Monday, 16 June 2025

27 June: Catherine Cookson

Author Catherine Cookson was born on this date in 1906. Here are facts you might not know about her.

  1. Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, South Shields and registered as Catherine Ann Davies. Her mother, Kate, was unmarried, a great source of shame in those days. Catherine was brought up by her Grandmother Rose and Step-Grandfather John McMullen, and believed for many years that her mother was her sister.

  2. She left school at 14 and went into domestic service, then got a job in a laundry at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. Her next job was actually running a laundry at Hastings Workhouse.

  3. She scrimped and saved in order to buy a large Victorian house and took in lodgers to supplement her income.

  4. One of her lodgers was a teacher called Tom Cookson. In 1940, when she was 34, she married him.

  5. She suffered several miscarriages due to a rare vascular disease, which resulted in severe depression. Her doctor advised her to take up writing to combat her depression. She helped found a writers group in Hastings and published her first book, Kate Hannigan, when she was 42.

  6. Despite a relatively late start, she became one of the most prolific British novelists with 104 novels to her name. She also wrote books as Catherine Marchant and Katie McMullen. She was the most borrowed writer from British libraries for 17 years, until she was overtaken by Jacqueline Wilson in 2002.

  7. She would research her books thoroughly. She once went down a mine, because she was writing a book in which the heroine came from a mining area.

  8. She was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1985 Queen's Birthday Honours List and the DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1993 Queen's New Year Honours List for her services to literature.

  9. The first film adaptation of her work was Jacqueline in 1956, based on her book A Grand Man. It was followed by Rooney in 1958. Eighteen books were adapted for television between 1989 and 2001.

  10. She died sixteen days before her 92nd birthday, having been bedridden for several years, although she continued to write in her sickbed. Her husband Tom died just 17 days later.




Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

26 June: Laurie Lee Quotes

This date in 1914 was the birthdate of Laurie Lee. He was an English writer, best known for his autobiographical trilogy Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War.

  1. At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.

  2. All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

  3. For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

  4. I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city – that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.

  5. I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.

  6. Spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory.

  7. We were as merciless and cruel as most primitives are. But we learnt at that school the private nature of cruelty; and our inborn hatred for freaks and outcasts was tempered by meeting them daily.

  8. History and progress has changed the emphasis of our lives, and it is too late to complain.

  9. Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed.

  10. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been.


Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

25 June: 176

On the 176th day of the year, 10 fun facts about the number 176.

  1. 176 is a cake number. A cake number is to do with the number of pieces a cube can be divided into by exactly n planes. The cake number is so called because you could imagine each partition of the cube as a slice made by a knife through a cube-shaped cake.

  2. The A176 is a road in Essex running between Vange, near Basildon and Billericay.

  3. The Heinkel He 176 was a German experimental rocket-powered aircraft. It was the world's first aircraft to be propelled solely by a liquid-fuelled rocket, making its first powered flight on 20 June 1939 with Erich Warsitz at the controls.

  4. London bus route 176 runs from Penge Pawleyne Arms to Tottenham Court Rd Station/Great Russell Street.

  5. The area code "176" is used for mobile phone numbers in Germany.

  6. Pallati 176 is a 1986 Albanian film about the Albanian National Theatre.

  7. The Year 176 was a leap year starting on a Sunday. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Proculus and Aper. During this year, the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius was made, and Faustina the Younger, Roman empress, died.

  8. 176 Iduna is a large Asteroid discovered by German-American astronomer Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters in 1877, in Clinton, New York. It is named after Sällskapet Idun, a club in Stockholm that hosted an astronomical conference; Idun is also a Norse goddess.

  9. The Roman numeral for 176 is CLXXVI, in Binary it’s 10110000.

  10. In numerology 176 resonates with expression of a personal sense of freedom. People with number 176 energy are extroverts, expressing themselves freely and taking delight in a sense of independence. They tend to be curious and intuitive. They are apt to be witty. With all of that, there is a nurturing aspect to their personality.


Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

24 June: Sir Fred Hoyle

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle was born on this date in 1915. 10 things you might not know about him:

  1. He was born in Bingley in Yorkshire.

  2. His father was a violinist who also worked in the wool trade and had been a machine gunner in the First World War. His mother studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and worked as a cinema pianist.

  3. During WWII, Hoyle worked with the British Admiralty on radar development. After the war he was a lecturer in maths at Cambridge University.

  4. He’s best known as the foremost proponent of the steady-state theory of the universe. This theory holds that the universe is expanding and matter is being continuously created to keep the mean density of matter in space constant.

  5. This is a rival theory to the Big Bang Theory, a term coined by Hoyle on his BBC radio show. Hoyle didn’t agree with this theory of the origins of the universe and Big Bang Theory was actually used as a derision of it. However, proponents of this theory had senses of humour and rather liked the name, and carried on using it.

  6. He had some ideas many would consider wacky today. He claimed that the 1918 flu pandemic, and certain outbreaks of polio and mad cow disease were caused by viruses being brought to Earth in cometary dust, which scientists of the day dismissed. One wonders if, he’d still been alive in 2020, if he would have taken to Twitter to tell us that covid 19 came from outer space!

  7. As a child, he sang in a church choir, but as an adult declared himself an atheist. Even so, he didn’t believe the universe came about by chance. He’s the one who came up with the comparison of pure chance creating the universe as being as likely as "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein". Only rather than God, he believed a superintelligence had “monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology”.

  8. He wrote a number of books. Some, predictably, about science, but he also wrote fiction including A for Andromeda and The Black Cloud, which may have been inspired by his time working for the radar project during the war. He also wrote an autobiography called The Small World of Fred Hoyle.

  9. After he retired, he moved to the Lake District and enjoyed writing, travel and treks across the moors. The latter proved to be his undoing. When out hiking in Yorkshire in November 1997, he fell down a ravine and broke his shoulder. He was there for 12 hours before a rescue dog found him. His health declined rapidly after that and he died of a stroke in 2001, aged 86.

  10. As well as university buildings and institutes, Hoyle has named for him an Asteroid (8077 Hoyle), a stretch of the A650 dual carriageway in Bingley (Sir Fred Hoyle Way), and a species of Bacteria (Janibacter hoylei).



Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

23 June: Alan Turing

Born on this date in 1912 was Alan Turing, famous WW2 code breaker and computer pioneer. 10 things you might not know about him:

  1. He was born in Maida Vale in London. Although his father worked for the Civil Service in India, his mother wanted her children to grow up in England. They still travelled to India but left Alan and his brother with a retired army couple in St Leonards on Sea while they were away. They also had a house in Guildford where Alan lived during school holidays.

  2. While his junior school headmistress recognised his talent, saying that she "...had clever boys and hard-working boys, but Alan is a genius," his secondary school teachers weren’t so sure. His English teacher wrote: “I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his unswerving inexactitude and slipshod, dirty, work, inconsistent though such inexactitude is in a utilitarian; but I cannot forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament.” Fact was, science and maths weren’t seen as so important in those days. Classics was the subject kids were expected to do well at. That said, Turing’s science and maths grades weren’t so great either. He was nearly stopped from taking the national School Certificate exams on the subject, for fear he would fail.

  3. Nevertheless, science was where his interest lay. There’s a drawing of him as a child, apparently watching daisies grow while the other kids played hockey. He eventually won a scholarship to Cambridge and graduated with a first class honour degree in mathematics.

  4. While he may have preferred observing Flowers to playing hockey, that didn’t mean he didn’t keep himself fit. He was a keen cyclist and runner. When a train strike meant he couldn’t travel by train to his first day at boarding school, he cycled there, 60 miles, all by himself with an overnight stay at an inn, at the age of 13. He’d also run to work and to meetings, sometimes distances of over 30 miles. He even tried out for the Olympic Games in 1948, finishing a marathon in 2 hours 46 minutes 3 seconds, which was only 11 minutes slower than the person who won the gold medal that year. The only reason he wasn’t an Olympic athlete was because he suffered a leg injury which stopped him from taking part. He ran for the Walton Athletic Club and served as its vice president.

  5. Turing began working at Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret headquarters for its codebreakers during World War II, in 1939. It has been said that his work there may have cut the war short by up to two years. He’s credited with saving millions of lives. Even so, at first, he was so frustrated by the lack of resources and staff there that he got together with some others and wrote a personal letter to Winston Churchill, making the case for better funding. In response, Churchill immediately wrote a memo to his chief of staff: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done.” Turing’s greatest achievement at Bletchley was cracking the Enigma, a mechanical device used by the Germans to encode messages. It was nearly impossible to decrypt without the correct cipher, which the Germans changed every day. Turing and his team managed to decode the German Enigma messages, helping Allied ships avoid German Submarine attacks.

  6. It’s well known that Turing was gay, at a time when being gay was a crime in the UK. His first love was probably a fellow pupil at school called Christopher Collan Morcom, who died in February 1930, from complications of bovine tuberculosis, contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously. Turing coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom, as a tribute to him. Nevertheless, Turing was briefly engaged to be married to a woman, Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst at Bletchley, in 1941. She wasn’t at all bothered when he told her he was gay. It was Turing who ended it, as he didn’t think he could go through with the marriage. He was arrested for being gay in 1951 and was given the choice of jail time or chemical castration. He chose the latter. His conviction cost him his job (in 1951, it seems, being gay meant you couldn’t keep secrets and were a security risk) and his freedom to travel to other countries. In 2009, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology to Turing on behalf of the British government. “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly,” Brown said. “on behalf of the British government, we're sorry, you deserved so much better." His conviction was actually pardoned in 2013, when he received a rare royal pardon from the Queen Elizabeth II. Today, he appears on the £50 note, released on 23 June 2021 to coincide with his birthday. He is the first openly gay person to appear on a banknote.

  7. Turing is known as a pioneer in computer science. Even before Bletchley, he’d published a paper called On Computable Numbers, in 1936. In it, he predicted that one day there would be machines able to solve any problem just using 1s and 0s. Later on, in 1945 he invented the Automatic Computing Machine, the first digital computer with stored memory. This wasn’t his only interest. He was also a pioneer in biology. In 1952 he published work on morphogenesis, which became a completely new field of mathematical biology. It was a mathematical explanation of how things grow. His work on the subject has been cited more than 8,000 times. And the plants he studied to come up with all this? Daisies.

  8. The people he worked with saw him as a bit of an eccentric. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book". He would chain his mug to a radiator to stop his colleagues using it. He’d wear a gas mask when cycling to keep his allergies under control. He never fixed his Bicycle chain, but rather learned to predict when it was going to fall off so he could stop riding and put it back on. In the 1940s, he feared that, in the event of a German invasion, he would lose his life savings. So, he bought two Silver bars worth £250 (£8,000 adjusted for inflation in 2022) and buried them in a wood near Bletchley Park. He wrote a code describing where he had hidden them. However, when he went back to dig the bars up, he couldn’t break his own code and never found his silver bars.

  9. There are a lot of things named after him. There’s the Turing Test, to assess the ability of a computer to imitate a human. We have him to thank for those irritating hoops we have to jump through online to prove we’re not robots: CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. There’s Turing’s Law, which provided amnesty for gay men convicted of indecency. There are numerous university buildings and academic lectures and prizes. There’s Turochamp, a computer Chess progamme that he devised. There’s a Monopoly edition based on his life.

  10. His death at the age of 41 is still a mystery. He was found dead in bed by his maid with a half eaten Apple on the bedside table. The cause of death was cyanide poisoning and the official story was that he injected the apple with the deadly poison and then ate it. Or did he? The evidence that he purposely ended his life by eating a poisoned apple: he’d been convicted of being gay and had lost his job; the medication he was made to take made him impotent and made him grow breasts; he was no longer allowed to travel; he’d been observed to be fascinated by the scene in Snow White when the Wicked Queen poisons an apple to give to Snow White; he’d been plunged into a deep depression by a fortune teller’s prediction (believe it or not, he actually believed in fortune telling, and a few weeks before he died, he’d visited one during a seaside day out. People with him noticed that his sunny mood vanished after he came out of the fortune teller’s tent). On the other hand: Nobody actually thought to test the apple for cyanide; he had shown no signs of putting his affairs in order and there was a to do list by his bed; friends had observed that he seemed to be taking the effects of his medication “in good humour”; even if the apple had been laced with cyanide, it could have been a tragic accident. His mother believed he’d eaten the poisoned apple by accident while experimenting with chemicals at home. Turing was known for being somewhat lax about lab safety and for testing chemicals by tasting them. Others theorised that he was murdered by the FBI because he was party to some secret information that would damage the US. Yet another theory was that Turing did commit suicide and the to do list was a bluff to spare his mother the pain of knowing he’d taken his own life. Finally, it’s sometimes said that the Apple logo, an apple with a bite out of it, is a tribute to the way Alan Turing died. Apple denies that there is any truth in this, and when asked about it, Steve Jobs replied that it wasn’t true, but he wished it was.


Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

22 June: Captain America

On this date in 1943 (according to the 2016 TV show Dates in Movie & TV History with Brandon Hardesty) Super Soldier Serum is injected into Steve Rogers, turning him into Captain America. 10 things you might not know about Captain America.

  1. Steve Rogers was born on July 4, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York. He was orphaned at the age of 18 when his mother died of TB, his father having been killed during the first world war, so presumably Steve never knew him at all. Steve was only 5-foot-4-inch (1.63 m) tall, weighed only 90 pounds (41 kg) and had a number of medical conditions including asthma, scoliosis, heart arrhythmia, partial deafness, stomach ulcers, and pernicious anaemia. He studied fine art and illustration, and his day job was writing and drawing comic books. Living the fantasy of any number of comic book artists and writers, perhaps, to be turned into a real life superhero!

  2. When the second world war broke out, Steve tried to enlist, and needless to say was turned down because of his small physique and medical issues. In 1942 he tried again, and this time, he came to the attention of Dr. Abraham Erskine, who is working on a super soldier experiment with U.S. Army Colonel Chester Phillips, and British MI6 agent Peggy Carter. Even when he learned that Nazi officer Johann Schmidt, head of the science division called Hydra, underwent an imperfect version of the procedure and suffered permanent side-effects, Rogers agreed to be injected with the serum and doused with vita-rays. After the treatment, he is over 6 feet tall and pretty buff. In the film, Chris Evans is shrunk by digital technology for the scenes before he’s injected.

  3. Chris Evans was the first choice to play Captain America. In fact, the movie makers were so keen to have him that he didn’t even have to audition before being offered the role, which, incidentally, he turned down three times. This wasn’t because he didn’t like the role, but rather because he was concerned about the effect the fame it would bring would have on his private life, and the potential long term commitment. Robert Downey Jr. eventually convinced him to take the part. Had RDJ failed, Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Chace Crawford, John Krasinski and Sebastian Stan were potentially in the running. The latter was was chosen to play Bucky Barnes.

  4. Captain America was first created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, fighting in World War II, before being frozen and waking up in the modern day. This meant the Cap was the first superhero to exist in the Marvel timeline, although he wasn’t the first to be created. The first comic book story penned by the great Stan Lee was a Captain America story, when Lee was 19 years old. It was called Traitor’s Revenge, and appeared in Captain America Comics #3.

  5. In the comics, Captain America’s shield is made from Vibranium (which absorbs vibrations) and Adamantium (making it indestructible). In the films, however, they couldn’t include adamantium because that was what Wolverine’s skeleton is made from and the makers of The X-Men films owned the rights to the fictional metal. So in the Marvel films, Captain America’s shield is pure vibranium. Black Panther’s suit, the Vision, Sam Wilson's Captain America suit and the Winter Soldier's cybernetic arm are all made from the same stuff, which came from a meteorite which fell to Earth and is regarded as the strongest metal in the world, stronger than steel and a third of the weight.

  6. Having been injected with experimental serum once, it’s not difficult to imagine that he might be up for it again. In a comic book tale called Queen of the Werewolves, he gets injected with a serum that turns him into a werewolf (temporarily, one assumes) and in this state, wins a fight with Wolverine in one of his berserker rages.

  7. Captain America can wield Thor's Hammer. When Thor is separated from his hammer, Captain America’s pure heart and his reason for wanting to wield the hammer (to defeat the bad guys and get the hammer back to its rightful owner) mean he is able to lift it and use it.

  8. Marvel planned to kill Captain America off in the 1960s in a storyline in which he grew tired of being a hero and even teams up with Dr. Doom. The world then turns against him and he gets killed. Clearly, they shelved that story. Instead, they went with him being frozen and waking up in the present day. In the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he has a written list of things to check out in modern times. This list differs depending on which country the film is being shown in. The US list includes includes I Love LucySteve Jobs, and disco, in France it includes the 1998 World Cup, The Fifth Element, and Daft Punk, and in the UK The Beatles, 1966 world cup final, Sean Connery, and Nirvana the band. When Captain America is missing and presumed dead, other heroes take on the role. These include Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson (formerly The Falcon).

  9. He wasn’t a founding member of The Avengers. Iron Man, Ant-Man, Thor, Hulk and The Wasp were the original line up. Captain America came along later and became the leader and voice of reason.

  10. There have been times when Captain America has lost faith in the American government. In the 1970s, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a similar scenario happened in the Marvel Universe, and Captain America temporarily took on a new costume and a new name: The Nomad. In the late 90's he lost faith again and was simply known as the Captain for a time. I wonder what name he will go under in 2025 as I can’t imagine that anyone worthy of wielding Thor’s hammer would support the big orange baby and his minions!


Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback

21 June: Trans-Siberian Railway

On this date in 1904, the Trans-Siberian Railway opened. 10 facts about it:

  1. It’s the longest passenger train journey in the world at 9,288 km, or 5772 miles, travelling from from Moscow to Vladivostok. This crosses eight time zones, 497 bridges and 16 major rivers. It goes through 15 tunnels, 87 major cities, 3 countries and 2 continents. That said, the longest train journey in the world is a freight route, the 13,000-kilometer-long Yiwu–Madrid freight train.

  2. On a high-speed train, a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway takes seven days, or eight days at regular speed without disembarking. Tourists tend to get off and spend a day or two at some of the locations.

  3. There are over 850 stations along the line, most of which are small and only used by the locals. The largest station on the line is Novosibirsk. Another stop is Slyudyanka, which has the distinction of being the only railway station in the world to be constructed entirely from marble.

  4. The railway took 25 years to build using some 100,000 workers, mostly prisoners exiled for their dissidence against the Tsar, using hand tools, even to dig the tunnels through solid rock. Conditions were harsh, especially considering that temperatures along parts of the route can fall to -62 degrees in winter.

  5. During the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922 the Bolsheviks used the railway for propaganda purposes. Special propaganda trains, known as agitpoezdy, emblazoned with slogans and flags, were sent along the route to deliver the revolutionary message to the people.

  6. Needless to say, it’s run by the Russian government via the state-owned company Russian Railways.

  7. It’s so big and important to the Russian economy that it has its own army. The Railway Troops were established in 1851, making it it the oldest force of its kind. As with any armed force, the primary responsibility of the Railway Troops is defending the nation, which they do by building, maintaining and protecting the railway.

  8. European and Chinese trains can’t use it because the track gauge (1,520 mm) is different. Most of the world’s railways (55%) use 1,435 mm. 1,520 mm is the second most used at 15% but this is largely because Russia is such a large country and has a lot of railways.

  9. The Trans-Siberian travels along the world’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal, for 207 kilometres. In the early years passengers and cargo crossed Baikal on ferries in the summertime and train tracks were laid across the lake’s ice during winter. The highest point is at Yablonovy pass at an altitude of 1070m situated in the Yablonoi Mountains, in Transbaikal, Siberia.

  10. It’s likely any number of babies have been born on this thing. I didn’t find any numbers on this but one baby born on this train was the dancer Rudolf Nureyev when his mother, Farida, was travelling to see his father in Vladivostok.




Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


Paperback