6 May: Passwords

The first Thursday in May is World Password Day. Here are ten facts about passwords.

1. The first passwords were spoken words, used, often by the military, to distinguish between friends and enemies. People you wanted to allow into your base would know the word to say. Enemies would not. In the Roman Empire, soldiers were given “watchwords” to be spoken to the night watchmen.

2. In the 11th century BCE by soldiers of Gilead used the password “shibboleth”. They didn’t care so much if their enemies found out what it was, because they would give themselves away by pronouncing it differently.

3. The first computer passwords were used by American computer scientist Fernando Corbató in 1961 to control access to the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), a general-purpose operating system.

4. Passwords that consist only of numbers may be called passcodes or personal identification numbers (PIN).

5. 59% of people use the same password for several platforms. 20% of employees share passwords with colleagues. A person usually changes the password every 2.5 to 3 years on average.

6. The most commonly used passwords include 123456, password, qwerty123 and iloveyou.

7. Research has shown that women are more likely to use personal names in their passwords, while men use words relating to their hobbies. People are 3 times more likely to use their pet’s name rather than that of a family member. Most of the sources I looked at for this one went on and on about how bad this is. That said, a famous hacker who was on the FBI most wanted list used his cat’s name as his password, followed by ‘123.’

8. The launch code for US nuclear missiles was ‘00000000’ for 20 years.

9. At one time those in the know could access any profile on Facebook by entering the password ‘Chuck Norris’ and on Hotmail using the password ‘eh.’

10. An eight-character password containing a combination of upper and lower-case characters has a total of 53 trillion billion combinations.

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 March: Radio Caroline

Radio Caroline Began broadcasting on this date in 1964. 10 things you might not know about Radio Caroline.

1. The station was born at a time when pop music got very little air time on BBC Radio. Young people wanting to listen to pop Music on the radio could only do so for about an hour a week, as The BBC catered mainly to older audiences.

2. It was founded by a musician and manager from Ireland, called Ronan O'Rahilly, who had applied to the BBC to get them to play a record by one of his contracted artists, one Georgie Fame, and been turned down.

3. O'Rahilly obtained a former Danish passenger ferry called Fredericia which he took to the Irish port of Greenore to be fitted out as a radio ship. She was then renamed MV Caroline and her port of registry changed to Panama. She was the first of a number of ships used to broadcast the station. Others were used as a result of mergers with other offshore stations or replacements for ships that were wrecked or seized. Other vessels included Mi Amigo and Ross Revenge. The latter was a former fishing trawler which had (91 m) high mast, the tallest on any ship in the world.

4. Why Caroline? We don’t know for sure, but there are three different theories. One was that O'Rahilly was inspired by a picture he’d seen of Caroline Kennedy, playing with her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., in the Oval Office. Another theory is that it was named after someone O'Rahilly knew, probably Caroline Maudling, daughter of the British government minister Reginald Maudling. The third theory is that it wasn’t named for a real person at all, but a concept of a target audience. For a time, Radio Caroline shared an office with a music magazine, Queen, whose target audience according to its editor was "a twenty something, non intellectual who had left school at 16, and was a ‘good time’ girl called Caroline." Which, it was decided, was also the target audience for the radio station.

5. Some big names in the broadcasting world started their careers on Radio Caroline. They include Tony Blackburn, Simon Dee, Tony Prince, Spangles Muldoon, Johnnie Walker, Dave Lee Travis, Tommy Vance and Emperor Rosko. For one weekend in 1965 the regular DJs were joined by a singer called Sylvan Whittingham, who visited to promote her new single and then couldn’t leave due to a storm. She spent the time mucking in and helping to present programmes and create jingles.

6. In 1967, the UK Government enacted the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 which essentially meant companies weren’t allowed to advertise on it, which caused serious financial problems and several offshore stations, for want of a better word, went under. Caroline, however, simply moved to Dutch waters, out of the law’s jurisdiction. They stayed there until 1974, when the Netherlands enacted a similar law, at which point they moved to Spain.

7. The first programme was pre recorded and presented by Chris Moore. The opening show on the Ross Revenge was presented by Tom Anderson, who had been the one to broadcast the final goodbye from the sinking Mi Amigo in 1980.

8. There was once a murder associated with the station. In 1965, Caroline was in negotiations to take over another station, Radio City, which broadcast from a Second World War marine fort called Shivering Sands Army Fort, off the Kent coast. One Major Oliver Smedley entered into a partnership with Radio City's owner, Reginald Calvert, and had a more powerful transmitter installed on the fort. This transmitter didn’t work. Calvert didn’t pay for it and Smedley withdrew from the deal. Smedley later took a bunch of workmen to the fort to repossess the transmitter as it would still have useful parts. Calvert wasn’t happy about that and showed up at Smedley’s house asking for the transmitter back. There was a fight which ended with Calvert being shot dead. Smedley was charged with Calvert's murder, later reduced to a charge of manslaughter. The jury acquitted him.

9. As well as pop music, Radio Caroline used to broadcast shows by American Evangelists, who would pay handsomely for late night slots, perhaps hoping to reach young pop fans. This helped make ends meet during the time when advertising was outlawed.

10. Radio Caroline still exists today, but it’s not broadcast from a ship these days. The station now broadcasts on 648 AM across much of England and DAB radio in certain areas, and you can also listen to it 24 hours a day on The Internet.

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/

26 July: Esperanto Day

Today is Esperanto Day. Here are 10 things you might not know about Esperanto.

1. Esperanto is a constructed language created by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof. He was born in 1859 in Bialystok, a multi-ethnic city that is in present-day Poland. Growing up there, he witnessed many arguments between people who spoke different languages. This gave him the idea of creating an entirely new language that was simple to learn, to bring people together. He eventually gave up his career as an eye doctor to concentrate on Esperanto, and became known as Doktoro Esperanto (Dr. Esperanto).

2. At first, he thought about reviving Latin as a universal language, but concluded that it was too complicated.

3. It was initially known as “International Language” but the early speakers began referring to it as Esperanto in 1889. “Esperanto” translates to “one who hopes.”

4. Today is Esperanto Day because it was on this date in 1887 that Zamenhof published the first book of Esperanto grammar.

5. Esperanto uses root words from the romance languages. It has one definitive article and no indefinite articles. Nouns have no gender, and verbs are all regular with only one form per tense. The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters and is based on the Latin alphabet. It doesn’t include Q, w, X and Y, and adds ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ.

6. The World Esperanto Association has a membership of 120 countries, but no country has adopted it as an official language. A small territory called Neutral Moresnet, between what is today Belgium and Germany, proposed to adopt it, but the first world war got in the way. Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is the name given to the collection of places where it is spoken.

7. Esperanto has a Flag. It features a green five-pointed star against a white canton, upon a field of green. It was proposed to Zamenhof by Richard Geoghegan, author of the first Esperanto textbook for English speakers, in 1887.

8. There are about 2 million speakers worldwide with about a thousand who were taught it from birth by their parents. It’s most popular in Europe, Asia and South America but there are speakers on other continents, too. In Africa, Togo has the most speakers.

9. Esperanto was added to Google Translate as its 64th language on February 22, 2012. Duolingo has an Esperanto course, and over 1 million people have started it. Esperanto Wikipedia (Vikipedio) is the 36th-largest Wikipedia by number of articles (359,000)

10. William Auld is a writer whose literary work in Esperanto has received three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1999, 2004, and 2006.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback

E book

25 April: Guglielmo Marconi

This date in 1874 saw the birth of Radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. 10 facts you might not know about him:

1. His mother was from Wexford, Ireland, and her grandfather was John Jameson, the founder of Whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons). It was those connections which helped Marconi establish his company in London in 1897.

2. He was educated at home by a series of private tutors hired by his parents.

3. He developed an interest in radio waves at a young age and by the age of 20 was experimenting with them in his attic at home with help from his butler, Mignani. Marconi correctly surmised, even then, that he would eventually be able to connect any two points on earth by wireless, even though the physics establishment of the time dismissed the possibility.

4. He married twice. His first wife was The Hon. Beatrice O'Brien, a daughter of The 14th Baron Inchiquin. They married in 1905 and honeymooned on Brownsea Island. Beatrice served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elena. They divorced in 1924 and Marconi married Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali, daughter of Francesco, Count Bezzi-Scali. Before he could marry her, he had to be confirmed in the Catholic faith. For unexplained reasons, Marconi left his entire fortune to his second wife and their only child, and nothing to the children of his first marriage.

5. Marconi built the world’s first international shortwave broadcast station, Vatican Radio, which went on the air in 1931. That year, he introduced the first radio broadcast of a Pope, Pius XI. Marconi said, "With the help of God, who places so many mysterious forces of nature at man's disposal, I have been able to prepare this instrument which will give to the faithful of the entire world the joy of listening to the voice of the Holy Father". A street in the Vatican Gardens is named after Marconi.

6. He won the Nobel prize for physics in 1909, the first inventor-entrepreneur to win one. It was also the first time the prize had been awarded for a practical application rather than theoretical accomplishments. He shared the prize with German physicist Ferdinand Braun. Had it not been for public worries about the safety of flying machines, however, the prize that year would probably have gone to the Wright Brothers.

7. After his invention played a vital role in rescuing survivors of the Titanic, which was fitted with a transmitter and was able to send a distress signal to the Carpathia, Marconi was one of the witnesses called by the US Senate Inquiry into the disaster. He advocated that ships at sea should be obliged to operate their wireless equipment round the clock, which was endorsed by the committee.

8. During World War I, Marconi was placed in charge of the Italian military's radio service. In 1929, he was made a marquess by King Victor Emmanuel III. He was, however, a member of the Fascist party. In 1930, Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council. The story that the Italian dictator was the best man at Marconi’s second wedding is not true, however. Marconi invited Mussolini to his wedding, but Mussolini said he was too busy and only sent a telegram.

9. Marconi lived on a boat for a couple of decades. It was a 220-foot yacht called Elettra (or “spark”), built for an Austrian prince. Marconi bought it from the British government after the First World War. He equipped it with a wireless research lab and a staff of 35, and named his youngest daughter Elettra.

10. Marconi died in Rome on 20 July 1937 at age 63. Over the previous three years he’d suffered eight heart attacks. The ninth killed him. When Marconi died, radio stations all over the world went silent in his honour. The largest wreath at his funeral was sent by Adolph Hitler.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback

E book

20 April: The Chinese language

Today is Chinese Language Day. 10 things you might not know about the Chinese language:

1. It is one of the oldest languages on Earth. Chinese writing, dating back to 1250 BC have been found, engraved on animal bones.

2. It doesn’t have an alphabet, but uses pictorial characters, not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs. Chinese is, in fact, the only pictorial language still in use today.

3. And it’s used by a lot of people: something like 1.3 billion, or 15% of the people in the world. It’s not only spoken in China but also in Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.

4. Mandarin is the most widely spoken form of the language, and the official language of China. However, there are many other forms, including Wu, Xiang, Cantonese, Putonghua, Min, Hakka and Gan.

5. There are over 50,000 distinct Chinese characters, with more being added every year as the language evolves. The good news for anyone thinking of learning Chinese, is that you only need to know about 2,500 characters to read a Chinese newspaper. You could probably manage without the most complicated character, “biang”, which is made up of 57 strokes and has to be written twice. It’s an unofficial character representing the sound of noodles being banged against a table.

6. The spoken language is tonal, which means that the same word can mean several different things depending on the pitch or tone which is used. For example, in Mandarin, the syllable "ma" can mean "mother," "hemp," "horse," or "scold," depending on the tone.

7. Chinese has no articles, verb inflections, or plurals; no masculine, feminine or neuter words. There is no word for “yes”, either. If a Chinese speaker wants to affirm something, they repeat a key verb or phrase from the question. For example, the answer to “Are you coming?” would be “Coming.”

8. Learning Chinese is said to be good for the Brain because it uses a range of different functions including recognising pictures and interpreting tones.

9. Chinese has been an official United Nations language since 1946, but it wasn’t used for the UN General Assembly until 1973.

10. Chinese texts were written right to left because in ancient times, they didn’t use pens, but brushes. This was the best way to write so that the writing didn’t smudge.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback

E book

14 February: The Speaking Clock

The first telephone speaking clock went into operation in Paris on this date in 1933. The UK followed suit on 24 July 1936. Here are 10 things you might not know about the speaking clock:

1. It used to be known as TIM, despite the voice being female up to 1985. This was because in the early days, people accessed the service by dialling those letters on a dial phone (846). At least, they did in the six biggest cities. Other exchanges used other numbers. By the 1990s it had been standardised to 123 in all parts of the UK.

2. Before the railways came along it wasn’t that important for every part of the country to be using the same time. Using the sun as a guide, local times would differ. Cornwall, for example, would be 20 minutes behind London. When people started travelling by train it suddenly mattered what time it was elsewhere. The phrase “passing the time of day” originated from people who would go to meet the train from London, on which there would be people who had set their Watches to London time and could tell you what the time was in London as well as imparting all the latest city gossip. In due course, people would call the telephone exchange to settle arguments about what time it was.

3. The first person to call the speaking clock was the then Astronomer Royal, Harold Spencer Jones. The voice he heard was that of Ethel Jane Cain, a telephonist who had won a competition to become the “Golden Voice”.

4. At time of writing, there have been five permanent voices. Ethel Cain’s voice was used until 1963, and then it was one Pat Simmons, another telephonist, who was the voice until 1985. An interesting fact here was that one of the two original machines, which had been working all that time, finally failed on the day Pat Simmons died. Brian Cobby was the third permanent voice from 1985 to 2007. He was an assistant supervisor at a telephone exchange in Brighton but before he worked for BT he recorded the “5-4-3- 2-1…Thunderbirds are go!” for the theme tune to Gerry Anderson’s TV series. The next voice was Sara Mendes da Costa from 2007 to 2016; and at time of writing the speaking clock’s voice belongs to Alan Steadman, who took over in 2016. On occasion, celebrity voices are used for short periods in aid of charities. Celebrities who have lent their voices to the speaking clock include Lenny Henry, Kimberley Walsh, Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, Gary Barlow, Chris Moyles, David Walliams, Fearne Cotton, Davina McCall, Ian McKellen, Jo Brand and Clare Balding, who, instead of the usual pips had a barking dog, so she’d say “at the third woof.”

5. The mechanism used at the beginning was an array of motors, Glass discs, photocells and valves. It took up the floorspace of a small room. The equipment involved in the current clock uses no more space than a suitcase.

6. During the Cold War, the British Telecom speaking clock network was designed to be used in case of nuclear attack to broadcast messages from Strike Command at RAF High Wycombe to HANDEL units at regional police stations, to tell them when to sound the sirens. The reason for using this rather than a dedicated system was that the government could be confident that it would work. It was effectively always under test; users would report faults on the line which could be promptly fixed rather than relying on a separate system which was only used when there was a war, and could fail at the critical moment.

7. So how does it cope with the occasional leap second, used to keep the clocks in synch over time? When a leap second is due, a second’s pause is added before the third beep.

8. When the speaking clock was first launched calls to the service cost one penny from home. Today a call costs about 40 times that much.

9. Between 1986 and 2008, the message included the phrase "sponsored by Accurist"; Accurist withdrew their sponsorship in 2008.

10. You’d think in modern times, with computers and accurate watches there’d be no need for a speaking clock, but according to The BBC, 3 million people a year still call it. So why? In a small number of cases, it might be people who just want to hear a human voice. Brian Cobby used to receive fan mail from people who used the service late at night just to hear his calm voice. Mostly, though, it’s when knowing the exact time to the second is crucial. It’s said that calls to the service peak just before five o'clock, when call-centre staff want to avoid picking up a 20-minute call from an irate customer. There are four days of the year when calls to the service peak. These are: the two days when the clocks change (so people can check whether the clock on a device has updated itself, for example); Remembrance Day (so the two minutes silence can begin at precisely eleven o’clock); and of course, New Year's Eve.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback

E book

22 October: Titbits

On this date in 1881 the first edition of the British magazine Titbits was published. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. The magazine was founded by George Newnes, who, a couple of months earlier had read a story about a runaway train in the Manchester Evening News. He owned a restaurant at the time and thought stories like this would give his customers something interesting to read while they were eating. ‘Why not start a weekly journal made up of similar pieces from ‘all the most interesting books, periodicals and newspapers in the world’? he thought.

2. Nobody was prepared to fund the idea, so Newnes put together the Money for a modest print run himself.

3. On its first day of publication, 5,000 copies of his magazine had been sold. By the turn of the century, it had became the first periodical in Britain to sell over a million copies per issue.

4. As well as interesting news stories, the magazine also featured short stories and full-length fiction, written by some of the big names in the literary world, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse.

5. Virginia Woolf, aged eight, submitted her first article to the paper in 1890. They turned it down.

6. During the First World War Tit-Bits (the hyphen was dropped in 1973) ran a competition to write a song soldiers could sing at the front. It was won by Ivor Novello with Keep the Home Fires Burning.

7. Newnes read every issue from cover to cover and removed anything he considered unduly lurid, sensational or equivocal. No doubt he turned in his grave, then, when in 1939, pin-ups replaced advertisements on its front cover.

8. In Ulysses, James Joyce has his protagonist reading Tit-Bits on the Toilet, and wishing he could publish a story in it. This is one of many mentions the magazine gets in literature. Other authors who mention it include George Orwell (Animal Farm), C. P. Snow (The Affair) Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being) HG Wells (The First Men in the Moon) and P. G. Wodehouse (Not George Washington). It gets a nod in the movies, too. In the final scene of Kind Hearts and Coronets, Arthur Lowe plays a Tit-Bits reporter who asks the Duke of Chalfont to print his memoirs, in which he confesses to mass murder.

9. The last issue was published on 18 July 1984, and the editor at the time was Paul Hopkins. There had been a merger with another magazine called Reveille, and a wage dispute but what probably saw it off was falling circulation. Titbits was then selling only 200,000 copies per issue.

10. A word about the word. The first recorded use of the word “titbit” was in 1649, although it was at the time spelled “tyd bit” and was defined as “a speciall morsell reserved to eat at last”.

NEW!!

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback

E book

23 September: Sign Language

Today is International Day of Sign Languages. Ten things you might not know about sign language:

1. Signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, but people unable to physically speak, or who have trouble with oral language due to a disability often use it as well.

2. One of the earliest written records of a sign language dates to fifth century BC. In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates says: "If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?"

3. Diarist Samuel Pepys mentions it too. In his diary, he described a conversation between George Downing and a deaf boy in November 1666: "But, above all, there comes in the dumb boy that I knew in Oliver's time, who is mightily acquainted here, and with Downing; and he made strange signs of the fire, and how the King was abroad, and many things they understood, but I could not…"

4. Today, there is no universal sign language. Each country has its own native sign language; some have more than one. the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and states that there may be many more which haven’t been discovered yet.

5. As of 2021, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the most-used sign language in the world.

6. In Britain, British Sign Language (BSL) is most commonly used. It’s not, however, the same as the English spoken language. A profoundly deaf person may consider BSL as their first language, and English their second. For example, some English words don’t have an equivalent sign, and a single sign can represent a whole sentence in English. The rules of grammar are different, too. The question ‘What is your name?’ would be expressed ‘Your name what’ along with a raised Eyebrow or tilt of the head to signify a question.

7. It takes seven years to fully qualify as a BSL interpreter.

8. BSL has been around for centuries but only became a recognised language by the British Government in 2003. Some schools even banned it in order to force deaf children to learn English and lip-reading. However, from 2025 it will be possible to study for GCSE in BSL.

9. For names and places or words for which there is no sign, fingerspelling is used. A BSL user may fingerspell their name when first introduced to a new person, but they’ll often have a “sign name” as well, which is shorter so people won’t have to fingerspell the entire name whenever it crops up in a conversation.

10. The British Sign Language Dictionary was published in 1992 and lists over 1,800 signs through pictures and diagrams. The foreword was written by Princess Diana, who was the patron of the British Deaf Association.

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21 August: Messages in bottles

On this date in 2015 a bottle with a letter inside by British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III was discovered by a woman on holiday in Germany. The bottle dating from 1906, if confirmed, would be the world's oldest message in a bottle found to date.

1. The first documents messages in bottles were said to have been released in 310BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, as part of a scientific experiment. He wanted to prove his theory that the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean.

2. In the days before modern communication, writing a message and putting it in a bottle was often the only way passengers and crew of a sinking ship could communicate with the world. It probably wouldn’t result in a rescue, so it was often a desperate attempt to express their love and final words to people at home in the slim hope someone would find it one day. Messages in bottles did sometimes throw light on what had happened to a missing vessel. A bottle sent from the SS Naronic in 1893, found three years later in England, confirmed that the ship had sunk after hitting an Iceberg.

3. There have been occasions when sending a bottled message has resulted in rescue, examples being some South American refugees abandoned at sea in 2005, and an Italian ship captured by Somali pirates in 2011.

4. In Elizabethan times, opening a bottle with a message in it could have got you in big trouble. Queen Elizabeth I allegedly believed that spies used this method to communicate with one another. She is said to have created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles". Anyone other than the holder of that title could face the death penalty for opening a bottled message.

5. Messages in bottles were common enough in the Victorian and Edwardian periods that newspapers had regular columns devoted to them. If you’re interested in the kind of things these messages said, there’s a book you can get which is a compilation of them. It’s called Messages from the Sea and the author is Paul Brown.

6. It has even been suggested that Christopher Columbus released one on his way home from discovering America. During a severe storm which he thought his ship might not survive, he allegedly wrote a message on parchment to Queen Isabella, about what he’d found in the New World. He wrapped it in waxed cloth, put it in a barrel and threw it overboard. The message was never found, but Columbus made it home and presumably gave the information to the Queen in person.

7. It was estimated in 2009 that since the mid-1900s, six million bottled messages had been released. Oceanographers studying currents account for 500,000 of them.

8. Nowadays, of course, you’d think twice about releasing a message in a bottle because of environmental concerns, so you might consider using something biodegradable like the poet in the Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike who inscribed his message on planks of wood.

9. Aside from science and messages to loved ones, messages in bottles have been used by people looking for pen pals, by evangelists to spread the word of God and by governments wanting to spread propaganda. The term has been used as well to describe messages sent into outer space such as on the Voyager probes.

10. Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe both wrote stories about messages in bottles, as did Nicholas Sparks in more recent times. Message in a Bottle has also been used as an episode title in Star Trek Voyager and Stargate SG1, and both The Police and Taylor Swift have recorded songs with that title.

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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28 July: Singing telegrams

On this date in 1933, the singing telegram was introduced. 10 things you might not know about them:

1. A singing telegram is a message delivered by an artist in a musical form. They tend to be humorous with the artist in a costume of some kind.

2. Early singing telegrams were delivered by means of a phone call rather than in person.

3. George P. Oslin, a Western Union public relations director, promoted the idea to make telegrams more popular, since they were usually associated with bad news.

4. The first person to receive a singing telegram was singer Rudy Vallee, in honour of his 32nd birthday, from a fan.

5. The Postal Telegraph-Cable Company delivered the first singing telegram. Many sources say it was Western Union, probably because the two companies merged soon after.

6. The telephone operator who delivered the singing telegram to Vallee was called Lucille Lipps.

7. Rudy Vallee wasn’t very impressed, however. He dismissed it as “a phony stunt by the publicity people”.

8. Oslin’s bosses weren’t impressed either. They told him he was “making a laughingstock of the company.” Nevertheless, Western Union didn’t drop singing telegrams until 1974.

9. Other companies still offered the service, though, including one called Western Onion. However, there has been a decline in demand thanks to modern phones and the ability to send a song via a video.

10. Variations of the singing telegram are the kissogram and the stripogram, where the message is delivered with a kiss and/or a striptease.

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle