national symbols, even by countries in which lions are only found in the zoo, like AlbaniaBelgiumBulgariaEnglandEthiopiaLuxembourg, the Netherlands, and Singapore. Humans have been fascinated by them for over 32,000 years, as evidenced by the earliest recorded images of them, in cave paintings of that age in the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Greek mythology had the Nemean lion, which was killed by Heracles. It is that lion which is represented by the constellation of Leo and the zodiac sign. Lions also gave their name to the Bulgarian currency, the Leva, which is Old Belgian for Lion. The Turkish word for lion is Aslan, which CS Lewis used as the name for the lion in his Narnia stories, while the Swahili word is Simba, the name of a character in The Lion King. The lion is also used as a symbol for the Gryffindor house in the Harry Potter series. The lion used in the MGM logo has opened every one of its movies since 1929. He has a name - “Leo the Lion”. Then there is the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz and Elsa the lioness in Born Free.
See also:
Cheetahs 
Tigers




More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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Saturday 21 July 2018

22 July: Rose Kennedy

On this date in 1890 Rose Kennedy, matriarch of the Kennedy family, mother of JFK was born. here are some things you might not know about her.


  1. She was born in Boston on July 22, 1890, the eldest child of John F. (“Honey Fitz”) and Mary Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald. She was given the name Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald.
  2. She grew up with politics. Her father was a congressman and the Mayor of Boston. He once took his daughters to visit the White House where President William McKinley commented, "You're the prettiest girl who has entered the house," to her sister. Rose said later, "I knew right then that I would have to work hard to do something about myself."
  3. She wanted to go to Wellesley College, but her father wouldn't let her. He insisted she went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Boston, which didn't, at the time, issue degrees. Rose always regretted not going to Wellesley, but grew fond of the convent school and believed the religious education she received there became the foundation of her life.
  4. At 24, she married Joseph P. Kennedy, who she'd met when the two families went on holiday together. The couple had nine children.
  5. Rose had a system for keeping track of her brood. She used index cards to record important information about each of them - their Shoe sizes, dental treatment, eye tests, illnesses and weights. She was said to be a little obsessive about their weights. She said the cards weren't the product of American efficiency, but rather, "Kennedy desperation."
  6. Her husband Joseph was a good provider for his family, but he had a number of affairs. At one point, Rose briefly left him and went back to her parents, but her father told her divorce wasn't an option. She went back to her husband and ignored his unfaithfulness, but the stress took a toll on her health, and she relied heavily on medication.
  7. In 1951, she became only the sixth American woman to be given the rare title of papal countess, for her "exemplary motherhood and many charitable works."
  8. She spoke several languages and could play the Piano. She dressed smartly and stylishly and was named the best-dressed woman in public life in the 1930s. In her free time she would swim, go for walks and play golf, up until she had a stroke in 1984, and became confined to a wheelchair.
  9. She outlived four of her children, and a fifth, Rosemary, spent most of her adult life in a home for intellectually disabled people. She didn't talk about her grief much, but did once remark, "Wasn't there a book about Michelangelo called 'The Agony and the Ecstasy'? That's what my life has been."
  10. She died at the age of 104 in 1995.


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