January 21: Hugging Day

Today is Hugging Day - so some quotes about hugging.

1. They invented hugs to let people know you love them without saying anything. Bil Keane
2. Hug your friends tight, but your enemies tighter – hug ’em so tight they can’t wiggle. Lyndon B. Johnson
3. A hug is a great gift — one size fits all, and it’s easy to exchange.
4. You can’t give a hug without getting a hug.
5. A hug a day keeps the demons at bay. German Proverb
6. A hug is a smile with arms, a laugh with a stronger grip. Terri Guillemets
7. One day someone is going to hug you so tight that all all of your broken pieces will stick together.
8. However long a hug lasts, it doesn’t last long enough. Kyle Schmalenberg
9. I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words. Ann Hood
10. A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away. Bil Keane

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20 January: Amsterdam

On this date in 1648 The cornerstone of Amsterdam town hall was laid. 10 things you might not know about Amsterdam.

1. The name comes from a dam which was built on the river Amstel after floods in 1170 and 1173. Amsterdam was a fishing village back then. The city has a nickname, too - Mokum, which is Hebrew for city or a place. It got the nickname thanks to a large Jewish population.
2. The three Xs on the coat of arms are St Andrew's crosses, a link to its past as a fishing town.
3. Amsterdam is built on 11 million 15 to 20 metre long wooden poles driven into the ground. An average house has about ten of these, but Central Station has about 9,000.
4. There are 881,000 Bicycles in Amsterdam. That's more bicycles than people, as the population is in the region of 799,400. About 25,000 bikes end up in the canals every year, but only about 8,000 are officially pulled out.
5. Talking of canals, Amsterdam has more canals than Venice - over 100km of them, and 1,281 bridges, three time as many as Venice. Hence another nickname for Amsterdam, “Venice of the North”. Where there are canals there will also be houseboats. Amsterdam has over 3,000 of them, including one exclusively for stray Cats.
6. The majority of Amsterdam is below sea level, 6.7 metres below sea level at its lowest point. The airport is 4 metres below sea level.
7. Amsterdam has more museums per square metre than any other city in the world. These include the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and Anne Frank's house.
8. Amsterdam has the oldest stock exchange in the world, dating back to 1602, when it was set up by the Dutch East India Company so it could trade its own shares.
9. There is the famous red light district, of course, and Coffee shops which sell rather more than coffee. While soft drugs can be legally bought and consumed in a coffee shop, you won't be able to buy dope in a bar because the policy is that soft drugs and alcohol mustn't be sold together.
10. I don't know if the fact that Amsterdam residents are the second largest consumers of coffee in the world is connected to that or not! 3.2 cups of coffee per day are drunk by the average Amsterdam resident.

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19 January: Lieutenant Uhura

Lieutenant Uhura, Communications Officer in the original series of Star Trek will be born on January 19 2233 in the United States of Africa. Here are some things you may not know about her.

1. She was originally going to be called "Lieutenant Sulu" until someone pointed out to Gene Roddenberry that it sounded too much like "Zulu", so George Takei's character got the name instead.
2. Lieutenant Uhura’s name means “freedom” in Swahili. It was inspired by a book Nichelle Nichols, who plays her, had with her when she came to read for the part, Uhuru by Robert Ruark. Producer Robert Justman told Gene Roddenberry what the title of the book meant and Roddenberry changed it to Uhura and used it.
3. Her first name, a mystery until the 2009 film, was revealed than as Nyota, which is the Swahili word for "star".
4. Nichelle Nichols resigned from Star Trek after the first season, but reconsidered after a conversation with a big Star Trek fan. The fan was Martin Luther King Jr.
5. After Star Trek was cancelled, Nichelle Nichols volunteered for a special recruiting project at NASA where she recruited America’s first and second female as well as black male as astronauts.
6. Uhura is a translator and communications officer specialising in linguistics, cryptography, and philology. She's also a good singer (Nichelle Nicholls was a singer before turning to acting and sang with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton) and would sing to entertain her crewmates when off duty. Spock would sometimes accompany her on the Vulcan lyre.
7. Uhura and Spock were "an item" at college. There's an edition of a Star Trek comic which shows them going on a date. Anxious to avoid any sign of favouritism, Spock assigned her to the USS Farragut originally, but Uhura protested, saying that he would have assigned her to the Enterprise if they hadn't ever dated. Spock eventually agreed, which was just as well as the Farragut was destroyed by the villain Nero.
8. In the series of re-boot films, Uhura is played by Zoe Saldana.
9. Nichols was among the first black actors not to play menial roles on TV. She inspired other future black actors, among them Whoopi Goldberg, who, on watching Star Trek for the first time, declared, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"
10. Former US president Barack Obama was a big Star Trek fan when he was younger and admitted, when he met Nichelle Nicholls, that he'd had a crush on Uhura.

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January 18: Arthur Ransome Quotes

Today, 10 quotes from Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, who was born on this date in 1884.

1. Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might-have-been.
2. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.
3. When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.
4. Perhaps the greatest satisfaction on the first day of the season is the knowledge in the evening that the whole of the rest of the season is to come.
5. They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.
6. No one wants to row who has ever sailed.
7. What's hit's history: what's missed's mystery.
8. Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them.
9. Softly, at first, as if it hardly meant it, the snow began to fall.
10. She's got a rum job, but she knows how to do it, and to have a job and know how to do it is one of the best things in this life.

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17 January: Benjamin Franklin

Born this date in 1706 Benjamin Franklin was one of the most well known founders of the United States of America. He signed the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States and the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He's also known as a scientist and inventor. Here are some facts about him:

1. He only attended school for two years, because that's all his parents could afford. (Since his father had seventeen children by two wives, that's hardly surprising!) He left school at the age of ten to work for his father and later as an apprentice in his brother's print shop. He was a voracious reader, often going without food in order to buy books.
2. When his brother James started up a newspaper called the New England Courant, Benjamin wanted to write for it, but James refused. Undeterred, Benjamin submitted letters and articles under the name of Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow. His submissions covered a wide range of subjects from religion and women's rights to fashion and marriage. Mrs Dogood's writings became so popular that "Mrs Dogood" received several marriage proposals. When Ben eventually came clean and told his brother he was Mrs Dogood, James was angry and jealous.
3. Fed up with being mistreated by his brother, Ben left home and settled in Philadelphia, at the age of 17. He was virtually penniless when he arrived, but in time, set up his own print shop and wrote and published “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. The almanac was the source of a number of adages still often quoted today, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear", "Fish and visitors stink in three days", and "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise". He went from being penniless to being able to retire at the age of 42 and devote himself to science and public service.
4. He didn't make his fortune in time to be able to marry the woman he wanted. In his early days in Philadelphia, he lodged with the Read family and fell in love with their 15 year old daughter, Deborah. He proposed to her when he was 17 but her widowed mother, worried about Franklin's financial position and the fact he was about to travel to London at Governor Sir William Keith's request, didn't allow the marriage. While Franklin was in London, Deborah married someone else. However, the man she married turned out to be a crook who stole her dowry and fled to Barbados without her. Nowadays that would be grounds for divorce or annulment, but not back then. Deborah was stuck and not free to marry again. When Franklin returned, he moved in with Deborah. Their common law marriage produced two children, and the couple also brought up Franklin's illegitimate son, William. Deborah was afraid of the sea, and so never travelled with her husband but was known to complain about being left behind.
5. Franklin was musical, too - he played the Violin, the harp, and the Guitar and also composed music. He even invented a musical instrument, the glass armonica, designed to reproduce the sound of a wet finger rubbing the rim of a glass. It consisted of 37 Glass orbs of different sizes and pitches, which he then mounted on a spindle controlled by a foot pedal. Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss all composed music for it. Franklin wrote, “Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.”
6. His many other inventions include bifocal lenses, the lightning rod, swimming aids, the Franklin stove, an iron fireplace that produced less smoke and used less wood, and the first volunteer fire brigade in America. He never patented his inventions, believing that they should be freely available rather than a means to make money. He wrote, "as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. He also invented a phonetic alphabet which ditched the redundant consonants C, J, Q, W, X and Y and added six new letters. That one didn't catch on.
7. Everyone has heard of his experiments with Kites and Lightning, but he was also the first to study and chart the Gulf Stream. At the time, he was deputy postmaster, and began looking into complaints about how long it took mail from England to reach New York, when merchant ships could do the trip much faster. Franklin's cousin, a sea captain, told him about the strong eastbound mid-ocean current which the merchant ships knew to avoid, but the mail ships sailed right into it. At first, the British sea captains ignored Franklin's advice, but when they started to listen to him they could cut their journey time by as much as two weeks.
8. Despite being a Founding Father of the USA and signing all the documents, he wasn't so keen on independence from Britain at first, since he'd lived there and held royal appointments. He campaigned for a peaceful compromise rather than revolution. When the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, he said it was an “act of violent injustice on our part” and insisted that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses. As time went on, he changed his mind and publicly announced his support for American independence - but not before he was suspected of being a British spy.
9. He is a member of both the Chess and swimming halls of fame. Swimming because he had a lifelong love of the sport. He swam in the Thames while in England and was observed to be so good that a friend offered to help him set up a swimming school. While Franklin turned that offer down he remained a proponent of swimming instruction for the rest of his life. Chess because he wrote a well-known essay, The Morals of Chess that detailed the rules of conduct for playing the game and was responsible for making chess a popular sport in America.
10. Although he owned slaves as household servants in his younger days, he became an abolitionist in his later years. His daughter's inheritance was conditional on her freeing her slaves. He also left money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. There were strings attached, however - for its first 100 years, the money was to be placed in a trust and only used to provide loans to local tradesmen. A portion could then be spent, but the rest would remain off limits for another 100 years, at which point the cities could use it as they saw fit. By 1990 these funds were worth $4.5 million and $2 million. The money was used to help finance the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. As for Franklin's sons, one died young, and he'd fallen out with William over American Independence. When Franklin became a supporter, William didn't - he was staunchly against the revolution and even went to prison for opposing it. After the war, he moved to England. His father never forgave him and cut him out of his will.

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16 January: Windsor Castle

On this date in 1993 Windsor Castle reopened, two months after a Fire swept through it. Here are some things you might not know about Windsor Castle.

1. Windsor Castle, located in Berkshire, England, is one of the residences of the British royal family and is the largest and oldest inhabited castle in the world. British kings and queens have made it their home for almost 1,000 years, starting with Henry I.
2. The word derives from the Old English Windlesoren, meaning “winch by the riverbank.” It's also the surname of the current British royal family, who named themselves after the castle in 1919. King George V decided that their dynastic German name of Saxe-Coburg Gotha wasn't the best idea after a huge war with Germany.
3. The original castle was built by the Normans, who wanted a ring of nine castles a day's march from London, so soldiers could get there quickly to defend the place if necessary. Windsor was the largest of these. William the Conqueror's castle was built from wood. It was Henry I, the first king to actually live there, who replaced the wooden walls with stone. The lavish state apartments were created in the late 1600s by King Charles II.
4. It has been a favoured residence of many British kings and queens including Edward III, Edward VIII, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria and of course, Queen Elizabeth II. As one of the Queen's homes, the changing of the guard takes place here as well as at Buckingham Palace. If you want to know if the Queen is at home, you can tell by which Flag is flying from the top of the castle. If it's the Royal Standard, the Queen is in. If it's the Union Jack, she's out.
5. Windsor Castle has about 1,000 rooms and 52,609 square meters (13 acres) of grounds. The approach road is 2.65 miles long and 240 ft wide. There are so many fireplaces (300) that a full time fendersmith is needed to take care of them. The same family have been doing that job for generations. There is a library with 300,000 books, prints and drawings, including Queen Victoria's diaries. There are more than 450 clocks in the castle, and yes, there is someone employed to look after them, too. When the clocks go forward in the spring, it takes 16 hours to change them all. When they go back in the Autumn, it takes 18 hours to change them, because most of the clocks can't be adjusted backwards.
6. On display here is a doll's house belonging to Queen Mary. It was built to a 1/12^th scale and designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. The attention to detail is mind-boggling. It has Toilets which actually flush and taps which actually work. The tiny Wine cellar contains over a thousand little bottles containing real wine and Beer; there's Electricity, Lifts, and in the library, tiny books which contain stories hand written by the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1500 artists and craftsmen were needed to build it.
7. Windsor Castle is the headquarters of the Order of the Garter with St George’s Chapel in the grounds as its spiritual home. The order was created by Edward III in 1348, inspired by King Arthur's knights of the round table. Membership is limited to the monarch, members of the royal family and 24 other people chosen by the monarch. According to legend, the order got its name when King Edward III's partner's garters fell off during a dance. He picked them up and pulled them over his own leg. Members of the order gather at Windsor Castle every June for a meal and a service in the chapel.
8. The chapel has 76 statues of animals on its roof. These are known as “The Queen's Beasts” and represent heraldic animals from the history of the royal family. They include the Lion of England, the Red Dragon of Wales, the panther of Jane Seymour, the falcon of York, the Black bull of Clarence, the yale of Beaufort, the White lion of Mortimer, the greyhound of Richmond, the white hart of Richard II, the collared silver antelope of Bohun, the black dragon of Ulster, the white Swan of Hereford, the Unicorn of Edward III and the golden hind of Kent.
9. During the Second World War, the Royal family spent their nights at Windsor Castle, commuting to Buckingham Palace by day. This was a big secret at the time, because they wanted the people to think they were staying at the Palace and braving the air raids along with their subjects. The Castle was reinforced to withstand any bombing; works of art were removed to an even safer place, chandeliers were lowered to the floor and the windows blacked out. Windsor Castle was never bombed, possibly because, as rumour had it, Hitler wanted to make it his home in Britain if he won the war.
10. Windsor Castle has been damaged by serious fires three times - in 1296, 1853 and most recently and devastatingly in 1992. It's believed the latter fire started during renovation work when a spotlight was placed too close to a curtain. The fire lasted 15 hours with 200 firefighters battling to bring it under control. More than 100 rooms were damaged by either fire or the water used to extinguish it. Luckily, many of the priceless works of art had been removed for the renovation work. The cost of restoring the castle after the fire was nearly £40 million.

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January 15: Telephone directories

On this date in 1880, the London Telephone Company published Britain's first telephone directory. Here are 10 things you might not know about phone books.

1. It wasn't the first telephone directory in the whole world - New Haven, Connecticut had issued one two years previously, although it could hardly be called a phone book. It was one piece of cardboard listing the fifty people and businesses in the town which had phones.
2. London's first phone book wasn't much bigger than that. It listed just 248 telephone users.
3. It didn't have any numbers in it. Back then, all calls were connected via an exchange, so people just asked for who they wanted by name.
4. The Yellow pages, a directory listing only business numbers, was first published in Chicago in 1886. The directory for listing domestic numbers eventually became known as the “White pages”.
5. Phone books only cover land lines. In the US, efforts to produce a directory of mobile numbers have met stiff opposition from people fearing they will be inundated with junk calls. In any case, people can store most of the numbers they need in their phones. An increasing number of people don't bother with a land line at all. People can also pay to be left out of the directory so their number is "unlisted", "ex-directory", "private" or "non-published" depending on which country you are in. Most people I know do this – so I reckon in time, the London telephone Directory will go back to having no more than about 250 names in it!
6. In 1981 France was the first country to have an electronic directory.
7. These days, people are more likely to turn to the internet to find a number they want than a paper book. This, and the fact that producing the directories uses 1,400,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases and over 600,000 tons of paper every year has led to some communities, including Seattle and San Francisco, to try and get them banned. Mostly without success due to the companies making money from the advertising making counter-claims so they can carry on distributing. As it is they are made from paper which has been recycled so many times it couldn't be recycled into anything else, except perhaps bedding for animals.
8. In 1991 there was a lawsuit in America in which a directory producer tried to sue another under copyright laws. The court ruled that a phone book is not subject to copyright because there is no creativity involved in compiling a list of phone numbers.
9. Tearing phone books in half is an accepted feat of strength. The world record at time of writing for the largest number of phone books torn in half in two minutes is 33. The record is held by Cosimo Ferrucci, who achieved it in 2010. The record for most phone books ripped within three minutes by a woman is 21, and was established by Tina Shelton in 2007.
10. In the first Terminator film, the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has to find and kill a woman called Sarah Connor. He doesn't know exactly where she is, so he uses telephone directories to track down every woman by that name and kill them all. The press and police gave him the nickname 'The Phone Book Killer'.

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