3 July: 184

Today is day 184 of 2026 (and, indeed, any other non-leap year) so here are 10 fun facts about the number 184.

1. There are 184 paths by which a Chess rook can travel from one corner of a 4 × 4 chessboard to the opposite corner without passing through the same square twice.

2. 184 Dejopeja is a large asteroid discovered by Johann Palisa in 1878, and named after Deiopea, a Roman nymph.

3. In March 2026 the results of a study by Exeter’s Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour was published. The researchers studied 184 bull sharks in Fiji and discovered that sharks might make friends.

4. The A184 is a road in England connecting Sunderland and Gateshead.

5. The Group of 184 was a group of 184 Haitian individuals and organisations in various sectors, from business to media and education, that opposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party. The name is frequently shortened to G184.

6. London bus 184 runs from Turnpike Lane Bus Station to Chesterfield Road, Barnet.

7. Running the 184 is a 2016 documentary film directed by Greg Lassik, following a man aiming to run across the entire state of New Jersey. The film includes interviews and training sessions, and the 184 mile run itself.

8. The Short Admiralty Type 184, often called the Short 225 after the power rating of the engine first fitted, was a British two-seat reconnaissance, bombing and torpedo carrying folding-wing seaplane designed by Horace Short of Short Brothers.

9. Some physicists have proposed that 184 is a magic number for neutrons in atomic nuclei.

10. In numerology, the person who lives with number 184 energy is likely to be focused on ways and means to enhance their standing in the community and their financial resources, for the present and for the future. They are independent, methodical and comfortable dealing with large amounts of data. 184 has a good sense of what's right, is loyal, honest, conscientious and sincere.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

2 July: Blithe Spirit

On this date in 1941, 85 years ago, Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit premièred in London. Ten facts about the play.

1. The title is taken from Shelley's poem To a Skylark, ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert").

2. What’s it about? A novelist called Charles Condomine holds a séance at his house in order to gather material for his next book. The clairvoyant medium is called Madame Arcati. The séance has the unfortunate side effect of summoning the ghost of Condomine’s deceased first wife, Elvira, who continues to haunt him afterwards and tries to disrupt his second marriage to Ruth. Charles can see and hear the ghost; Ruth cannot. Elvira’s plot to get Charles to join her in the spirit world by sabotaging his car backfires when Ruth uses the car and is killed instead. Her spirit returns to get revenge on Elvira. Charles can’t see Ruth, but can tell something is tormenting Elvira. He calls Madame Arcati back to exorcise both the spirits, but instead she unintentionally materialises Ruth. It turns out, one of the housemaids is psychic and has been the conduit for the ghosts. With that knowledge, Madame Arcati manages to make the ghosts vanish, but warns that just because Charles can’t see them doesn’t mean they are not still there potentially causing havoc and that he should move as far away as possible. He takes her advice and after he leaves the ghosts trash the house.

3. Coward had been toying with the idea of a play about ghosts for some time. His original idea was not unlike the concept of the BBC TV series Ghosts: an old house haunted by spirits from different periods in history, only set in Paris, with humour arising from their different attitudes to things. However, he could never quite figure out an exact plot.

4. The breakthrough came after Coward’s flat was bombed during The Blitz and he took a holiday in Wales, Portmeirion on the coast of Snowdonia, to be exact. His companion for the trip was Joyce Carey, an actress who was writing a play about John Keats. Sitting on the beach one morning, Coward ended up bouncing ideas off of Carey and later wrote that by lunchtime he had a basic plot, the title and the names of the main characters. The next morning, Coward sat down at a Typewriter and started writing.

5. The script changed little from that first draft, although he did tone down some of Madame Arcati’s humorous lines as he decided she should be a person who took herself rather seriously.

6. He had to change the name of one person referred to in the séance. The late “old Mrs Leggatt” had to change because of a tragic event in real life. Lord Monkton’s secretary Shelagh Leggatt was killed in a plane crash around that time and it made the news. The script was immediately changed to say ‘Mrs Plummet’, which, you could argue, wasn’t much better!

7. The reception from critics was positive. The Manchester Guardian thought it "not untouched by genius of a sort”, and The Times said it compared favourably, not only with Coward’s previous plays but also with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

8. This was in spite of initial reservations that writing a comedy about death in the middle of a world war was a bit of a risk. The risk paid off, though, and showed Coward’s sheer talent as he was able to pull it off. Blithe Spirit ran for 1,997 performances, a new record for a non-musical play in London.

9. Charles Condomine was played by Coward himself at some points during the play’s tour and also by John Gielgud. The role of Madam Arcati has been taken on by some big names, too. Actors who have played her include Margaret Rutherford (in the original 1941 production), Beryl Reid, Dora Bryan, Penelope Keith, Alison Steadman, Hattie Jacques, Angela Lansbury and Jennifer Saunders. Twiggy also played Elvira in one production.

10. Blithe Spirit has been turned into a musical, High Spirits, and has been adapted for film twice, in 1945 and 2020. It has also been adapted for TV and radio.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

1 July: Estee Lauder

Cosmetics businesswoman Estée Lauder was born on this date in 1908. Here are some thing you might not know about her.

1. She was born in Queens, New York and her parents gave her the name Josephine Esther Mentzer. Esther was to be her first name, after a much loved great aunt, but her parents decided at the last minute to name her Josephine with Esther as her middle name. It didn’t stick; she was soon nicknamed Esty and ‘Estée’ was a variation of that.

2. Her father had a hardware store and the young Estée would often help out there. It was here she developed a taste and aptitude for business. Although she did harbour a dream of becoming an actress, with her "name in lights, Flowers and handsome men".

3. Fashion and beauty were early interests, and when an uncle from Hungary came to stay, who happened to be a skin specialist, she started helping him out, and learned from him.

4. In her early twenties, she met and married Joseph Lauter, who later changed his name to Lauder. They were married for nine years before Estée decided she’d married too young and wanted to experience all the aspects of life she had missed, and so they divorced. She soon realised she’d made a mistake and had given up the "sweetest husband in the world". They remarried three years after the divorce and stayed together until Joseph died in 1983.

5. In 1946, Estée and Joseph Lauder founded ‘Estée Lauder cosmetics. Initially, they sold just four products. Estée strongly believed that the ideal beauty routine didn’t need to be complicated and involve more than a few key products. She believed 3 minutes morning and evening were enough to spend on beauty routines. “Never sell a customer what she doesn’t want or need,” she wrote. Hence their early range was limited, including Skin treatments, a rouge, and a makeup base. She would go to beauty salons and demonstrate her products to women as they sat under the hairdryer.

6. There’s a story, which may or may not be true, that on one occasion Estée went to sell a perfume to a Department store, but they turned it down. She went out into the shop and smashed a bottle of that perfume on the floor. When customers started asking what that fragrance was, the store had to change their minds and place an order.

7. In 1953, women generally didn’t buy perfume for themselves but rather had to wait for their husbands to buy it for them as a gift. Estée had the idea of combining a perfume with a bath oil, which women would buy for themselves. Hence they could also get as much perfume as they wanted whenever they liked.

8. Her company’s innovations included the first night serum, as she understood that skin repairs itself mostly at night and the texture of a serum was the best to penetrate the skin and aid the process. She invented the “Gift with Purchase” concept, now a standard industry practice. She was also the first to produce a high-end fragrance for men, Aramis, in 1963.

9. It was important to Estée to know her employees personally, even when the company grew into a large corporation. She made sure to meet all prospective employees in person. “I don’t look at their resumes…I look at them,” she said. “My decision is based on chemical reaction."

10. She was the first woman to receive the Chevalier class of the Legion of Honour from the Consul General of France in 1978; and was the only woman on Time Magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

30 June: Strontium

On 30 June 1808 Davy reported to the Royal Society that he had successfully isolated strontium metal for the first time. 10 facts about this element.

1. The chemical symbol for strontium is Sr and its atomic number is 38.

2. It’s a soft silver-white yellowish metallic element which is highly chemically reactive. It is softer than Calcium and harder than Barium.

3. Its melting point is 777 °C and its boiling point is 1377 °C.

4. It was first discovered in 1790 by Adair Crawford and William Cruickshank, who were scientists working on the production of barium, and noticed that an ore found in Lead mines was similar, but also had different properties. Crawford therefore concluded it must be “a new species of earth which has not hitherto been sufficiently examined."

5. The new element was named for Strontian, a village in Scotland close to the lead mines where it was first discovered.

6. Strontium is the 15th most abundant element on Earth.

7. In the 19^th century, its main use was to extract Sugar from sugar beets, using a now obsolete method called the strontian process. In the 20^th century, it was used in the manufacture of cathode ray tubes for Televisions, which has now declined in favour of other display methods. Today, alloys of it have various uses: Strontium aluminate is used in glow in the dark toys; strontium carbonate and other strontium salts are added to Fireworks to give a deep red colour; strontium chloride is sometimes used in Toothpastes for sensitive teeth.

8. Due to its similarities to calcium, the human body can absorb it in a similar way so it can be found in bone. Naturally occurring isotopes are not hazardous to heath at low levels.

9. The same is not true of strontium-90, which is synthetic and highly radioactive, one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, because the body takes it in like calcium.

10. Strontium Dog is a British comics series starring a character called Johnny Alpha, a mutant bounty hunter in Earth's future, after a nuclear war. The series was created in 1978 by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra for Starlord, a short-lived weekly science fiction comic. When Starlord was cancelled, the series transferred to the British science fiction weekly 2000 AD.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

29 June: Photographs

As today is National Camera Day, here are ten facts about photographs.

1. The oldest surviving photograph was taken by Joseph Niepce about 200 years ago and was titled ‘view from the Window’. The view was of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and is of a castle and some other buildings. It took 8 hours to record this image.

2. The first photograph of a person was taken in 1828 by Louis Daguerre, entirely by accident. What Daguerre intended to do was take a picture of a street in Paris, but it just so happened that there was a man getting his Shoes polished in the street at the time and so he, and presumably the person shining his shoes, became the first humans to be photographed.

3. A study conducted by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schrillo from Wake Forest University concluded that our "best side" in a photo is the left side of the face, which tends to show more intense emotion and so is seen as more attractive.

4. The first colour photograph was taken by Tomas Sutton in 1861. He used Red, Green and Blue filters which he layered and then projected onto a plate. It was a picture of a multicoloured ribbon.

5. Photos of Cats are nothing new. A man called Harry Pointer dressed his cat up in a little suit and hat and took a picture of it in the 1870s.

6. The most expensive photograph ever is Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres, a picture of a woman with musical symbols on her bare back. It sold in 2022 for $12,400,000. The photo is over 100 years old.

7. There’s no statistic for how many photographs are taken in the world ever day, but it’s estimated that more than a trillion are taken every year.

8. The photograph which has been seen by the most people is the default wallpaper for Windows XP. It’s the one of fields and a blue Sky with fluffy clouds. It has a name: it’s called Bliss and it was taken by Charles O’Rear in 1996. However, he took it for a stock website and so it didn’t make him rich.

9. Looking at old photographs, it would seem that the Victorians didn’t smile much. The reason they’re not smiling is because they had to pose for as much as several hours, and it was just to much effort to smile for that long.

10. Another reason might be that the person in the photo was dead. It was a common practice in the 19^th century to take photos of recently deceased family members posed as if they were alive as a keepsake to remember them by.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

28 June: Earrings

Today is International Body Piercing Day, so here are some facts about the most common jewellery worn in piercings: earrings.

1. The wearing of earrings goes back a long way. Earrings made of Gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian were found in ancient sites in Lothal, India, and in a Sumerian Royal Cemetery at Ur from the Early Dynastic period. Gold, Silver and bronze hoop earrings were worn in the Minoan Civilization (2000–1600 BCE).

2. They were often primarily worn by men rather than women. Friezes from the Persian Empire during the Achaemenid dynasty (550–330 BC), show warriors wearing earrings. Otzi the Iceman had pierced Ears and so did Tutenkhamen.

3. Fashions changed over the ages. In the middle ages, women wore headdresses which covered the ears, so earrings went right out of fashion. By the 16^th century, earrings were back with Pearl earrings being especially popular. They were worn by men during this era, too. Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake all wore gold earrings. The Victorians considered piercings vulgar and inappropriate, so they went out of fashion again in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Earlobe stretching, common in indigenous cultures for thousands of years, began to appear in Western society in the 1990s.

4. Some ancient peoples believed that evil spirits could get into a person’s body through its orifices, so some early earrings would have been amulets to keep demons out of a person’s ears.

5. Ancient doctors believed that earrings cured headaches and improved eyesight.

6. Sailors wore them almost like badges or medals. A sailor who’d crossed the equator, sailed all around the world, or survived a shipwreck would be entitled to an ear piercing. They’d often choose gold earrings as a kind of funeral plan – they could be used to pay for their burial when they died.

7. In India, babies often have their ears pierced soon after birth. In the West, cheap ear piercings have been offered by jewellery stores aimed at young women. In Ancient Egypt, they were possibly only worn by children, which was evidenced by the fact that Tutankhamun’s mummy wasn’t wearing any despite having pierced ears, although there were some buried in the tomb. The burial mask's ears were perforated, but the holes were covered with golden discs.

8. The term "ear piercing" usually refers to an earlobe piercing. Piercings elsewhere on the ear are often referred to as "cartilage piercings". These take longer to heal than the earlobe variety.

9. 13 April is National Silly Earring Day.

10. Finally, some earring related world records. The record for the largest collection of earrings is held by American Carol McFadden who started collecting them in 1952 and in 2006 had 37,706 different pairs. In 2020, Ramkumar Sarangapani of Dubai created the largest pair, which measure 200 cm (78.74 in) in height and were designed as a replica of the Dubai Frame. GRT Jewellers in India created the heaviest earrings ever, to mark their 60th anniversary. They weighed in at 3.527 kg (7 lbs 12 oz) and are made of 22K gold. They don’t hold the record for the most expensive pair of earrings, though. That award goes to the Apollo and Artemis Diamonds, which sold for over $57 million.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

27 June: Ganymede

On this date in 1996 Galileo, NASA’s Jupiter probe, passed within 524 miles of its moon Ganymede. 10 things you might not know about Ganymede.

1. It was named after a beautiful boy in Greek mythology who was carried off by Zeus disguised as an eagle. He became the cup bearer to the gods. Zeus, of course, is the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter.

2. Ganymede was discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei on Jan. 7, 1610, along with three other large moons. This was the first time any planet other than Earth was found to have a moon.

3. The diameter of Ganymede is 3,270 miles (5,260 kilometres), which means it is the biggest moon in the solar system and is actually bigger than Mercury and Pluto.

4. It is 665,000 miles (1,070,000 kilometres) from Jupiter and takes about a week to orbit the planet. It’s tidally locked with Jupiter, so the same side always faces the planet; and it’s in what’s called an orbital resonance with Io and Europa. Every time Ganymede orbits Jupiter once, Europa orbits twice, and Io orbits four times. It’s this which has caused these moons to maintain eccentric orbits.

5. Ganymede is the only moon known to have its own magnetic field.

6. There may be more water on Ganymede than on Earth. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence that there could be a massive underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede which is ten times deeper than the oceans on Earth. This ocean is covered by a 95-mile (150-kilometer) crust of ice. Since scientists believe it was the interaction of salt water and rock which first caused the appearance of life, and there’s also a small amount of Oxygen in the atmosphere.

7. Daytime surface temperatures on Ganymede range from -297 to -171 degrees Fahrenheit (90 to 160 Kelvin). It takes sunlight 43 minutes to reach it.

8. Surface features on Ganymede are named after Near Eastern, Middle Eastern and Egyptian deities.

9. It has inspired a number of science fiction writers and has appeared in books and TV shows including The Expanse and Red Dwarf. Arthur C Clarke was inspired by images from Voyager 2 of grooved ridges cutting across parts of Ganymede, and created Ganymede City for his novel 3001: The Final Odyssey. Robert A Heinlein used Ganymede as a setting, too, in Farmer in the Sky.

10. There is a spacecraft from Earth on its way to Ganymede as I write. It’s called The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), and it was launched on 14 April 2023. It’s expected to enter orbit around Ganymede in 2032, and crash land on the moon in 2034.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/