May 3rd: Machiavelli

Born on this date in 1469 was Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. Here are a few of the things he said:

1. The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
2. Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.
3. He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.
4. The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
5. The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
6. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
7. Never was anything great achieved without danger.
8. Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.
9. it is better to act and repent than not to act and regret.
10. It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.

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2nd May: National Truffles Day

Today is National Truffles Day. Here's the lowdown on this expensive delicacy.

1. A truffle is the fruit of a tuber like fungus which grows around certain trees in a symbiotic relationship in which the tree gets phosphorous and the truffle gets sugar. They like Beech, Birch, hazel, hornbeam, Oak, pine, and poplar. By some peculiarity of biology, however, a truffle is more closely related to a Carrot than a Mushroom.
2. In ancient times, nobody really knew what they were, hence people believed they were caused by thunderstorms and Lightning strikes.
3. They are rare and it took a long time to work out how to cultivate them. A Frenchman called Pierre II Mauléon (1744–1831) was a pioneer of trufficulture. He worked out that they were often found near oak trees in rocky, chalky soil. He planted acorns from the truffle producing trees in the right kind of soil, and sure enough, a few years later he was growing truffles. His success at this got him a prize at the 1855 World's Fair in Paris.
4. France is still the largest producer of truffles, harvesting up to 30 tonnes a year. However, production has fallen since the end of the 19th century when production was over 1,000 tonnes. The largest truffle market in the world is in Richerenches, a small village in France.
5. So truffles are rare. Rare enough that there is a thriving black market where dealers resort to kidnapping truffle hunting Dogs, smuggling and underground auctions. Black market aside, they can bring in a lot of cash. The record price paid for a single white truffle was set in December 2007, when Macau casino owner Stanley Ho paid $330,000 (£165,000) for one weighing 1.5 kilograms (3.3 lb).
6. Harvesting truffles is done with the help of either a dog or a Pig. Female pigs love truffles because they have a chemical in them which is similar to one produced by a randy male pig. So sows are pretty motivated to find them, and don't need to be trained to do so, but are also highly likely to eat any they find. Dogs need to be trained, but are usually happy to give them up for some praise and a dog treat.
7. Truffles have long been considered an aphrodisiac. Such much so that in the Middle Ages the church condemned them as the work of the devil, and monks in particular were forbidden to eat them in case it made them forget their call to celibacy. Casanova and Napoleon were said to use them to enhance their virility. Nobody is quite sure whether truffles contain something that turns people on as much as it does a female pig, or if the attraction is in the fact that they are rare and expensive (this guy can afford truffles - he's a keeper).
8. So what do they taste like? White truffles have a more pungent flavour than Black ones. The taste has been described as earthy and pungent with a hint of petrichor (the fresh smell of rain-soaked earth after rain).
9. Truffle oil has no truffles in it. It's usually olive oil with synthetic flavouring.
10. 100g of truffles contains 284 calories, 70g of fibre, 9g of protein, some sodium, calcium, Iron, vitamin B6, magnesium and Potassium. And no cholesterol.

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1st May: Save the Rhino Day

Today is Save the Rhino day. Here is all you need to know about rhinos:

1. There are five species of rhinoceros alive today, one of which, the Javan rhino, is the rarest animal on the planet with a population of only about 50 left in the wild.
2. The Javan rhino, the Indian rhino and the Sumatran rhino are all native to Asia. The Black rhino and the White rhino live in Africa. The black rhino isn't black, and the white rhino isn't white - they are both Grey. It's thought that white rhinos weren't named for their colour at all but for the shape of their mouths, which are wider than a black rhino's mouth, and that "wide" morphed into "white". Subsequently the black rhino was so called to distinguish it from the white rhino.
3. A rhino's horn is made from keratin, the same stuff out hair and fingernails are made of, albeit with a strong mineral deposit through the middle. If the horn breaks off, the rhino can grow a new one.
4. It is possibly because of the horn that rhinos are endangered. Even though the horn has no more nutritional or magical properties than chewing your hair or nails, people in Asia nevertheless believe that powdered rhino horn cures fever, headache, gout, rheumatism and food poisoning.
5. An old belief that rhino horn can detect poisons in drinks may have some truth in it. Strong alkaline poisons may produce a chemical reaction with keratin, so cups made out of rhino horn may have reacted when poison was put in them.
6. A group of rhinoceros is called a ‘herd’ or a ‘crash’.
7. Rhinos are the largest land animal on earth after the Elephant. They have thick skin - a rhino's skin is generally about 1.5-5 cm thick, but can be as thick as 5cm.
8. They have a reputation for being grumpy animals, possibly because their eyesight is bad and so any movement can frighten them, because they can't see what it is. The flocks of birds which feed off ticks and parasites on the rhinos' skin help the rhino in another way - they spot danger before the rhinos can and cause a commotion so the rhinos know something is up. When it comes to running away, a rhino can outrun a human. A rhino can run at 28mph and a black rhino can even get up to 40mph.
9. The rhino's nearest relatives are Horses, Zebras and Tapirs.
10. Millions of years ago, there were rhino species which stood 16 feet tall at their shoulders, were 26 ft long, and weighed 18 tons. There were also woolly rhinos adapted for life in cold climates. At the other end of the scale, there were rhinos which were no bigger than a Dog.

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30 April: Louisiana Admission Day

Louisiana was admitted as the 18th US state on 30 April 1812.

1. Louisiana was named after King Louis XIV. The capital, Baton Rouge, gets its name from a pole in the town which had the heads of dead animals attached to it. The pole marked the boundary between tribal hunting grounds. Baton Rouge is French for "Red Stick". The town of Jean Lafitte was named after a pirate.
2. It is the only state in the USA to have parishes rather than counties.
3. Louisiana is the only state that still acts under Napoleonic code.
4. Louisiana has the tallest state capitol building in the United States (450 feet tall with 34 floors) and the two longest bridges over water in the world. At number two is the Manchac Swamp Bridge at 22.80 miles (36.69 km). The swamp it crosses is said to be haunted. Number one is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, at 23.83 miles.
5. Several popular cocktails were invented in New Orleans, including the Sazerac and the Hurricane, but the state beverage is Milk. Magnolia is the state flower, the bald cypress is the state tree, and the eastern brown pelican is the state bird. The state also has an official Dog (The Catahoula Leopard Dog) and bear (the Louisiana black bear, which is endangered - there are only about 600 left).
6. Louisiana has the longest coastline of any US state (15,000 miles) thanks to having a lot of bays and sounds. 41% of the wetlands in the US are here, and one of the highest alligator populations in the US. There are about half as many alligators as people. There are also lots of bayous here - this word is French and means slow moving river.
7. Several towns have claims to fame: Rayne is "The Frog Capital of the World"; Breaux Bridge is the “Crawfish Capital of the World”; Dubach is the “Dog Trot Capital of the World”; Mamou is the “Cajun Music Capital of the World”; and Gueydan is the “Duck Capital of America”.
8. Famous people born in Louisiana include Louis Armstrong, Truman Capote, Anne Rice, Britney Spears and Lil' Wayne. At the other end of life, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were killed about eight miles south of Gibsland, and Nicholas Cage has bought himself a pyramid shaped tomb in the state.
9. Things you'd better not do in Louisiana if you don't want to fall foul of the law include tying an alligator to a fire hydrant, rob a bank and then shoot the cashier with a water pistol, gargle in public or have a Pizza delivered to a friend without telling them first. Biting someone with false teeth is “aggravated assault” but if you bite someone with your own teeth is it “simple assault”.
10. The highest point in the state is only 535 feet above sea level, and its lowest, the city of New Orleans, is the second-lowest point in the US at eight feet below sea level. Because of the low elevation people put their dead in mausoleums above ground rather than burying them.

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29th April: Eel Day

The Saturday of the May Bank Holiday weekend is Ely Day, also known as Eel Day. So here are ten facts you might not know about eels.

1. The name of the city of Ely derives from the old Northumbrian word for "district of eels", which is why these fish are celebrated on the May Bank Holiday weekend. Features of the festival include a parade, an eel throwing contest (no eels are, or ever been harmed during this contest. Toy eels are used, and before that, tights stuffed with Socks), and a town criers competition. Couples getting married on this day are named "King and Queen of the Eels". The bride is expected to take part in the parade, wearing a crown of live eels, which, according to legend, bring luck to a marriage. The City of Ely will send the couple a hamper of eels every year on their anniversary.
2. Eels are long fish belonging to the order Anguilliformes. Electric eels and spiny eels do not belong to this order and are therefore not true eels.
3. Eels can live for about 85 years.
4. They range in length from 5 cm (2.0 in) in the one-jawed eel (Monognathus ahlstromi) to 4 m (13 ft) in the slender giant moray. Adults range in weight from 30 g (1.1 oz) to well over 25 kg (55 lb) in the European conger.
5. They don't have pelvic fins, and many species also lack pectoral fins.
6. The collective noun for a group of eels is a swarm, bed or fry.
7. A young eel is called an elver. This name is thought to come from the time in the spring when elvers would swim upstream along the River Thames, a time once called "Eel fare". Elver is thought to have been a corruption of this.
8. The first stage in the life of an eel is a transparent, flat larval form called leptocephali. They live in shallow seas and eat particles which float in the water. They grow into glass eels, and finally the elvers who swim upstream, often climbing up anything that gets in their way, like dams or waterfalls.
9. Most eel species are nocturnal.
10. Eel blood is toxic to humans, but cooking and the digestive process destroy the toxin.

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28th April: Harper Lee Quotes

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird was born on this date in 1926.

1. Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
2. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
3. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
4. The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
5. I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
6. Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.
7. People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
8. We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.
9. Things are always better in the morning.
10. It's better to be silent than to be a fool.

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April 27: Mornington Crescent

On this date in 1998 Tube station Mornington Crescent reopened after 5 years. Here are some things you didn't know about this London location.

1. The station is on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line, between Euston and Camden Town, although not where it appears to be on a standard tube map. Tube maps show Mornington Crescent to the west of the City branch tunnels, it is in fact to the east of them, because the two branches cross over one another at Euston.
2. The station was part of the original route of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line) and first opened on 22 June 1907.
3. It almost wasn't called Mornington Crescent. Before it opened, the name Seymour Street had been proposed instead.
4. It wasn't a very busy station, and at one time was closed at weekends, and before 1966 Edgware-bound trains passed through without stopping.
5. On 23 October 1992 the station was closed for refurbishment, including the replacement of the 85-year-old lifts. The intention was to open it within one year, but turned out to be in such a state of neglect that it was closed for most of the 1990s, and there was talk of closing it permanently.
6. The campaign to get it opened again sprang from people being fond of it because of the game featured in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. It was in fact re-opened by the regular cast of the show (Humphrey Lyttelton, Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden) and a memorial plaque to the late Willie Rushton, one of the longest-serving panelists, was installed at the station in 2002.
7. The game is a spoof with no actual rules. It consists of each panellist in turn announcing a landmark or street, most often a tube station on the London Underground system. The apparent aim is to be the first to announce "Mornington Crescent". Interspersed with the turns is improvised discussion amongst the panellists and host regarding the rules and legality of each move, as well as the strategy the panellists are apparently using. The game has been a regular feature of the show since the sixth series in 1978. According to Chairman Humphrey Lyttelton, the game was invented purely to annoy a producer who was unpopular with the panellists. One day, the team members were drinking, when they heard him coming. "Quick," said one, "Let's invent a game with rules he'll never understand."
8. Since its 1998 reopening, the station has been open at the same times as most other stations, including weekends, in an attempt to relieve the pressure on the increasingly busy Camden Town station.
9. China Miéville mentions the station and its long state of disuse during the 1990s in his novel King Rat (1998), also using it as scene of a brutal murder by dismemberment via a passing train.
10. The station is also the location for two fictional organisations - the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are above Mornington Crescent tube station in Christopher Fowler's "Bryant and May" mysteries, and the station is also home to the Ministry of Serendipity, a fictional agency whose main activity is to ensure the British Empire rules the globe, via dealings with aliens in Robert Rankin novels. According to Rankin, the top secret nature of the ministry's work is the real reason why the station was only open on weekdays and closed for "repairs" for much of the 1990s.

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26th April: Pretzel Day

Today is Pretzel Day. Here are ten things you might not know about the popular snack:

1. Pretzel Day was started by Philadelphia governor Ed Rendell, who made the declaration that April 26 would be Pretzel Day in 2003. Pennsylvania is possibly the pretzel capital of the world - introduced by German and Swiss immigrants. While most Americans eat about two pounds of pretzels a year, in Pennsylvania they eat twelve. There's also a pretzel museum here, which opened in 1993.
2. Pretzels originated in Germany. The first known picture of one dates back to 1185 and appeared in the Hortus deliciarum from Alsace.
3. The word pretzel derives from the German word "Brezel" which may derive from the Latin word bracellus (a medieval term for "bracelet") or possibly bracchiola meaning "little arms".
4. They are thought to have originated as a treat for children given out by monks. Because the shape suggests a person praying with crossed arms, it was thought to have been given to children as a reward for saying their prayers.
5. A pretzel is a type of Bread, and they can be soft or hard. The hard ones originated in Pennsylvania (where else?) in 1850 when a 17th century baker over-cooked a batch - and ate them anyway.
6. Pretzels without salt are called “baldies”.
7. In Switzerland pretzels are a feature of the wedding ceremony. A couple break one and make a wish for good luck. It's thought the presence of pretzels in Swiss wedding ceremonies was the origin of the term "tie the knot".
8. In Germany, there is a tradition in which children tie pretzels on string around their necks at the beginning of the new year for luck.
9. Pretzels are associated with Easter, too, because they don't contain any of the foods traditionally banned during Lent, so it's okay to eat them during that period. They were sometimes hidden for children to find, rather like Easter Eggs are today.
10. The Guinness World Records' record for the largest pretzel weighed 382 kg (842 lbs), was 8.20 m (26 ft 10 in) long, and 3.10 m (10 ft 2 in) wide. It was made by Olaf Kluy and Manfred Keilwerth of Müller-Brot GmbH in Neufahrn, Germany, on 21 September 2008.

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25th April: DNA Day

Today is DNA day. Here are a few things you might not know about DNA.

1. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.
2. DNA was first isolated by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869, in the pus of discarded surgical bandages. He called it "nuclein". However, he didn't make any connection between this stuff and heredity. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick suggested what is now accepted as the first correct double-helix model of DNA structure.
3. All human cells have DNA in them except for Red Blood cells. If unwound and tied together, the strands of DNA in one cell would stretch almost six feet but would be only 50 trillionths of an inch wide. If you did that to all the DNA in a human body, it would reach from the Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times or from Earth to Pluto and back.
4. Your DNA is 99.9% identical to that of every other human being on Earth, 98% identical to that of a chimpanzee and 50% to that of a Banana. People living outside of Africa also have about 1-4% Neanderthal DNA proving that the two species interbred at some stage.
5. The first animal to have its DNA completely sequenced was a nematode worm in 1998.
6. 8% of human DNA is made of Viruses that used to infect prehistoric man.
7. A single gram of DNA is capable of holding 700 terabytes of data, which means if you wanted to store all the digital information that exists in the world in DNA format, you'd only need two grams of it.
8. A cell has three billion base pairs of DNA. It would take 30 years of nonstop typing to type them all out, and the text would fill 200 Telephone directories.
9. DNA is built using only four building blocks, the nucleotides adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine.
10. Some people have two distinct sets of DNA. This can happens when a foetus absorbs its twin in the very early stages of pregnancy. This is not as rare as you might expect, and causes no obvious effects so a person could go through their entire lives and never know they had “Chimerism”, as the condition has been named. Often it is only discovered when people need compatible organs for a transplant, or when a DNA test is done. A woman in Washington, for example, had a DNA test in 2002 which showed she wasn't the mother of her own children. This led to her being accused of fraud and a long court battle until it was eventually found that she had chimerism.

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24 April: Nightingales

The Nightingale is celebrated today in the French Revolutionary Calendar. Here are a few things you might not know about nightingales:

1. The word Nightingale dates back a thousand years, and meant night songstress in Anglo-Saxon, from the the Old English galan, "to sing". The collective noun for nightingales is a watch.
2. These birds are most famous for their song. They sing both during the day and during the night. Although poets are fond of referring to a singing nightingale as "she", it is only the males which sing, to attract a mate. Studies have shown that individual birds may have a song repertoire of over 200 different phrases. They also lose weight each night they sing - so the longer they can keep going, the fitter and stronger they are. In urban areas, they sing more loudly at dawn, to compete with the background noise. Early Christians noticed this and the birds became a symbol of a soul singing in anticipation of the second coming of Christ. They also considered the nightingale's song to be the cries of lost souls in purgatory.
3. The nightingale is the national bird of Iran, and the bird of the month of May.
4. They are small birds, about the size of a Robin. They have plain Brown plumage, and are sometimes mistaken for female robins.
5. They are often heard, but not seen. They tend to hide in thick foliage while they sing and are difficult to spot.
6. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square was one of the most popular songs in Britain during World War II - but it was unlikely as they're not that common in London these days and the square doesn't provide the sort of habitat they like - forest and scrub. However, they used to be more common - in 1819 John Keats spotted one on Hampstead Heath and wrote a poem about it (Ode to a Nightingale).
7. Nightingales are native to Europe and south-west Asia. They are found in sub-Saharan Africa too, where they migrate for the winter. Spain, France and Italy have the biggest populations, numbering tens of thousands of pairs. In the UK, the biggest populations are in the south east - Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent and Sussex.
8. They eat a mixture of fruits, seeds, insects and nuts. They are eaten by Rats, foxes, Cats, birds of prey, large lizards and Snakes.
9. Nightingales are symbols of education and teaching, because the parents teach their young to sing.
10. There's a lot of mythology surrounding the nightingale. Because it sings by day and by night, it was believed they never slept at all, so when a groom in one legend wanted to punish his fiancée for continually putting off their wedding, he had her turned into a nightingale and condemning her to an eternity without sleep. (Though if she'd married him and had a baby the result would have been the same.) Putting a nightingale's eyes and heart in someone's drink will make them die of sleeplessness, according to folklore. Eating the nightingale's heart was once thought to inspire talent in artists, and their song was a good omen for those of a creative persuasion. There is an early Christian myth which says that nightingales die at three o'clock in the afternoon, the same time that Christ died on the cross.

More birds

Bald eagle

Blackbird

Bullfinch
Buzzard
Chickens
Cuckoos
Geese
Grouse
Mallard Duck

Pigeons

Pheasants
Quail

Swallows 

Swans
Vultures
Wrens

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