20 November: Edwin Hubble Quotes

The astronomer Edwin Hubble after whom the Hubble Telescope was named, was born on this date in 1899. Some words of wisdom from him:

1. The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.
2. Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
3. Past time is finite, future time is infinite.
4. All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.
5. Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
6. Observations always involve theory.
7. Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages.
8. The universe is unfolding as it should.
9. The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it.
10. We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of a world it is—at least in its physical aspects.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

19 November: Vitamin D

On this date in 1931, Vitamin D-1 crystals were produced in Germany. 10 things you might not know about Vitamin D.

1. When vitamin A was discovered in 1914 by Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis, in cod liver oil, a British doctor named Edward Mellanby did more research after noticing that Dogs fed cod liver oil didn’t get rickets. He concluded that vitamin A prevented rickets. To prove it, he gave dogs cod liver oil from which the vitamin A had been removed, and discovered the dogs still didn’t get rickets, so there must be something else going on. Since a couple more vitamins had been discovered and named in the meantime, Mellanby dubbed this rickets-preventing stuff vitamin D.
2. Our bodies make 90% of our vitamin D from sunshine. This means that, strictly speaking, vitamin D isn’t actually a vitamin, but a hormone.
3. Recent figures show that 13% of women and 9% of men in the UK have low vitamin D levels. It’s not always possible to get enough sunshine in Britain, especially not in winter. People with darker skin and older people are more likely to lack this vitamin.
4. You can get it from food as well, but the number of foods rich in it are relatively small. Oily fish, Milk and Eggs are good sources. Vegans can get it from Mushrooms and tofu.
5. Another name for vitamin D is calciferol.
6. Vitamin D dissolves in fat. Fat helps the body absorb it so it can do its job – so cutting all fats from your diet isn’t such a great idea. Vitamins A, E and K also need fat to help them function. So adding some Olive oil or even Butter to veg isn’t a sin – it’s good for you.
7. So what is vitamin D’s job, exactly? It helps to extract calcium from the food we eat. That is why it’s important for healthy bones and why rickets is a consequence of not getting enough. It can also help prevent osteoporosis and brittle bones.
8. It doesn’t just seem to help with bones. The various sites I consulted while researching this seemed to suggest that vitamin D deficiency can be responsible for almost every health condition known to man – gum disease, muscle weakness, heart disease and dementia. There’s even some suggestion it might prevent against the virus that has broken the world, covid 19, although there’s also a lot of people saying that’s not proven (Not surprising. Big Pharma can't cash in on sunshine, after all, so even if it's true, they don't want us to know).
9. The UK retailer Marks and Spencer adds vitamin D to all its Bread and bread rolls. They do that by exposing yeast to UV light. Yeast, apparently, can make the stuff from UV light just like we do. Two slices of M and S bread can therefore increase your level of vitamin D by 15%. 78% of shoppers surveyed welcomed the move. Well, let’s face it – would you rather take pills or eat a Sandwich? It’s also possible to boost the amount of vitamin D in mushrooms by exposing them to UV light.
10. While we do need the stuff, taking too much is as bad as not getting enough. If you take too much your body might absorb too much calcium, which can lead to nausea, vomiting, muscle weakness, psychiatric problems, pain, loss of appetite, dehydration, excessive thirst, and kidney stones. So if you do take a supplement, don’t exceed the stated dose.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

18 November: Gallup polls

George Gallup, pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll was born on this date in 1901. 10 things you didn’t know about the man and his polls:

1. George Gallup was born in in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of a dairy farmer. As a young man he played football, delivered Milk to earn money and ran newspapers for his high school and university.
2. For a while he was an academic, studying journalism and psychology and eventually becoming a professor in journalism, a position he gave up when he started his polling company.
3. The house he was born and grew up in, 703 South Chestnut Street in Jefferson, Iowa, now a registered historic building, is octagonal. His father had a thing for octagonal houses as this was the third one he’d had built.
4. He began to get interested in politics and polls when he conducted polls for his mother in law, Ola Babcock Miller, who was elected Iowa Secretary of State in 1932.
5. His American Institute of Public Opinion was founded in 1935 with the aim of scientifically measuring public opinions on things in the news such as government spending, criminal justice, and presidential candidates.
6. A year later, the organisation shot to fame when, using a sample of just 50,000 people, it predicted that Franklin D Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in the U.S. Presidential election. The foremost polls up to that point had been conducted by the Literary Digest magazine, but on this occasion, despite sampling more than two million people, the Digest got it wrong and predicted Landon would win. Gallup went on to conduct another survey, using a much smaller random sample which matched the demographic of Literary Digest respondents. This one, too, predicted a Landon victory.
7. Gallup polls weren’t always right, however. In 1948 Gallup predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman, by between 5 and 15%; Truman won the election by 4.5%. Even so, Gallup blamed the fact that he’d stopped polling three weeks before the election and during that three weeks, Truman’s popularity had surged.
8. As well as trying to predict who will win an election, the company also run a yearly poll in America to find out who the most admired man and woman are. This has been running since 1948. Most years the most admired man is the sitting President of the United States and the most admired woman is or has been the First Lady. Donald Trump, however, has only topped the list once, in 2019, and even then it was a tie with Barack Obama. Melania didn’t appear on the top 12 women’s list at all. As for who has won most times, that’s a tie, too, between Dwight D Eisenhower and Barack Obama who have both won most admired man 12 times. Hillary Clinton has won the most admired woman the most times (22) followed by Eleanor Roosevelt (13) and Margaret Thatcher (6). In 1999, there was a poll to find out who the most admired person of the entire 20^th century was. Mother Teresa topped that one, with Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill making up the rest of the top 10.
9. Another regular poll is the Gallup World Poll, in which a representative sample of at least a thousand people from different nations are asked identical questions in order to compare things like incomes, well-being, freedom and so on. The base line is a fictional country called Dystopia, which has the lowest incomes, lowest life expectancy, lowest generosity, most corruption, least freedom, and least social support. The premise is that no country is actually that bad and everywhere will compare positively with it. I await this year’s results with interest, however, since at time of writing it feels like the country I live in is fast approaching Dystopia. The happiest countries in the world seem to be those in Scandinavia.
10. It’s not all politics. Gallup polls ask all kinds of things, especially in America. Some of the things they’ve found out about Americans include: a third believe in ghosts. 41% believe in extrasensory perception, 37% in haunted houses, 21% in witches and 9% believe it is possible to channel spirits from the other side. 79% believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, while 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth and 3% have no opinion either way. As for which country they gained independence from, one in four of them don’t know. 2% think it was France, 3% some other country and 19% had no idea at all. If you happen to be one of those 24% it was actually Britain. 22% of Americans would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate, even if he or she was standing for the party they’d usually vote for.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

17 November: Vera Name Day

Today’s Latvian name day is Vera. Vera is a female first name of Russian origin. In Russian, Vera means faith, although it has also been said to mean truth, deriving from Latin. 10 famous Veras:

1. Vera Lynn, British singer known as “The Forces Sweetheart” during the Second World War. Her most famous song is probably We’ll meet Again.
2. Vera Duckworth, fictional character on the long running soap opera Coronation Street. She was married to Jack Duckworth.
3. Vera Maxwell, American fashion designer famous for 1940s sports wear.
4. Vera Leigh, a British spy during World War II who helped downed British airmen escape from behind enemy lines. She was executed by the Germans in 1944 at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.
5. Vera Stanhope, fictional detective played by Brenda Blethyn in the TV series Vera, which is based on novels by Anne Cleeves.
6. Vera Putina, a Russian woman who claims Vladimir Putin is her long lost son. She lives in the village of Metekhi, about 18 kilometers from Gori, Georgia and says that Putin's father is a Russian mechanic called Platon Privalov, who got her pregnant while he was married to another woman. When she got married, her new husband made her give up her son and she left him with his grandparents. She claims these people are the "parents" Putin's official biography speaks of.
7. Vera Vague, spinster character in 1940s and 50s American radio, played by Barbara Jo Allen. Her catchphrase was “You dear boy!”
8. Véra Nabokov wife, editor, and translator of Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov claimed he "would have been nowhere without her." All his works are dedicated to her. Several times, when he threw his manuscript of Lolita on the fire, it was Véra who rescued it.
9. Vera Claythorne, a fictional character from Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, which she described as the most difficult of her books to write. Claythorne is a young woman on leave from her position as a sports mistress at a girls' school. Once a governess employed by the Hamilton family, she was dismissed after her young charge, Cyril, drowned on her watch. She actually let the boy drown so his uncle Hugo could inherit the family estate and marry her. Hugo rejected her when he realised what she’d done. In a post-traumatic state after shooting another character, she hangs herself.
10. Vera Brittain, a nurse during the first world war, famous for her memoir, A Testament of Youth, published in 1933, about her experiences.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

16 November: Cinnamon

Today is National Cinnamon Raisin Bread Day. I’ve done Raisins and Bread already, so here are 10 things you might not know about cinnamon.

1. Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of trees from the genus Cinnamomum. The trees are native to India, China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Indonesia, China, Vietnam and Sri Lanka were the top four countries producing it in 2017.
2. There are two distinct types of cinnamon, Cassia and Ceylon. Most of the cinnamon sold in grocery shops is Cassia, which comes from Indonesia and China and is thicker and darker in colour. Ceylon is milder and comes from Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the Seychelles.
3. The chemical which gives cinnamon its distinctive flavour is cinnamaldehyde. It’s a golden Yellow substance which is present in the essential oil of the tree bark.
4. Cinnamon has a long history. It gets a mention in the Bible as an ingredient of the holy oil that Moses used for anointing. The ancient Egyptians used it in mummification and the Greek poet Sappho wrote about it in the seventh century.
5. It was once extremely expensive – up to 15 times more expensive than Silver. It was considered a fitting gift for kings, queens and gods. Part of its mystique came from the tales traders made up about where it came from. It grew in Arabia, and the plants were guarded by winged serpents. Giant birds collected cinnamon sticks to make their nests. It was fished in nets from the source of the Nile at the edge of the world. Pliny the Elder debunked the birds’ nest theory, saying it was no more than a tall tale used an excuse to charge more for the spice.
6. The emperor Nero burned huge amounts of it at his wife’s funeral. The story goes that he accidentally killed her by kicking her in the belly during a row about how much time he spent at the races. He believed that burning loads of this incredibly expensive stuff would atone for his lethal domestic violence.
7. In ancient China, it was used as medicine to treat nausea, period pains and the common cold. Today, we know it is a good source of vitamin K, calcium, iron, vitamin E and Zinc; also that it has natural anti-inflammatory properties. It’s said to be good for the immune system and can help prevent degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer’s.
8. That said, consuming too much of it is bad for you. Cinnamaldehyde is a throat irritant and consuming large amounts of cinnamon at once can cause skin irritations or swelling of the mouth and gums. The “cinnamon challenge” in which people would film themselves eating a teaspoon of cinnamon powder was dangerous for this reason, and also because there was a tendency to inhale the fine powder.
9. You can buy cinnamon as powder, but also as sticks, or quills. Quills last longer. In Sri Lanka, they grade cinnamon quills according to thickness. Alba is the thinnest (under 6mm), followed by Continental, Mexican and Hamburg (up to 32mm).
10. Cinnamon oil has several uses other than adding it to food and drinks. It’s toxic to Mosquito larvae and therefore makes a natural insecticide. It can also be mixed with Honey or conditioner to make a natural hair dye, which lightens the hair when it is exposed to sunlight.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

15 November: Chlorine

On this date in 1810 Humphrey Davy announced his discovery that Chlorine is an element. 10 things you may not know about that element:

1. Its atomic number is 17, its chemical symbol is Cl and it belongs to the halogen family of elements.
2. It was first discovered in 1774 by a scientist called Carl Wilhelm Scheele, but he believed the gas he collected from hydrochloric acid (or muriatic acid, as he would have known it) was a compound and contained Oxygen. He called his discovery muriaticum.
3. Sir Humphrey Davy proved, over 30 years later, that it was an element, with no oxygen in it.
4. Davey named the element chlorine after the Greek word chloros, meaning a yellow-green colour. Chlorine is a Yellow gas.
5. Its Melting Point is −101.5 °C/ −150.7 °F and its boiling point is −34.04 °C/ −29.27 °F.
6. Chlorine is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s oceans, the 21st most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the ninth most abundant element in the human body.
7. That said, it’s pretty toxic stuff. It reacts with the mucous membranes and can burn the skin. Concentrations around 1000 parts per million would kill a person if they breathe it in. Hence it was one of the first chemical weapons, used in the first world war. Since it is heavier than air, it would collect in trenches. The reason there’s so much of it in the human body is because, as a compound with sodium, it makes an essential substance in our diet – sodium chloride, otherwise known as table Salt.
8. Chlorine is used in the manufacture of a multitude of products such as plastics, Paper, medicine, insecticides, disinfectants, textiles, dyes and petroleum products. It is commercially extracted by electrolysis from brine solutions.
9. Chlorine will form compounds with most elements in the periodic table, except for the inert noble gases and heavy, unstable elements.
10. It has been used as a disinfectant for many years, including being added to the water in public swimming pools. However, the distinctive smell you get on your skin after swimming in a pool isn’t chlorine, but chloromine, a compound which is produced when chlorine reacts with the proteins in your Hair and skin.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

14 November: Moby Dick

14 November is Great White Whale Day: in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. The book opens with the famous line, “Call me Ishmael”. The narrator, Ishmael, is a member of the crew of the whaling ship Pequod. The captain is Ahab, hell bent on bringing down a Whale which had bitten his leg off at the knee on a previous trip. Ahab’s false leg is made from a whale’s jawbone. Ishmael describes the natural history of whales and day to day life on board a ship with a multicultural crew – their routines and encounters with other ships.
2. Many writers base their characters on real life people. Herman Melville was no different, although in his case, it was real whales. Two of them, in fact. A real life albino whale, over 70 feet long, used to shadow whaling boats. As long as they didn’t attack him, he was fine, but at the first sign of an attack he’d fight back. The whale was nicknamed “Mocha Dick” after an island near where he was first seen. When the whalers finally got him, there were 19 harpoons in his side. Why Melville decided to change the whale’s name to Moby isn’t known. It wasn’t as if the whale was going to sue for libel! In 1820 another whale succeeded in sinking a whaling ship leaving the crew stranded in lifeboats for four months. By the time they were rescued, most of them had died and they’d had to start eating each other.
3. Just three months before the novel was published, a ship called the Ann Alexander was sunk by a whale. While the story would have been written by then, the coincidence wasn’t lost on Melville, who wrote in a letter at the time: “I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod … I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”
4. There is, as well, at least one human character based on someone real. Captain D’Wolf, who first appears in chapter 45, and said to be the narrator’s uncle, is based on Melville’s uncle, one Captain John D’Wolf II, who used to regale the young Herman with tall tales about his adventures, claiming that he’d sailed to Russia and crossed Siberia on a dogsled.
5. Some time later, a fan of the book, called Gordon Bowker, who was setting up a Coffee house business, almost called the company after Ahab’s ship, Pequod. Until his business partner, Terry Heckler, commented, “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod.” So they named it after the first mate instead – Mr. Starbuck. Starbuck also gave his name to a character in the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Both Moby Dick and Battlestar Galactica also have characters called Boomer, although I could find no mention that the name Boomer was lifted from Moby Dick, but it’s possible.
6. Another influence on Melville was fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived just six miles away. Melville was a big fan of Hawthorne, even comparing him to Shakespeare (the Bard being another massive influence on Melville’s writing). The two writers met in 1850, and presumably Melville showed Hawthorne his work in progress, for after the meeting, he re-wrote the whole thing, and dedicated the final novel to Hawthorne. Hawthorne returned the favour by giving Melville’s books very positive reviews.
7. Moby Dick wasn’t a best seller during Melville’s lifetime. Only 3,715 copies were sold. Not as many as another of his novels called Typee, which sold three times that. Melville gave up on writing for a living and got a job as a customs inspector. It was only after he died and his obituary mentioned that he was the author of a book called Moby Dick that people became interested. Not that it was easy to find any of his novels – they’d all been out of print for almost 20 years. When an author called Carl Van Doren found a copy at a second hand book shop, over 25 years later, he raved about it, calling it “one of the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world” and it took off from there.
8. A prehistoric sperm whale which had huge teeth (up to 36cm long) was named Livyatan melvillei by palaeontologists, in honour of the author.
9. The British edition was heavily censored. The Victorian editors removed, for example, any suggestion that God wasn’t perfect, criticisms of the British and their royal family, and, surprise surprise, all descriptions of the sex life of whales. They also removed the epilogue, for no apparent reason, in which the story of how Ishmael survived is told. It’s possible the publishers simply lost it.
10. The novel has been made into several films, TV and radio shows with John Barrymore, Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart taking on the role of Ahab. Stewart would go on to reference the novel in another of his famous roles, that of Star Trek’s Captain Picard, who quotes it as he sets out for revenge against The Borg: "And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it."

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book