June 10: Z Day

Z Day was 10 June 1945, the day Australian Imperial Forces landed in Brunei Bay to liberate Brunei as part of Operation Oboe Six. Here are 10 things you might not know about the letter Z, the 26th and final letter of the modern English alphabet.

1. It is pronounced differently depending on where you are. In the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, it's "zed". In the USA, it's "zee". Zee comes from a 17th century English dialect. "Izzard" is another, obsolete, dialectal form.
2. It hasn't always been the last letter in the alphabet. In the 19th century, the ampersand (&) was also considered to be a letter and came after Z in some alphabets. The alphabets of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway have extra letters at the end of their alphabets, such as Ö or Å.
3. Iceland has dropped Z from its alphabet altogether, although some personal names still contain it.
4. Some creatures have Z chromosomes. While humans and mammals have X and Y chromosomes with the gender being determined by the sperm, birds, some fish and crustaceans have a different system whereby the ovum determines the gender of the offspring. To distinguish their sex-determination chromosomes from ours, they are referred to as Z and W chromosomes. Males will have two Z chromosomes. The Z chromosome is larger as is the X chromosome in humans.
5. Z is the least frequently used letter in written English, and few words begin with it. Americans use Z more often than Brits due to variations in the spelling of words like "organisation" which in America is spelled "organization".
6. The word in the Oxford English Dictionary which contains the most Zs is Zenzizenzizenzic, an obsolete mathematical term meaning the eighth power of a number.
7. The American Poet Ezra Pound used "Z" as a pseudonym.
8. British people of a certain age may remember Z-Cars, a police drama series which aired between 1962 and 1978. The title does not, as sometimes suggested, come from the cars used, Ford Zephyr and Ford Zodiac. Instead, it is based on the radio call signs allocated by Lancashire Constabulary, which assigned areas with letters from north to south.
9. A row of Zs in a comic or cartoon signifies that a character is asleep, because snoring sounds like the pronunciation of Zs.
10. In the NATO phonetic alphabet, Z is "Zulu". --.. is the Morse Code for Z.

The Raiders Trilogy

Book One

Book Three

Book Two

   

Power Blaster is a superhero who lives in a dimension not unlike our own, in the mega-nation of Innovia. No-one knows who he is or where his powers come from. 
After saving the life of the President several times, Power Blaster learns that a test of a nuclear warhead to defend the planet against asteroid strikes will have devastating consequences for his world and sets out to prevent it.

Power Blaster's actions lead to an unexpected result - a wormhole opens between his dimension and our own. Anyone in the vicinity is pulled through. People from diverse backgrounds and cultures must co-operate to survive and learn to live with the powers travel through the wormhole has bestowed on some of them.

A stable wormhole is established between the two dimensions. Power Blaster is determined to bring Desi Troyes, the person responsible for the bomb, to justice. Help comes from some rather unexpected sources. Meanwhile, Shanna Douglas sets out on a mission of her own, to find out if there is a cure for the life altering condition the wormhole gave her friend, Benedict Cole. Little does she know that she will stumble upon the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious origins.