1 April: Leeds

On this date in 1974 the City of Leeds was established. 10 things you didn't know about Leeds:

1. The name derives from an old Brythonic word Ladenses meaning "people of the fast-flowing river", in reference to the River Aire. A person from Leeds is known locally as a Loiner. The origin of that word isn't known. A posh word for a person from Leeds is Leodensian, which comes from the Latin name for the city.
2. Leeds Kirkgate Market is Europe’s largest indoor market with over 600 stalls. It's also the birthplace of Marks and Spencer: Michael Marks opened his Penny Bazaar there in 1884.
3. One of the city's landmarks is Temple Works, a Grade-I listed former flax mill known for its incredible Ancient Egyptian design. It was the largest single room in the world when it was built in 1836. Maintaining the correct humidity for a flax mill was a challenge for the time, which was solved by growing grass on the roof. To keep the grass under control, they grazed sheep on the roof. Getting the sheep up there was another challenge, solved by inventing the hydraulic Lift.
4. The Temperance Hotel, now known as Leeds Bridge House, is another Leeds landmark dating back to 1879. It's said to have inspired the Flat Iron Building in New York. The city's tallest building is a business and residential building which has been nicknamed "The Dalek".
5. The first moving images were created in Leeds in 1880 by Louis le Prince in a garden. 8 years later, he created an early movie in the city centre, entitled Crossing Leeds Bridge.
6. The Royal Armouries in Leeds is home to the largest suit of animal armour in the world, 16th-century Elephant armour brought to the UK in 1801 by the former wife of the Governor of Madras. The armour weighs in at 118 kilograms and comprises 5,840 plates.
7. Famous people from Leeds include Barbara Taylor Bradford, Alan Bennett, Herbert Asquith, Dennis Healey, Ernie Wise, Peter O'Toole, Marco Pierre White, Jeremy Paxman, Keith Lemon, Mel B and the Kaiser Chiefs. Pudsey Bear from “Children in Need” is named after the Pudsey district of Leeds.
8. A Blackburn Type D aircraft – a one seat single engine monoplane, was built in Leeds by Robert Blackburn for Cyril Foggin in 1912. It can still fly, making it the oldest flying plane in Britain. The first steam locomotive in the world was made in Leeds, too, and Middleton Railway is the oldest continuously working public railway in the world. It originally opened in 1758 to move coal from the nearby quarries.
9. Leeds City Station is the busiest in the UK outside of central London, with over 900 trains and 100,000 passengers a day.
10. 130,000 years ago, giant hippos roamed where the streets of Leeds are today. We know this because the bones of one were found in 1984 during the construction of the Armley Gyratory. The bones now reside in Leeds City Museum.

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31 March: 90

Today is the 90th day of the year. 10 things you might not know about the number 90:

1. An angle measuring 90 degrees is called a right angle. This is because in a right triangle, the angle opposing the hypotenuse measures 90 degrees, with the other two angles adding up to 90. The interior angles of a rectangle or square measure 90 degrees each.
2. 90 degrees is also the latitude in degrees of the North and the South geographical poles.
3. 90 is the atomic number of thorium, a weakly radioactive metallic element with the symbol Th. It's is silvery in colour but tarnishes black when it is exposed to air.
4. +90 is the code for international direct dial phone calls to Turkey.
5. The M90 is the northernmost motorway in the UK. It runs from just south of the Queensferry Crossing to Perth in Scotland.
6. The longest Interstate Highway in the United States is Interstate 90. It is 3,020.54 miles (4,861.09 km) long and runs between Seattle and Boston.
7. Major League Baseball bases are 90 feet (27 m) apart.
8. In Roman numerals 90 is written as XC and in Binary it's 1011010.
9. Joe 90 is a British science-fiction television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It follows the exploits of nine-year-old schoolboy Joe McClaine, who becomes a spy after his adoptive father invents a device (the BIG RAT) capable of recording expert knowledge and experience and transferring it to another human brain. Hence Joe can be armed with the skills and knowledge of the world's top academic and military minds, while appearing to be an innocent kid. Why he's called Joe 90 is debatable. According to the publicity for the show, he's the World Intelligence Network (WIN)'s 90th London based agent, but dialogue in the show says it's because the documents pertaining to the BIG RAT device are in a file entitled "File Number 90".
10. In numerology, the energy of the number 90 concerns humanitarianism, idealism, tolerance, justice and infinite potential. The person with 90 in their numerology profile has a vision of an ideal society which includes freedom of action and thought, career opportunities and financial sufficiency and tolerance.

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30 March: Bridges

On this date in 1909, the first double-deck bridge, The Queensboro Bridge in New York, opened to traffic, linking Manhattan and Queens. 10 things you might not know about bridges:

1. The earliest type of bridge was probably stepping stones. Neolithic people used to build walkways across marshes. An example is the Sweet Track in Somerset which is approximately 6000 years old. It's so called because it was discovered by an archaeologist named Sweet. The oldest bridge in continuous use, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the Caravan Bridge, a stone arch span over the Meles River in Izmir, Turkey, which is 3,000 years old.
2. The world's highest bridge is the Beipanjiang Bridge, in south west China. It rises 1,854 feet above a river. The longest is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, which is 24 miles long. For 8 of those miles, you can't even see the land at either end.
3. The longest combined road and railway bridge in Europe is situated at the border between Sweden and Denmark. It has the additional feature of turning into a tunnel for part of the crossing. This was so it wouldn't inconvenience air traffic coming and going from nearby Copenhagen airport.
4. There is a word for the fear of crossing bridges: gephyrophobia. It seems there are a lot of people in Michigan, USA, who suffer from that. The Mackinac Bridge there is five miles long and over 200 feet high. The bridge has a Drivers Assistance Program in which people who are too scared to drive over themselves can be driven over by a member of staff. About 1,200 to 1,400 use this service.
5. Then again, they might be more justified than you'd think, since the 607,380 bridges in the USA are on average over 40 years old and 11% of them are considered structurally deficient.
6. While we think of bridges as man made objects, Nature is more than capable of building bridges, too. The largest natural bridge in the world is in China and is called the Fairy Bridge. Until 2010 it was virtually unknown outside China. The Natural Arch and Bridge Society only learned of it when one of their members found it on Google Earth in 2009. They sent a party to measure it in 2010 and they found it was the largest natural bridge in the world by a wide margin. It's also possible to make bridges from living tree roots, which automatically strengthen over time, although it does take about 15 years to build such a bridge.
7. In 480 BC, King Xerxes I of Persia built bridges to invade Greece. However, all the bridges he built got destroyed by storms. Eventually, in a true Basil Fawlty moment, he whipped the sea, threw chains at it, burned the water with red hot irons and got his men to yell at the water. The next bridge he built remained standing.
8. The Euro currency was designed to feature fictitious bridges, meant to represent architectural styles across Europe while not favouring any one country. Which worked fine until the Netherlands decided to build them for real.
9. Brooklyn Bridge in New York has Wine cellars underneath it. They were a money-making scheme to help pay for the bridge as they charged wine merchants for storage of their wine as the vaults were always cool. The cellars are still there but no longer in use.
10. Bridges are often where people go when they want to commit suicide, so some of the highest bridges have prevention measures such as plaques with helpline numbers or even people who try to talk would be suicides out of it. The most bizarre suicide bridge, however, is the Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland, where over the past fifty years, about one dog a year has suddenly, without warning and for no apparent reason, thrown itself off the bridge to its death, 50 feet below. The doggy suicides always take place in the same section of the bridge and all of them have been breeds with long noses. It has led people to wonder if the bridge is haunted. Overtoun is Celtic for "the thin place," an area where this world and the next are said to be close; so who knows? Its curse once extended to the human race when in 1994, a man threw his baby son off the bridge because he thought the baby was the Anti-Christ.

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29 March: Manchester

On this date in 1853, Manchester was granted city status. Here are 10 things you might not know about Manchester:

1. The Roman name for the area dates from AD 79. They named it Mamucium after two hills near the River Medlock. The name means “breast-shaped hill”. Although it was later re-named Manchester, the word for someone from Manchester, Mancunian, derives from the original name.
2. Manchester is the birth place of a number of things. One is vegetarianism, the virtues of which were first preached in a Salford chapel by the somewhat inappropriately named Reverend William Cowherd. His followers went on to form the Vegetarian Society. The Suffragette Movement began life in the city too when Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester in 1903. The first M&S store was opened here, on Stretford Road in 1894. Rolls-Royce Limited was created over a lunch in Manchester in 1904 when Car salesman Charles Rolls met engineer Henry Royce at The Midland Hotel. Today, there's a statue at the hotel which commemorates their meeting. Finally, a meeting at Manchester’s Royal Hotel in 1888 saw the formation of the Football League.
3. A symbol of the city is the Manchester Bee. It was adopted as a symbol for the city in the 19th century and represents the industrious nature of the city and its people.
4. The Greater Manchester town of Wigan is home to the annual world pie eating championships which began in 1992. As befitting the area where vegetarianism began, the contest now features vegetarian pies as well as meat ones. In 2016 a pie was launched into space to promote the event.
5. Manchester University has a number of claims to fame, not least that 25 Nobel Prize winners worked or studied there. The first computer with stored memory, nicknamed "Baby" was built there in 1948. Earnest Rutherford became the first person to artificially create a nuclear reaction in a laboratory in Manchester. Graphene was discovered here by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov in 2004. One last fact about Manchester University is that it is the only place in the world where you can take a course in Mummy Studies. The University has its very own Mummy Tissue Bank.
6. In 2017, the city of Manchester was awarded City of Literature status by UNESCO. Only 28 other cities worldwide have been granted this, and only 3 in the UK – Norwich, Edinburgh and Nottingham. Criteria set to achieve this status includes the level of publishing, literary education, events, libraries, book shops and more in the city.
7. No doubt Manchester being home to the English-speaking world's first free public library helped. Chetham’s Library has been in use for over 350 years. The building it's in is even older, built in 1421, originally used as accommodation for priests of Manchester’s Collegiate Church.
8. Not to mention the classic novels that were written in or based on the city. Charles Dickens is reputed to have at least partly set his novel Hard Times in Manchester, because of its similarity to the fictional location of the story, Coketown. Charlotte Bronte began writing Jane Eyre in 1846, while staying in Hulme with her father, who was convalescing after cataract surgery. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote much of The Secret Garden while visiting Salford's Buile Hill Park.
9. Manchester was the first city in the world to commemorate its LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) past by commissioning a local artist to set rainbow tiles into flagstones around the city, marking historical places of interest for the LGBT community.
10. Famous people from Manchester include Andy. Barry and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, Davy Jones of The Monkees and Jason Orange of Take That; stand up comedians Les Dawson and Bernard Manning; Serial killer Myra Hindley; actors Mark Addy, Caroline Aherne and John Thaw; writer Anthony Burgess and former prime minister David Lloyd George.

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28 March: Osiris

In Egyptian astrology, the current sign is Osiris. Here are 10 things you might not know about the god Osiris:

1. The name “Osiris” comes from the ancient Egyptian word Asir or Wsir, which means someone extremely powerful who sits on a throne.
2. He was the Egyptian god of death and the underworld, but also of resurrection and fertility.
3. In art, Osiris is depicted as a man with a pharaoh's beard who is mummified from the chest down. His skin is usually Green or Black to represent fertility and new birth. He wears a crown of ostrich feathers and carries a crook and a flail an agricultural tool used to separate the grain from the husks. He is said to have taught the people law and agriculture, and introduce them to Barley, one of their most important crops.
4. He was the son of Geb and Nut, and his siblings were Nepthys, Set and Isis. Isis was also his wife and they were the parents of Horus.
5. Osiris is the subject of one of the most famous stories about Egyptian gods, known as the Osiris Myth. Osiris and Isis started out in charge of the world of the living. His brother Set was jealous of him and hatched a plot to kill him. Set built a coffin, made to measure for Osiris, and said he would give the coffin as a gift to anyone it fitted. He invited his brother to try it out, and when Osiris lay down in the coffin, Set slammed it shut, locked it, and threw it in the Nile. It floated away and eventually got stuck in a tree, which grew around it and trapped Osiris even more securely. Malcander, the King of Byblos; and his wife Astarte came across the tree and fell in love with its beautiful fragrance. Malcander ordered the tree to be cut down to be taken to his palace and be made into an ornamental pillar. Osiris, having survived thus far, didn't survive being made into a pillar.
6. Meanwhile, his wife Isis was searching high and low for his body, knowing that if she found it, she could bring him back to life. She disguised herself as an old woman in order to infiltrate Malcander and Astarte's palace. Once inside, she revealed who she really was, and they offered her anything she wanted. Needless to say, she chose the pillar. She hid it in the Nile deltas with her sister Nepthys guarding it while she gathered herbs for the resurrection spell. Set found out, and tricked Nepthys into giving him the body. Set cut the body into pieces and scattered them.
7. Even so, Isis didn't give up. She managed to gather all of Osiris's body, apart from his penis, which had been thrown in the Nile and eaten by fish. She put him back together and brought him to life, but there were a couple of problems due to the fact he didn't have a willy. It meant he was incomplete and therefore not fit to rule the living, and he couldn't father a child. Although Isis found a way round the latter problem by turning herself into a kite and flying round him in circles, which somehow had the effect of drawing his sperm out of him and into her body to create Horus. Unable to rule the living, Osiris became the ruler of the underworld and would welcome those who proved worthy into the afterlife.
8. After they died, pharaohs were mummified to resemble Osiris. This was partly as a reminder of the god, and partly to fool evil spirits into thinking this was the actual god and keep them away.
9. The centre of the cult of Osiris was the city of Abydos, although he was worshipped throughout the land. Annual fertility rites were performed in his honour, including filling an effigy of him with soil and planting grain in it, which would sprout, representing new life.
10. The reserve boat for Oxford University Women's Boat Club is named Osiris.

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27 March: James Callaghan

James Callaghan, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979, was born on this date in 1912. Some things you might not know about him:

1. James was actually his middle name. He was known by his first name, Leonard, until he entered politics, whereupon he started using his middle name. He was affectionately referred to as ‘Big Jim’ or ‘Sunny Jim’.
2. His father was an Irish Catholic called James Garogher, who had run away from home in the 1890s to join the Royal Navy. Being too young to join up, he gave a false date of birth and changed his name to Callaghan, so his true identity couldn't be traced. He served on the royal yacht under Edward VII. He abandoned Catholicism because he wanted to marry a woman named Charlotte Cundy, who was a Baptist, and the Catholic church at the time didn't allow marriages to people from other denominations.
3. The family were poor, and although the young James passed the exams qualifying him for a university place, he couldn't afford to go, so he left school at 17 and joined the Civil Service as a clerk for the Inland Revenue at Maidstone in Kent. In later life, however, he would be awarded Doctor of Law degrees by four universities: University of Wales in 1976; Sardar Patel University, India, in 1978; Birmingham University, in 1981 and Meisei University, Japan, in 1984.
4. While working for the Civil Service, he became a trade union official. When he tried to enlist at the start of world war II he was told he couldn't because Trade Union official was deemed to be a reserved occupation. He did manage to join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman in 1942, but a routine medical showed he was suffering from tuberculosis and was sent to hospital to recover, and after that assigned to duties with the Admiralty in Whitehall. There, he wrote a service manual for the Royal Navy The Enemy: Japan. By the end of the war, however, he had served at sea, on the escort carrier HMS Activity. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in April 1944, making him the last (to date) British prime minister to be an armed forces veteran and the only one ever to have served in the Royal Navy.
5. He was elected Member of Parliament for Cardiff South in 1945, and by 1947 had been appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport. His term there saw the introduction of Zebra Crossings, and increased use of cat's eyes on the roads.
6. James Callaghan is the only 20th-century British Prime Minister to have held all 4 major offices of state: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister.
7. When Hugh Gaitskell died in January 1963, Callaghan ran to succeed him, but came third in the leadership contest, which was won by Harold Wilson. When Wilson resigned unexpectedly in 1976, Callaghan won the leadership election and became Prime Minister.
8. Callaghan’s government lost its majority of seats in Parliament on his first day in office. This forced him to rely upon the support of the Liberal Party during 1977 to 1978, and then the Scottish National Party for the remainder of the government. This led to the referendum on the devolution of powers to Scotland in 1979. His years as Prime Minister also saw the introduction of the Police Act of 1976, which formalised Police complaints procedures; the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977, which established the responsibility of local authorities to provide housing to homeless people; and the Education Act of 1976, which limited the number of independent and grant-maintained schools in any one area.
9. Despite losing the general election in 1979, he stayed on as an MP and became Father of the House, the longest continually-serving member of the Commons, in 1983. He stood down at the 1987 general election after 42 years as an MP, and was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Callaghan of Cardiff. He was the longest-lived British prime minister in history (living to the age of 92 years and 364 days).
10. Outside of politics his interests were rugby, tennis and agriculture. He married Audrey Moulton in 1938. The had four children and some grandchildren. When asked at a press conference on the day after the 1979 General Election what he would most miss about being Prime Minister, Callaghan responded by quoting something his 4-year-old grandson had said during the campaign: 'I do hope Grandad doesn't become Prime Minister again because he doesn't come and see us often enough now", and added, "that's what I shall gain."

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26 March: Tennessee Williams Quotes

This date in 1911 saw the birth of playwright Tennessee Williams, whose plays include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 10 quotes from him:

1. In memory everything seems to happen to music.
2. All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
3. If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
4. I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?
5. Time is the longest distance between two places.
6. Friends are God's way of apologising to us for our families.
7. The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.
8. To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.
9. Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.
10. Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

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25 March: Flour

March is National flour month, so here are some facts about flour.

1. It's no coincidence that the word “flour” sounds like “flower”. They both come from the old French word for blossom, fleur, which had a figurative meaning also – “the finest”. Flour was the finest part of the grain since the coarse parts of the grain had been removed during the milling process.
2. People have been making flour since at least 6000 BC, using simple millstones.
3. Most flour is made from Wheat, but can be made from many other things including acorns, Almonds, green Bananas, Rice, chestnuts, chickpeas, coconuts, Coffee beans, corn, Hemp, Peanuts and Potatoes.
4. Flour is made from the endosperm of a grain of wheat. The milling process separates this from the outer casing, or bran, and the germ, or seed. Simply grinding it, as was done in ancient times, resulted in quite grainy, coarse flour. Today, there are machines which can open the grains and scrape out the endosperm.
5. White flour is flour made from simply the endosperm. Wholemeal flour is made from the whole grain.
6. Making flour can actually be quite dangerous as flour dust suspended in air is explosive. In 1878 22 people were killed as a result of an explosion in a flour mill in Minneapolis, USA, which led to widespread safety reforms in the flour manufacturing industry.
7. One grain of wheat makes more than 20,000 particles of flour.
8. About 4 million tonnes of flour are produced annually in the UK. 84% of it is made from home grown wheat.
9. The nanny state uses flour to make sure people get their daily requirements of certain nutrients. By law, calcium, Iron, niacin and thiamin must be added to all flours. Even though less than half the people who eat Bread are even capable of having babies, let alone actively trying to have them, the UK government is considering adding folic acid, which reduces birth defects, to flour as well. Even though too much folic acid could mask the symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency in older people, resulting in damage to their nervous systems.
10. How many calories in 100gm of flour? Depends which type of flour. Wholemeal flour has 327kcal, brown flour 339kcal, and white flour 252kcal.

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24th March: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

On this date in 1955 the Tennessee Williams three act play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway. Some facts about the play, and the movie.

1. The play was based on Williams's 1952 short story Three Players of a Summer Game.
2. The themes of the play are lies, death, sexual orientation and difficulty in maintaining intimate relationships.
3. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, who insisted on some revisions to the third act. Williams wasn't keen, but wanted the play to be a success. When the play was published in a book, it contained both the original and revised versions of the third act.
4. The spelling in the book version of the play isn't always standard – this is meant to reflect the characters speaking in southern US accents.
5. So what's the story? The Pollit family have gathered to celebrate the 65th birthday of its patriarch, Big Daddy. He has just returned from the clinic, having been told he's perfectly healthy apart from a "spastic colon", another cause for celebration. He has been lied to, however—he is actually dying of cancer but the family have chosen to keep this from him and his wife, Big Mama, so as not to ruin his birthday. Both his sons want to inherit his fortune and property. Brick is the one who should inherit, but he's an alcoholic. His ambitious wife Maggie wants to ensure that Brick gets everything in spite of that. Brick and Maggie haven't slept together in some time, and there are hints that Brick is gay and his alcoholism stems from the suicide of his friend, possibly his gay lover. Big Daddy suggests he would leave everything to Brick's child, if he had one, so Maggie claims to be pregnant. No-one believes her. The play ends as she takes Brick's booze away and locks it up, and says she will "make the lie true".
6. Tennessee Williams wrote the role of Big Daddy with Burl Ives in mind. Ives, up to that point, was primarily a singer, but the play launched his acting career. He was one of the original Broadway cast to reprise their role in the film version. The other main roles in the Broadway production were played by Barbara Bel Geddes (Maggie), Ben Gazzara (Brick) and Mildred Dunnock as Big Mama.
7. The 1958 film starred Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Judith Anderson, and Jack Carson. Taylor went ahead with the role even though her husband had died in a plane crash just before production started. The tragedy left her with a stutter; but when she was acting, it abated. Her fellow cast members were concerned for her health, as she wasn't eating. A scene where the family were eating a meal was especially difficult.
8. The film was originally going to be filmed in black and white, as was the norm for films of this type at the time; but producers knew audiences were particularly fond of the colours of Newman and Taylor's eyes, and for that reason, decided to go with colour.
9. The cast of the film could have been quite different. George Cukor was offered the director's job, but turned it down because references to Brick's homosexuality had been removed. Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner and Grace Kelly were considered for the part of Maggie; James Dean was considered for the part of Brick, but died before production began. Robert Mitchum and Elvis Presley both turned the role down.
10. Tennessee Williams hated the film. He hated it so much that he went to the cinema and told the people waiting to go in, "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!"

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• Secrets
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23 March: Sir Roger Bannister

Sir Roger Bannister, the athlete who was first to run a mile in less than four minutes, was born on this date in 1929. 10 facts about him:

1. Bannister was born in Harrow on the outskirts of London. His father Ralph was a civil servant originally from Lancashire. The family moved to Bath at the start of the second world war. It was in school in Bath that Roger discovered he had a talent for cross country running.
2. He went to Oxford University on an athletic scholarship, where he started his career as a pacemaker for other athletes, and caught the eye of the coaches, who noted him as a potential Olympic athlete. He competed at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki and came fourth in the 1500 meters, missing out on a medal. Disappointed in his performance, he resolved that he would run a mile in less than four minutes.
3. Training often too second place to his academic studies – he was studying medicine. In 1947, for example, he was working on three weekly half-hour training sessions, yet still showed promise. He didn't compete in the 1948 Olympics because he wanted to concentrate on studying. However, when he resolved to run the four minute mile, he used his knowledge of medicine and the human body to come up with a training regime specially designed to prepare him for the feat.
4. He almost didn't run on the fateful day at all. His historic feat was almost stymied by the weather. Winds of up to twenty-five miles per hour (40 km/h) made Bannister think twice about running that day, saving his energy for a race on a less windy day. However, the winds dropped just before his race and he decided he would run after all.
5. The exact time of Bannister's famous mile was 3:59.4. The announcer at the event was Norris McWhirter, who would later become a co-publisher of the Guinness Book of Records, teased the crowd by delaying his announcement of Bannister's race time for as long as possible, but when he announced "The time was three..." their cheers drowned out the rest of the announcement.
6. While Roger Bannister is probably the most famous record holder for running a mile, he also holds the record for holding that record for the shortest amount of time. Just 46 days later, Australian runner John Landy shaved 1.5 seconds off the record in Turku, Finland. In 1954, the two raced against each other in Vancouver. Landy led for most of the race, but Bannister overtook him at the final turn, just as Landy looked over his shoulder to check where Bannister was. Both of them finished the mile race in under four minutes, the first time two men had done so in the same race. Vancouver sculptor Jack Harman made a bronze statue of the two runners, immortalising the moment when Landy looked over his shoulder. Landy quipped that while Lot's wife was turned to Salt for looking back, he was turned to bronze.
7. Once thought to be humanly impossible, running a mile in less than four minutes has since been achieved by more than 500 men, and at time of writing the record stands at 3:43.13, set by Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. As yet, no woman has achieved it. The women's record at time of writing is 4:12.56 set by Russian athlete Svetlana Masterkova in 1996.
8. A full time career in athletics was never on the cards for Bannister. He retired from the sport when he graduated and became a doctor. He became a neurologist, serving for many years as the director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London. He once said in an interview, "I'd rather be remembered for my work in neurology than my running. If you offered me the chance to make a great breakthrough in the study of the autonomic nerve system, I'd take that over the four minute mile right away. I worked in medicine for sixty years. I ran for about eight."
9. That said, he never quite lost his interest in athletics and served as chairman of the British Sports Council and president of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Recreation. He was actually the first Chairman of the Sports Council (now Sport England) and it was for this that he received his knighthood in 1975, not for running the four minute mile. It was in this post, too, that he foresaw that drugs in sport was likely to become a problem and gathered a team of scientists to devise the first test for anabolic steroids.
10. Bannister married the Swedish artist Moyra Elver Jacobsson in Basel, Switzerland in 1955. They had four children. In 2011, Bannister was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He died in March 2018 at the age of 88.

My Books:

If you like stories about:

• Superheroes
• Psychic detectives
• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
• Friendship
• Family relationships
• Ghosts
• Adventure
• Crime

If you want to read about superheroes who aren't the usual Marvel/DC staples, who don't all live in the USA.

If you like quirky tales.

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Check out my books page.

22 March: 81

On the 81st day of the year, 10 things you might not know about the number 81:

1. It's the square of 9 and the fourth power of 3.
2. 81 is used as a symbol for the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, because 'H' and 'A' are the 8th and 1st letters of the alphabet.
3. In Roman numerals it is written as LXXXI, and in Binary as 1010001.
4. +81 is the code for international direct dial phone calls to Japan.
5. Staying in Japan, 81 is the number of squares on a shogi playing board. Shogi is a two player board game sometimes referred to as Japanese Chess. The name means general's board game.
6. 81 is the atomic number of thallium, a chemical element with the symbol Tl. It is a grey metal not found in nature in its pure form. When isolated, thallium resembles Tin, but discolours when exposed to air. Chemists William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy both discovered thallium independently in 1861, in residues of sulphuric acid production. Crookes gave the element its name, which comes from the Greek thallós, meaning "green shoot" or "twig".
7. There are 81 prayers in the Catholic Rosary.
8. There are 81 stanzas or chapters in the Chinese classic text, the Tao Te Ching.
9. In the USA, Interstate 81 is a road running from Dandridge, Tennessee to Wellesley Island at the Canadian border. It traces the paths created along the Appalachian Mountains through the Great Appalachian Valley by migrating animals, Native Americans and early settlers. It also follows a major corridor for troop movements during the Civil War.
10. In numerology the energy of number 81 is connected to humanitarianism and business. A person with this number in their numerology profile will have a vision for an ideal world which involves a healthy environment for business. They will want to help humanity, and will do so using a business perspective.

My Books:

If you like stories about:

• Superheroes
• Psychic detectives
• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
• Friendship
• Family relationships
• Ghosts
• Adventure
• Crime

If you want to read about superheroes who aren't the usual Marvel/DC staples, who don't all live in the USA.

If you like quirky tales.

If you like to support independent self published authors.

Check out my books page.

21 March: Astrology Quotes

 March 21st is Astrology Day. Here are some quotes about astrology:

1. The more evolved someone is, the more they will differ from their astrological traits. Dreamchaser
2. Astrology is taurus. F.W. Dedering
3. I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're sceptical. Arthur C Clarke
4. Anyone can be a millionaire, but to become a billionaire you need an astrologer. J. P. Morgan
5. A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician. Hippocrates
6. We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. Carl Jung
7. Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies. Edward Abbey
8. A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament. Jeremy Taylor
9. I do not believe in astrology. They can not tell from a chunk of mud millions of miles away what is going to happen to me. Harry Houdini
10. Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you. Dane Rudhyar

My Books:

If you like stories about:

• Superheroes
• Psychic detectives
• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
• Friendship
• Family relationships
• Ghosts
• Adventure
• Crime

If you want to read about superheroes who aren't the usual Marvel/DC staples, who don't all live in the USA.

If you like quirky tales.

If you like to support independent self published authors.

Check out my books page.