31 July: Christchurch, New Zealand

On 31 July 1856, Christchurch, New Zealand was chartered as a city. Here are some things you might not know about Christchurch.

1. Christchurch is the oldest city in New Zealand.
2. It is the largest city on the South Island and the third largest in the country as a whole, with a population of around 388,400 in 2018.
3. The first people to live in the area were Maori tribes who went there in the 1200s to hunt moa, a now extinct bird. The Waitaha, Ngati Mamoe and Ngai Tahu fought over the land, with the Ngai Tahu eventually winning and controlling it until the Europeans arrived in 1840.
4. The Europeans went there to hunt Whales initially, but in 1848, the Canterbury Association was founded to form a colony in the region which would be made up of Christian pilgrims from England who wanted to build a city around a cathedral and college based on Christ Church, Oxford. Because of this, the name Christchurch was chosen for the colony.
5. The official Maori name for the city is Otautahi, which was adopted in the 1930s. It means "the place of Tautahi", ie the place where a chief of the Ngāi Tahu tribe, Te Potiki Tautahi used to live. Before this official name was adopted, however, the local Maoris called the city Karaitiana, which basically means "Christian".
6. It's also nicknamed the “Garden City” because it has a large park and botannical gardens. Locals have also used the slogan "our city rocks" since an Earthquake in 2010.
7. Christchurch is one of only a few cities in the world to have a nearly exact antipodal city, ie, a city on the exact opposite side of the earth. Christchurch's antipodal city is A Coruña, in Spain.
8. If you plan on going on an expedition to Antarctica, chances are you'll go there via Christchurch. Both Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton departed from the port of Lyttelton in Christchurch, and in more recent times Christchurch International Airport is the departure point for Antarctic explorers from the USA, Italy and, indeed, New Zealand itself.
9. The city has coastlines along the Pacific Ocean and the estuaries of the Avon and Heathcote Rivers. There are also a number of Ski resorts and national parks in the nearby Southern Alps, so tourism is an important part of the city's economy.
10. Christchurch has often hit the news for the wrong reasons. In 1947, the worst Fire disaster in New Zealand took place in a department store there, in which 41 people died. In 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in which 185 people were killed and many more were injured. Many historic buildings, including the cathedral, were damaged. In 2019 there were two terrorist attacks on mosques in Christchurch, in which 51 people lost their lives.

30 July: C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

C. (Cyril) Northcote Parkinson, historian and author of some sixty books, the most famous of which was his bestseller Parkinson's Law, was born on 30 July 1909, 110 years ago. Here are some things he said:

1. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
3. Expenditure rises to meet income.
4. Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.
5. The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
6. In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.
7. The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.
8. The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. He becomes fussy about filing, keen on seeing that pencils are sharpened, eager to ensure that the windows are open (or shut) and apt to use two or three different-coloured inks.
9. If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
10. It is the busiest man who has time to spare.

29 July: National Lipstick Day

Today is National Lipstick Day. Here are 10 things you never knew about lipstick.

1. Although the word "lipstick" wasn't used until 1880, lipstick has a history going back much further than that. Cosmetic cases containing lip rouge have been found in Ancient Sumeria dating back to 3,500 B.C.
2. In ancient Egypt, both men and women wore Lip colour. It was, at that time, an indication of their social status. Magenta, blue-black, and Orange were popular colours then, as well as red. Lipstick was also an indicator of social class in ancient Rome.
3. In Greece, however, it wasn't done for high-class ladies to wear it. Wearing lipstick was the mark of a prostitute. There was even a law which said that prostitutes must wear lipstick at all times because to be seen in public without it meant they were "improperly posing as ladies."
4. In England, one person who helped popularise lipstick was Queen Elizabeth I. She believed, as many did in those times, that lipstick had healing properties. When she fell ill, she'd put on lipstick. She was said to have had half an inch of lipstick on her lips when she died.
5. People around that time thought lipstick had magical properties and was denounced by the church for that reason, and also because it was deemed sinful to alter the face god gave you. Using lipstick in some US states was grounds for divorce, because it meant the woman was tricking her suitor in to believing she was more attractive than she actually was.
6. In ancient times, the ingredients of lipstick were at best disgusting and at worst, toxic. The disgusting ingredients included sheep sweat, human saliva, ox marrow, crushed insects and Crocodile excrement. White Lead, fucus and vermillion were among the toxic ingredients. In ancient Rome, poor people would use red Wine to stain their lips, so were less likely to suffer ill effects from their lip colour. The Mesopotamians used crushed jewels to create shimmery lip paints, but most cultures used fish scales to boost shine. In fact, fish scales are still used in some lipsticks today.
7. In 1912, Elizabeth Arden handed out red lipstick to women marching in New York for the right to vote. Red lips became a badge of the Suffragette movement.
8. In Victorian times, lipstick was considered vulgar, but women would form secret societies - "underground lip rouge societies" would meet in secret to trade recipes.
9. While lipstick might not actually be magic, it does have effects on a woman's morale and her attractiveness to potential mates. According to a study conducted by the University of Manchester, men stare at women wearing Red lipstick for an average of 7.3 seconds, Pink lipstick for an average of 6.7 seconds, and women with bare lips for an average of 2.2 seconds. It's certainly a morale booster - there is an actual phenomenon known as "the lipstick effect" where it has been proved that in times of economic recession and even on rainy days, sales of lipstick go up. Winston Churchill knew this - lipstick was the only cosmetic kept in production during the second world war, because he believed it to be a morale booster.
10. It's often said that a woman who wears lipstick every day will swallow about 4 pounds of the stuff during her lifetime. While lipstick wearers are inevitably going to swallow some, it's hard to know how much. 4 pounds is the equivalent of 533 tubes of lipstick, so it's highly unlikely to be that much.

28 July: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was born on this date in 1929 and would therefore have celebrated her 90th birthday today. She was the first First Lady to be born in the 20th century, and the youngest, at 31, since Frances Cleveland. Here are 10 things you might not know about her.

1. As a child, her teachers described her as “full of the devil” because she misbehaved at school. Her parents believed it was because she'd finished her work before everyone else and got bored.
2. Tabloid journalist Igor Cassini named her Debutante of the Year in 1948.
3. Her day job before her marriage was as a reporter and photographer. At the age of 22, she entered and won a Vogue writing contest, the prize being a job as junior editor for six months in New York and six months in Paris. She only worked at that job for one day. On her first day, her boss told her she should leave because the job would damage her marriage prospects. A future first lady of today would no doubt sue him for sexual discrimination but things were different in the 1950s. Jackie took his advice on board and left immediately.
4. Her next job was as receptionist at the Washington Times-Herald. While this job was presumably more conducive to snaring a husband, Jackie was bored of it within a week and persuaded the editor to give her a job as "Inquiring Camera Girl", which involved interviewing random people on the street and taking their photographs. She went on to interview Tricia Nixon, then aged six, after her father Richard Nixon was made Vice President in 1952, and to travel to England to report on the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
5. JFK wasn't the first man she became engaged to. In January 1952, she announced her engagement to Wall Street banker John Husted. However, by March, she had broken the engagement off, allegedly because she'd decided Husted was boring and immature for his age, and because she had doubts about becoming a housewife.
6. She met JFK at a dinner party. He proposed to her after being elected to Senate. Jackie took her time giving him an answer. She was already committed to going to Europe for the Queen's Coronation and decided to spend a month travelling in Europe while making her mind up. When she got back, she accepted his proposal. There were 700 guests at their wedding in Rhode Island and 1,300 at the reception.
7. One of the things she was famous for was refurbishing the White House and getting through her $50,000 budget in a matter of days. She'd visited the White House at the age of 12, little knowing that she'd one day live there. She'd been frustrated that there was so little information for visitors, and so little historic furniture. As First Lady, she had the opportunity to change all that. When it was done, in February 1962, she invited CBS-TV to film a tour of the newly refurbished mansion. The resulting programme won her an Emmy award, making her the only First Lady to win one.
8. Her marriage to Aristotle Onassis after Kennedy's death brought her a considerable amount of bad press. Onassis was a long time friend of hers, and its possible that one consideration in deciding to marry him was that he'd be able to provide privacy and security. She had, after Robert Kenndy was assassinated, suffered from depression and was afraid someone might come after her or her children: "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets ... I want to get out of this country", she said. The wedding took place on Skorpios, Onassis' private Greek island in the Ionian Sea. She took his name, forfeiting her right to the Secret Service protection she was entitled to as a president's widow.
9. When Aristotle died in 1975, she went back to work, as a book editor at Viking Press and Doubleday. As well as books about her first husband, she also edited Michael Jackson's autobiography and Jeffrey Archer's novel, Shall We Tell the President? She continued working as an editor until she died.
10. Actors who have portrayed her on screen include Jaclyn Smith, Blair Brown, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Joanne Whalley, Jacqueline Bisset, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Katie Holmes and Natalie Portman.

See Also: Assassination of John F Kennedy 

27 July: Norfolk Day

Norfolk Day is a relatively recent celebration - the first Norfolk Day was in 2018. 10 things you might not know about Norfolk, England's fifth largest county.

1. Norfolk has over 90 miles of coast, but no motorways. It was actually quicker to get from Norwich to Amsterdam by sea than to London by road before trains were invented.
2. It was the first part of Britain to be settled by human beings, as 1.2 million years ago, Norfolk was connected by a land bridge to mainland Europe. A local man walking his Dog in the 18th century stumbled upon a hand axe and contacted a local museum. It turned out the axe was made 700,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than any previously discovered artefact.
3. For centuries, Norfolk was England’s most populous and prosperous county, with Norwich being the second largest city after London. A third of the population of Norwich died in an outbreak of plague in 1579. Norfolk is one of very few counties where the population is lower today than it was in the early 14th century.
4. In Medieval times, a lot of people meant a lot of churches. Back then, there were over 1,000 churches in Norfolk. 659 medieval churches survive there today, the highest concentration in Europe. Of these churches, 125 have round towers – more than any other county in Britain. Because the county was prosperous, they were able to import honey-coloured Caen limestone from Normandy to build the churches. Also on the subject of churches, St Nicholas’s Church in Great Yarmouth is the largest parish church in the country at 23,000 square feet; and he spire of Norwich Cathedral is 315 feet high – second only to that of Salisbury.
5. The Norfolk dialect is almost like another language. It's hard for outsiders to imitate and has a rich vocabulary of words all its own, including jasper (wasp), dodman (Snail), pishmire (ant), hamser (heron), kewter (Money) to pingle (to play with food) and bishy barnabee (a ladybird). You might even spot the dialect on road signs instructing ‘Slow You Down’.
6. Things invented in Norfolk include fish fingers, Bowler hats and Colman's Mustard. The world's first football stand is in Great Yarmouth, opened in 1892 and still in use today. On the subject of football, Norwich City Football club's song, On The Ball City is the oldest football chant still sung in UK today.
7. Some celebrity connections: The Sandringham Estate, where the Queen goes for Christmas, is in Norfolk. The Queen Mother used to have a beach hut at Holkham. 2,000 years ago it was home to another queen - Boudicea and the Iceni tribe. Admiral Lord Nelson was born in Burnham Thorpe, and Howard Carter the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutenkhamen grew up in Swaffham. Albert Einstein hid from the Nazis in Norfolk for a time before heading to America. A local legend of a ferocious dog called Black Shuck came to the ears of Arthur Conan Doyle whilst holidaying in Cromer and provided him with the inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee first met at Britannia Pier Theatre in Great Yarmouth.
8. While Norfolk is known for being flat, it does have a few hills. Norfolk's highest point is Beacon Hill (also known as Roman Camp) near West Runton, 338 feet above sea level. Beacon Hill is the highest point in East Anglia.
9. The Norfolk Broads are made up of twelve large and twenty-four small lakes or meres, and were created by the flooding of ancient peat diggings. The Broads are home to Britain's largest butterfly, the Swallowtail butterfly. You can't find swallowtail butterflies anywhere else.
10. Great Yarmouth was once the hub of the herring fishing industry, with over 80 million herring being brought into port in just one day in 1907. There were so many boats that it was said you could walk across the river simply by stepping from one boat to another.

26 July: Quotes from Carl Jung

Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung was born on this date in 1875. Here are some things he said.

1. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
2. In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
3. Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
4. The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.
5. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
6. Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.
7. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
8. To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
9. Everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.
10. You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

25 July: St James the Greater

Today is the feast day of St. James the Greater Apostle, brother of St John. Here are 10 things you might not know about him.

1. He is referred to as St James the Greater to distinguish him from the other apostle whose name was James (James the Less). That means he was probably older or taller than the other James, rather than less important.
2. His parents were Zebedee and Salome and his brother was the apostle John. According to one legend, Salome asked Jesus to seat her sons by His side in Heaven.
3. James is traditionally the first apostle to be martyred. The story is told in The Acts of the Apostles and states that King Herod had him beheaded with a sword. Some scholars suggest that this was because of his temper, the same temper that caused Jesus to call him and John "Sons of Thunder".
4. He is the patron of veterinarians, equestrians, furriers, tanners, pharmacists, Oyster fishers and woodcarvers. Places claiming him as their patron saint include Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Spain. The national day of Galicia is celebrated on 25 July, as St James is its patron saint.
5. His head, chopped off by order of King Herod, is buried under the altar of the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral of St. James in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which is said to be the site of his martyrdom.
6. The rest of him is buried in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. There is some controversy about this, since the Bible story suggests he never evangelised anywhere other than the Holy Land. Some legends suggest he did preach in Spain, too, and that when he died his disciples carried his body by sea to Iberia. Or, according to other legends, his body was taken by angels and put in a boat which sailed itself to Iberia.
7. Thousands of pilgrims make their way to his grave at Santiago de Compostela every year. The name Santiago is derived from the Latin Sanctu Iacobu, "Saint James". The place name San Diego is another derivative. 237,886 pilgrims registered in 2014 as having completed the pilgrimage.
8. Pilgrims walking to the shrine often wear scallop or cockle shell symbols on their clothing, because the shell is the emblem of St James. That's also why the word for scallops in several European languages translates as "mollusk of St James" or "shell of St James"). Examples are the French coquille St. Jacques, German Jakobsmuschel and the Dutch Jacobs schelp.
9. Mormons believe that James was resurrected along with Peter and John, and was one of the three who visited Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in 1829 to restore the authority of the priesthood on Earth.
10. While there isn't a gospel of St James in the Bible, the New Testament apocrypha has a Secret Book of James that is said to be the secret teachings of Jesus to Peter and James. A major theme of these teachings is that suffering is inevitable.

24 July: Windows

On this date in 1851, the window tax in Britain was abolished after 150 years. It was first imposed in 1696 to make up for losses caused by people filing the metal off the edges of coins. No tax is popular, and this one was no exception, with detractors saying it was a tax on light and air, and even health. People bricked up their windows to avoid paying the tax, and there are properties from the period which have bricked up windows to this day.

1. The word "window" derives from an old Norse word ‘vindauga’ (vindr meaning “wind”, auga meaning “eye” literally translating to wind-eye) which referred to holes on top of the walls for ventilation and to let smoke out.
2. The Latin word for window is fenestra (meaning hole in the wall, opening for light, or opportunity), which gives us the French word for window, fenetre, and the posh word for throwing something (or someone) out of a window - defenestration.
3. Holes in the wall may let light in but they also let the cold in during Winter. Early windows had shutters, but closing them also shut out the light. In an attempt to get the best of both worlds, people used Paper, flattened pieces of translucent animal horns and even thinly sliced marble to cover the holes.
4. It was the Romans who invented clear Glass, initially so they could admire their Wine before drinking it, but other uses for glass soon became obvious.
5. It took until the 17th century for windows to become common in England. Before this, only the very rich could afford glass windows. They were such a luxury item that when wealthy aristocrats went away from their mansion for a while, they'd take the windows down and store them away somewhere.
6. Double glazing first appeared in Scotland in the 1870s, although it wasn't double glazing as we know it today. It was basically a second sheet of glass attached to the existing window with putty.
7. Your house probably has between 8 and 15 windows, making up about 15% of the wall space. The White House in Washington DC has 147, Buckingham Palace has 760, the Empire State Building in New York has 6,500 and the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has 34,348.
8. Approximately 25% of a home’s heat is lost through poorly insulated windows.
9. Skylights provide 30% more light than vertical windows of the same size.
10. You may have heard that glass is a liquid that flows very slowly, so that the windows of very old buildings will be thicker at the bottom than at the top. It's not true. Glass is a solid.

23 July: National Hot Dog Day

Today is National Hot Dog Day 2019. Some things you might not know about hot dogs.

1. Why are they called hot dogs, anyway? Nobody really knows for sure. The term "dog" to mean a sausage has been around since the 19th century and some believe it's even possible dog meat might have been used to make them back then. Another theory is that vendors in 1901 started a sales pitch: "Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!" A slang term for a Dachsund is a "sausage dog" because of their shape. A cartoonist called Tad Dorgan allegedly drew a cartoon of barking dachshund sausages in rolls, writing 'hot dog' as the title - but the cartoon has never been found.
2. Equally, there is a dispute as to where they originated. The city of Vienna in Austria claims the hot dog was invented there, by Emil Reichel and Sam Ladany, who later went to America and sold hot dogs at the 1893 World’s Fair. In German, the city is called Wien, which, they say, is the origin of the “wiener” sausages used for hot dogs. Meanwhile, Frankfurt in Germany also claims to be the place where hot dogs originated, invented by a butcher called Johann Georghehner. Another word for a hot dog sausage, of course, is "frankfurter".
3. There's a third possibility - that sausage in a bun was first made for the Roman emperor Nero, by his cook, Gaius.
4. What is agreed is that hot dogs were taken to America by German immigrants. The first hot dog stands opened in New York in the 1860s. The person who made the biggest contribution to the popularity of hot dogs in America was Nathan Handwerker, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who set up a hot dog business in Coney Island in 1916. He borrowed $300 to set it up and by the 1930s was known across America. Nathan’s dogs were reportedly gangster Al Capone’s favorite food.
5. It's not only gangsters who enjoyed hot dogs. When King George VI of England visited President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, he was served hot dogs and Beer. In 1957 when the American Bar Association attended a banquet held by Queen Elizabeth II, hot dogs were on the menu.
6. Americans eat 20 billion hot dogs a year - about 70 hot dogs per person per year. 150 million of these will be eaten on July 4.
7. 71% of Americans say their favourite topping is mustard, and 52% like ketchup on their hot dogs. However, there actually exists an etiquette guide to hot dog eating. According to that, it is considered tacky to eat hot dogs with ketchup if you're over 18. Serving hot dogs in posh buns and posh dishes and eating them with a knife and fork is considered pretentious. Licking topping off your fingers when you've finished eating is fine.
8. Hot dogs are a common snack enjoyed by astronauts in space. Since Apollo 7, astronauts made no secret of the fact they much preferred hot dogs to freeze-dried Ice cream.
9. The world's most expensive hot dog cost $169 and was served in Seattle in 2014. A cheese bratwurst was smothered in butter Teriyaki grilled Onions, Maitake Mushrooms, wagyu beef, foie gras, shaved black Truffles, Caviar, and Japanese mayonnaise on a brioche bun.
10. At time of writing, the Guinness World Record for making hot dogs (11 in one minute) is shared by Andre Ortolf who set the record in Augsburg, Germany, in 2016, and Luke Franks of the UK who equalled it in 2017.

22 July: Rose Kennedy Quotes

Rose Kennedy, matriarch of the Kennedy family, was born on 22 July 1890. Here are 10 quotes from her.

1. Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
2. Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments.
3. I'm like old wine. They don't bring me out very often, but I'm well preserved.
4. Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety.
5. Make sure you never, never argue at night. You just lose a good night's sleep, and you can't settle anything until morning anyway.
6. More business is lost every year through neglect than through any other cause.
7. it is not tears but determination that makes pain bearable.
8. Money doesn't give you any license to relax. It gives you an opportunity to use all your abilities, free of financial worries, to go forward, and to use your superior advantages and talents to help others.
9. I tried to allow my children to take risks, to test themselves. Better broken bones than broken spirit.
10. I don't think you're much good, unless you're doing good to someone.

See also: Facts about Rose Kennedy 

21 July: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on this date in 1899. Here are 10 facts about him.

1. As a child, Hemingway was dressed as a girl by his mother until he was six, and called "Ernestine". She'd wanted a girl. This didn't stop the young Ernest from growing up into a macho man, however. She also wanted Ernest to be a cellist and kept him home from school to force him to play the cello. Ernest wasn't the least bit interested in playing the instrument.
2. He played an active part in both world wars, despite having poor eyesight. He talked the military into letting him be an ambulance driver in WWI. Despite being badly wounded by mortar fire, he helped some Italian soldiers reach safety and for that was awarded Italian Silver Medal of Valor. In WWII he got in on the action through being a war correspondent. As such, he wasn't supposed to play any active role in the fighting, but he did anyway. He removed the badges identifying him as a journalist, collected weapons in his hotel room and, posing as a colonel, led a band of Resistance fighters in the French town of Rambouillet on a mission to gather intelligence. He was charged for breaking the rules, but was eventually cleared and even got another medal, a Bronze Star.
3. He was big into hunting and fishing and also boxing. He had a boxing ring built in his garden so he could spar with guests. One person who refused to fight him was boxing legend Jack Dempsey, because he knew he could only win the fight by doing Hemingway some serious harm. Hemingway didn't only fight in the ring, either. His drinking buddy, James Joyce, would pick fights in bars and call on Hemingway to finish the job. Hemingway once got into a fight with actor Orson Welles in a theatre, but afterwards the two became great friends.
4. He was a cat lover, and in particular, Cats with six toes on each foot. In 1931, someone gave him a white cat with extra toes, which he named Snowball. In his hometown to this day there is a much larger than expected number of polydactyl cats of various breeds. Snowball, it seems, put herself about a bit. Hemingway even wrote about polydactyl cats, so such moggies are sometimes referred to as “Hemingway cats.”
5. Hemingway was married four times. His first three marriages, to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer and Martha Gellhorn. Within a year of his divorces, he would marry again, but each wife got a book dedicated to her - The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls respectively. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh, had a dedication in Across the River and Into the Trees.
6. He got to read his own obituaries. While on holiday in the Belgian Congo, he was involved in two plane crashes on consecutive days. After the second one, journalists mistakenly reported that he had been killed.
7. He liked his drink, too. When his favourite local bar was renovated, he bought one of the old urinals and installed it in his house as a fountain. He quipped that he'd poured enough Money down it that it was rightfully his.
8. Another toilet story - he once took fellow author F Scott Fitzgerald into a cafe bathroom to inspect the size of his penis. Fitzgerald's wife had been taunting him about being too small. Hemingway was able to reassure him that his stature was perfectly adequate, and if Fitzgerald didn't believe him, he should go and look at the naked sculptures in The Louvre for confirmation.
9. Having survived anthrax, malaria, skin cancer, pneumonia, diabetes, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, hepatitis, a ruptured spleen, a fractured Skull, a crushed vertebra, his eventual cause of death was himself. In later life he developed bi-polar disorder, which at that time was treated with shock therapy. The treatment made it impossible to write, and so he shot himself.
10. There is a Hemingway Look-alike Society in Key West, which runs an Ernest Hemingway Lookalike Contest every year on his birthday, at Sloppy Joe’s bar.

20 July: Fortune Cookie Day

On Fortune Cookie Day, here are 10 things you might not know about fortune cookies. 

1. While we associate fortune cookies with Chinese meals, they didn't originate in China. It was in Japan that the concept originated, with cookies called tsujiura senbei, sold at new year for good luck. Tsujiura senbei are larger than the fortune cookies we know and taste different. They are flavoured with miso.
2. The distinctive taste of the fortune cookies we know comes from the ingredients of vanilla and sesame.
3. In fact, you won't find fortune cookies in China at all. They made a brief appearance there in 1989, when they were marketed as “genuine American fortune cookies”. They didn't catch on.
4. Nobody knows who adapted the tsujiura senbei into the fortune cookies you get after a Chinese meal. Fortune cookies are said to have first appeared in America in the 1890s at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden. Several people have claimed to be the inventor, including David Jung of Los Angeles’ Hong Kong Noodle Company who claimed he invented them in 1918, and and Seiichi Koto, a Los Angeles restaurant owner who said he adapted the tsujiura senbei idea.
5. How are they made? Flour, sugar, vanilla, and sesame seed oil are mixed in a large tank and the mixture is squirted onto trays to be baked. At this point they are round, flat biscuits. After a minute's baking, the fortunes are added and the still soft dough is folded around them. They harden as they cool. This is another difference between fortune cookies and tsujiura senbei. In the Japanese version the fortunes are baked inside the cookes.
6. Chances are your fortune cookie was made in New York. There's a company in Brooklyn called Wonton Food, Inc. which produces 4.5 million of them a day. They use a machine called the Kitamura FCM-8006W which can make 8,000 fortune cookies per hour.
7. There are Mexican and Italian versions of the fortune cookie, too. The Mexican version of the fortune cookie is called the "Lucky Taco" and the Italian version is called the "Lucky Canoli".
8. A fortune cookie contains 107 calories, a little under a gram of fat, one milligram of cholesterol, 24 grams of carbohydrates, and 13 grams of sugar.
9. Ever wondered who wrote the fortunes? Up until 1995 it would have been Donald Lau, vice president of Wonton Food, but in 1995 he ran out of ideas and after that the company hired an official fortune writer. How many different ones are there? Wonton Food has a database of about 15,000, Yang’s Fortunes in San Francisco, has a collection of 5,000, while one bakery in Japan has a repertoire of just 23. Hence if you get a fortune which includes lucky lottery numbers, chances are if they did come up, you'd be sharing the prize with a number of other people who had a Chinese meal that week.
10. People in America sometimes amuse themselves by adding the words "between the sheets", "[except] in bed" or "in jail" to the fortune they get, to create a rude or dark version of the fortune.

19 July: Lambeth Bridge

On this date in 1932 Lambeth Bridge opened. 10 things you might not know about Lambeth Bridge.

1. Thanks to the Archbishops of Canterbury, whose London residence is at Lambeth Palace, there has been some kind of river crossing at the site of Lambeth Bridge since at least 1367, when it's recorded that the clerks of chancery were paid £16 for a barge to ferry the then Archbishop, Simon, across the river.
2. By 1513 there was a ferry here for Horses and horsedrawn carriages. The horseferry between the Palace of Westminster and Lambeth Palace was the only way to get across the Thames in central London for quite some time. The Archbishop of Canterbury owned the lease to the ferry which came to an end in 1750 when Westminster Bridge opened. Lambeth Palace had a landing stage where the Archbishop received important visitors. Today, all that's left of the horse ferry is the road that once led to it - Horseferry Road.
3. As early as 1664 people wanted a bridge at Lambeth, but the ferry owners blocked it. Finally in 1737, an act of Parliament was passed to put a bridge there but it wasn't built until 1861. That bridge was a suspension bridge 828 feet (252.4 m) long, designed by Peter W. Barlow, which cost £48,924 to build. It wasn't a great success. It has a steep incline which made crossing in a horse and carriage difficult, so it was used mostly as a footbridge. It was closed to vehicles in 1910 because The girders and cables were already starting to deteriorate.
4. The bridge that is there now was opened in 1932 by King George V and Queen Mary. It was designed by engineer Sir George Humphreys and architects Sir Reginald Blomfield and G. Topham Forrest. It is a five span steel arch.
5. It is 236.5m long and 18m wide. It carries the Lambeth Road and has three lanes, one of which is for Buses only.
6. It is painted Red for a reason - the red colour scheme matches the seats in the House of Lords. The Houses of Parliament are located on the north bank between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges. The House of Lords is nearest to Lambeth Bridge. Westminster Bridge, nearer to the House of Commons, is painted Green to match the seats in there.
7. The crests on the sides of Lambeth Bridge represent the London County Council, which was responsible for building it.
8. The objects on top of the obelisks at either end are said by some to be Pineapples, placed there as a tribute to John Tradescant the younger, head gardener to Charles I, famous for growing the first pineapples in Britain. He is buried nearby, in the churchyard of St-Mary-at-Lambeth. However, this is merely an urban myth. The objects are actually pine cones. What they represent isn't quite so obvious. They could have been included by Masons as a symbol of enlightenment, or they could represent ancient symbols of hospitality or eternal life.
9. Lambeth Bridge was the first Thames Bridge to be tunnelled beneath to provide pedestrian access along the embankment, in 1965.
10. Lambeth Bridge has appeared in several films. It was used as a locaton for Woody Allen's Match Point; The Greater Good; the James Bond film Spectre (in which a boat and helicopter pass over and under it); Fast And Furious 6 (in which the bridge and the buildings around it stand in for Moscow); the Jackie Chan film The Foreigner (in which a bus explodes on the bridge, freaking out a few passers by who weren't in the know during filming) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban (in which the Knight Bus races over the bridge squeezing between two regular London buses.

18 July: Blueberries

July is National Blueberry Month, so here are some fascinating facts about blueberries.

1. Blueberries belong to the genus Vaccinum, and are therefore related to not only cranberries, bilberries and huckleberries but also the Rhododendron and the azalea.
2. They are a rare example of a food that is naturally Blue. The pigment responsible for the colour is anthocyanin.
3. Blueberries are native to North America and weren't introduced to Europe until the 1930s. They are grown commercially in several US states and in British Columbia in Canada. Blueberries are Canada’s most exported fruit.
4. North American indigenous peoples called them “star fruits” because the blossom end of the berry forms a star shape. In most languages, however, the word for this fruit is a translation of "blue berry".
5. There are two types of blueberries, highbush and lowbush. The ones you find in the supermarket are highbush. Lowbush blueberries are smaller and sweeter, and are the ones used for juices, jams, blueberry muffin mixes and the like. Lowbush blueberries can also be used to make blueberry wine.
6. A single blueberry bush can produce as many as 6,000 blueberries per year.
7. Wild blueberries produce more fruit after forest fires.
8. The silvery "bloom" on blueberries is a natural compound which protects the fruit. Therefore you should only wash them right before you plan to eat them.
9. It's said that early American colonists boiled them with Milk to make Grey paint.
10. Blueberries consist of 14% carbohydrates, 0.7% protein, 0.3% fat and 84% water. They contain moderate levels of manganese, Vitamin C, vitamin K and dietary fibre.

17 July: Icebergs

On this date in 1586 John Davis, English explorer, described an iceberg in his journal. 10 things you might not know about icebergs.

1. You probably know that 90% of an iceberg is underwater, hence the saying, "tip of the iceberg". What you may not know is why. It's to do with the relative densities of ice and salt Water. Ice is 90% as dense as water, so 90% of an iceberg is under the surface. In comparison, wood is half as dense as water, so wood floats with half its volume under water.
2. The word iceberg comes from the Dutch term ijsberg which means “ice mountain”.
3. Icebergs come in all shapes and sizes, but officially, an iceberg is a chunk of floating ice larger than 5 meters (16 feet) across. The largest ones may be the size of a small country. Smaller chunks have different names - "bergy bits" which are icebergs about the size of a house, and "growlers" which are about the size of a grand piano. Bergy bits and growlers are actually more dangerous to shipping because they don't show up on radar.
4. 93% of the world's icebergs can be found in the Antarctic. They are also commonly found in the North Atlantic. The ones in the Antarctic tend to be bigger. In 1987 an iceberg, with an area of 6,350 sq. km, calved from the Ross Ice Shelf. It weighed about 1.4 trillion tonnes and could have provided everyone in the world with 240 tonnes of pure drinking water. The largest iceberg recorded in the Northern Hemisphere was encountered in 1882 near Baffin Island. It was 13 km long, 6 km wide, and was about 20 m above water. It weighed over 9 billion tonnes – enough for everyone in the world to drink a litre of water a day for more than 4 years.
5. Where do icebergs come from? They are the edges of glaciers which break off, or "calve" into the ocean and drift away. How many new icebergs are formed in a year will vary but to give you a rough idea, about 40,000 medium to large icebergs calve from Greenland glaciers every year.
6. As glaciers are formed on land by the gradual build up of Snow, the ice in an iceberg, and any air trapped in bubbles inside it, will be about 10,000-15,000 years old. Unlike the sea around it, iceberg ice isn't salty, and it would be perfectly safe to break up and put in a Gin and Tonic. In fact, in Newfoundland, iceberg ice is collected and sold as bottled water. However, climbing onto an iceberg to get the ice isn't safe at all, so don't do it.
7. Icebergs have blueish streaks sometimes because meltwater has collected in crevasses on the glacier and frozen, making pure ice, with no bubbles. This reflects Blue light. The bulk of the iceberg is compacted snow, which will have tiny bubbles in it. This reflects all light so the iceberg appears white. Rarely, an iceberg may have a Brown or Black streak, caused by dust from volcanic eruptions falling on a glacier and becoming trapped. In general, though, the winds carrying volcanic dust don't mix with Arctic air masses.
8. The temperature inside an iceberg is between -15 and -20 degrees Celsius. The speed at which they travel varies with the drifts and currents of the sea and is usually around 0.7 km/h but can be as high as 3.6 km/h. When they reach warmer climates, it is attacked by both the warmer air and the warmer water. Any cracks will widen and pieces will break off. As an iceberg melts, it releases nutrients into the water around it, which, biologists have found, leads to an increase in plankton and other sea life.
9. If an iceberg melts quickly, it makes a sound like soda water fizzing, which is called the "Bergie Seltzer". This is due to the air being released from many tiny bubbles.
10. The most famous iceberg ever is, of course, the one that hit the Titanic. After the Titanic disaster, several nations got together to form the International Ice Patrol to warn ships of icebergs in the North Atlantic. Today they use aircraft and radar to track them, but only icebergs larger than 500 square meters (5,400 square feet).

16 July: Ginger Rogers

Fred Astaire's best known dance partner, Ginger Rogers, was born on this date in 1911. 10 things you might not know about her.

1. Her real name was Virginia Katherine McMath. She got the name Ginger from a young cousin who couldn't pronounce Virginia properly.
2. By the time she was born, her parents had split up. Her mother, Lelee, had lost a baby giving birth in a hospital - her father wanted Lelee to give birth in hospital again, so Lelee left him. Ginger's father kidnapped her twice when she was a child until eventually Lelee took him to court. When Ginger was nine, her mother married John Rogers, and even though she was never legally adopted by him, Ginger took his name.
3. Her mother had no more children so Ginger was raised an only child. She and her mother were close. Lelee, a scriptwriter, once wrote a children's book with Ginger as the central character.
4. Her dancing career started in 1925 when she won a Charleston contest at the age of 14. This got her a Vaudeville contract and for the next three years she appeared in several shows, under her mother's guidance.
5. She married five times. The first time was at the age of 17, to Jack Culpepper, an entertainer who used the stage name Jack Pepper. They formed an act together called Ginger and Pepper, but both the act and the marriage ended within a few months. In 1934, she married actor Lew Ayres. They divorced seven years later. She married Jack Briggs in 1943. He was a US marine. They divorced after her returned from World War II. In 1953, she met a French actor called Jacques Bergerac, who was 16 years younger than she was. They divorced in 1957. She married director and producer William Marshall in 1961. They divorced in 1969.
6. Ginger made her Broadway debut in a show called Top Speed. This was soon followed by a starring role in Girl Crazy by George and Ira Gershwin. This made her a star at the age of 19. One of the choreographers working on that show was none other than Fred Astaire.
7. She made 19 films before being paired with Fred. Flying Down to Rio (1933), was her 20th film appearance but only Fred's second. They made nine films together. Ginger was Fred Astaire's favourite partner. One factor was perhaps her resilience under stress. Astaire said of her "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No, no, Ginger never cried".
8. Not all of her films had dancing in them. She starred in a number of non-musical films, too, including Stage Door, Vivacious Lady and Bachelor Mother. In 1941, Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's Kitty Foyle.
9. It's often said of her that, while Fred Astaire may have been great, Ginger Rogers did everything he did...backwards and in high heels. However, as is often the case even today, in the 1930s she didn't earn as much as Fred did. In fact, she didn't earn as much as some of the lesser actors. She'd fight for her salary and contract rights, which led to strained relationships with her bosses.
10. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were big fans of Ginger Rogers. She was included in the gallery of magazine cuttings they put up on the wall in the house where they hid from the Nazis. Now the house is a museum, the pictures are still there.

See also: Fred Astaire

15 July: Coral reefs

15th-21st July is Coral Reef Awareness week, so here are 10 things you might not know about them.

1. Corals are tiny animals, relatives of Jellyfish and anemones. An individual coral is known as a polyp. They are very simple creatures, consisting mostly of a stomach and a mouth with tentacles which it uses to catch and sting prey. A coral colony contains thousands of them. A coral reef is made up of the calcium carbonate exoskeletons of many colonies.
2. Even though they are animals, corals rely on photosynthesis to survive. They don't photosynthesise themselves, but have a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae, or zooxanthellae, which live in their stomachs. 90% of the energy a coral needs comes from the zooxanthellae and only 10% from hunting prey.
3. Coral reefs are the largest biological structures on Earth. The largest of them, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, can be seen from space and covers an area of 133,000-square miles. That said, reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean, which in total adds up to an area about half the size of France.
4. Everybody knows the Great Barrier Reef is the largest. You may not know which is the second largest, though. It's Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, which stretches over 550 miles from Cancun to Honduras.
5. Nevertheless, coral reefs are home to around a quarter of all marine species, and are sometimes called "rainforests of the sea". They provide a protected environment for sea creatures to live and to spawn. Sea mammals such as dugongs also raise their young in reefs.
6. There are three types of coral reef: fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and coral atolls. Atolls are often mistaken for islands. Barrier reefs and fringing reefs form around coastlines, the difference being that fringing reefs occur closer to the land.
7. Reefs tend to form on the eastern side of land masses, because the eastern side is usually warmer. Reefs need a temperature of 70 to 85º Fahrenheit to survive. For the same reason, they tend to grow in shallow seas - at a maximum depth of around 150 feet, because shallower water is more easily warmed by the sun, which is also needed for photosynthesis. They also like strong currents and wave patterns, because these deliver more food.
8. Scientists have recently discovered that many parts of a coral reef can be harvested to make medications to treat cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, Alzheimer’s disease, Heart disease, Viruses, and other diseases.
9. Corals actually like eating plastic. Scientists in North Carolina collected corals and fed them a variety of things including sand and tiny bits of plastic, and found they really liked plastic, especially microplastics that weren't covered in Bacteria.
10. Around 60% of the world's coral reefs are threatened by human activity, although they are valuable to us - they protect shorelines from storm damage, and are also important for fishing and tourism. Destroying just 1 kilometre of coral reef causes a loss of between $137,000 to $1,200,000 over a 25-year period, according to the World Resources Institute. However, humans can also help the coral along. Old navy ships are sometimes sunk because coral reefs will start to grow on them. It's also possible to raise young corals in a protected environment and plant them on a reef when they have passed their most vulnerable stage. This is called "coral gardening".

14 July: Sage

The French Revolutionary Calendar celebrated Sage on this date. 10 things you might not know about this herb.

1. The botanical name for sage is Salvia officinalis. That name is all to do with the herb's medicinal uses. Salvia comes from the Latin word "salvere," meaning to be saved or to be healed. Officinalis, too, refers to the plant's medicinal use. The room in which herbs and medicines were stored in a monastery was called the officina.
2. Sage is closely related to Rosemary and Mint.
3. It is native to the Mediterranean region.
4. There are over 500 different varieties of sage. It is usually a perennial shrub about 2 feet high. The flowers can be Purple, Blue, White, Red or Pink. The flowers are fragrant and rich in nectar. Some varieties have variegated leaves.
5. People have been writing about sage's medicinal properties for centuries. Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder and Charlemange are among those who recommended it for various ailments.
6. It was highly prized by the Chinese in the 17th century - they would hand over three or four pounds of Tea to Dutch traders in exchange for one pound of sage.
7. The list of ailments sage has been recommended for is long. Snake bites, insect stings, eye problems, infection, epilepsy, intoxication, memory loss, worms, intestinal problems, nervous conditions, mental conditions, inflammation of the mouth, tongue and throat, reducing fevers, female fertility and even appears in an old recipe for warding off plague. It was believed to stimulate the brain, increasing powers of concentration, memory and reasoning, which is why they word "sage" is used to describe a wise person.
8. It is commonly used in cooking, and as such is probably best known as a component of sage and Onion Stuffing an accompaniment to roast turkey or chicken. It's also an ingredient of vermouth, Sage Derby cheese and Lincolnshire sausages. Its anti-oxidant and antibacterial properties mean it slows the spoilage of food and can be used as a preservative. Some varieties make good herbal teas.
9. Another use for sage is burning it, a spiritual practice also known as smudging. Those not familiar with the idea may see it as a wacky "new age" thing; but smudging to purify the air and clear stagnant energy in a person's aura has been around for centuries. It was a common practice among Native Americans and is even mentioned in the Bible (Psalms 141:2 and Leviticus 16:12–13). Proponents say it works by neutralising the positive ions in the air around us, making it feel lighter. It is said to be good for people suffering from asthma, headaches, lung problems, respiratory issues, coughs and colds.
10. Scientists today are discovering that smudging isn't merely new age mumbo jumbo. The smoke is a powerful antiseptic that can purify the air of 94% of harmful bacteria for up to 24 hours.