18 October: Azerbaijan Independence Day

Azerbaijan declared Independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Here are some things you may not know about the country:

1. The country first became a republic in May 1918, but this republic only lasted 23 months before Lenin noticed there was a lot of oil there and invaded in order to absorb it into the Soviet Union. 18 October 1991 was when it became independent from Russia.
2. Talking of oil. Azerbaijan was the location of the world's first oil well in the nineteenth century. The Nobel family of Norway, who created the much lauded Nobel prizes, acquired much of its wealth from Azerbaijan's oil industry.
3. Before that, it was also the location of the world's first fireplace, built in Azikh Cave, the largest cave in Azerbaijan, around 700,000 years ago.
4. It is probably this, and the fact that the rich oil and gas deposits would ignite and burn naturally, that gave the country its name. Azerbaijan means "Land of Fire".
5. Another first is Neft Dashlar, a town in the Caspian Sea - it was the first town ever to be built on stilts. Construction started in 1947.
6. The capital and largest city is Baku.
7. The highest peak of Azerbaijan is mount Bazardüzü (4,466 m), while the lowest point lies in the Caspian Sea (−28 m). The largest lake is Sarysu (67 km²), and the longest river is Kur (1,515 km).
8. It was the first Muslim country to grant equal political rights to women, and the first to establish a modern university.
9. Lotfi A. Zadeh, who discovered fuzzy logic, was from Azerbaijan.
10. Tea is the most popular drink, although their method of sweetening it is rather different. Instead of putting sugar in the tea, they put a lump of sugar or jam in their mouths and drink the tea through it.

17th October: Aubergine day

In the French Revolutionary calendar, today was Aubergine day, so here are 10 facts about aubergines/eggplants:

1. The aubergine goes by many different names. In France and the UK, it's an aubergine. In the USA and Canada, it's an eggplant (because early cultivated varieties were white or yellow and looked like Eggs). In India, it is called brinjal, which means "king of vegetables" because it is widely used in Indian cuisine. An old Italian term for it is "mela insana", insane Apple, and in olden times, people in the UK, too, would call it a "mad apple."
2. It's not actually a vegetable. Like a Tomato (to which it is in fact related) it is a fruit.
3. Aubergines belong to the nightshade family. Because of this, it was once thought the fruit was poisonous. It isn't, but eating large amounts of the leaves and flowers of the plants would be extremely bad for you.
4. They contain nicotine - more than any other edible plant, but you'd need to eat 20lbs (9kg) of them to get the same amount of nicotine from them as you would from smoking a cigarette.
5. Most of the world's aubergines are produced in China (58%) and India (25%), although Iran, Egypt and Turkey are also producers.
6. More than 4,000,000 acres (1,600,000 ha) are devoted to the cultivation of eggplant in the world.
7. The first known written record of the plant is found in an ancient Chinese agricultural treatise completed in 544. The first written record of it in England dates from the 16th century.
8. Japan has a proverb about eggplant: “The happiest omen for a New Year is first Mount Fuji, then the falcon, and lastly eggplant.”
9. In the 5th century, it was fashionable in China for women to dye their teeth grey, using a polish made out of the skins of purple aubergines.
10. There are many different varieties of aubergine, including 'Harris Special Hibush', 'Burpee Hybrid', 'Black Magic', 'Black Beauty', 'Little Fingers', 'Casper' and 'Easter Egg'.

16th October: Oscar Wilde

The very quotable Oscar Wilde was born this date in 1854. Here are 10 of his sayings:

1. The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
2. Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
3. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
4. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
5. Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
6. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
7. There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
8. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
9. No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
10. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

15 October: Friedrich Nietzsche

10 quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche, born on this date in 1844:

1. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
2. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
3. In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
4. All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
5. One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
6. We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
7. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
8. There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
9. To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
10. When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

14th October: Honey Bee Day

Today is Honey Bee Day, so here are some things you may not know about honey bees:

1. There are only seven species of true honey bee (members of the genus Apis), with 44 subspecies, so honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. The study of honey bees is known as apiology.
2. Worker bees have career progression. When they are young, their job is to clean the hive and feed the larvae, but after a time they lose the ability to produce the royal jelly which the larvae eat and so they move on to building honeycombs and later to defending the hive and collecting the pollen from the forager bees. Finally, they start to fly out of the hive and become foragers themselves.
3. In winter, the bees stay in the hive and cluster around the queen to keep her warm. They produce heat by shivering and can detach their wings so that they can use the wing muscles to generate heat. The bees rotate in the cluster from outside to inside so none of them get too cold. During this time the bees eat the honey they have stored to create energy and the queen stops laying until the spring. Bees also use this technique to get rid of intruders - they cluster around them and heat them up until they die of a combination of heatstroke and carbon dioxide poisoning.
4. Bees collect both nectar and pollen from flowers - nectar to make Honey and pollen for protein.
5. A queen bee has to mate within 20 days of emerging from her queen cell or she will lose the ability to do so. She only mates once, but with multiple males (who die once they've mated). She stores all the sperm and can choose whether or not to fertilise the eggs she lays (can be as many as 2,000 a day). If she chooses to fertilize an egg it becomes a female worker; if not, it becomes a male drone.
6. Honey bees are the only bee species that swarm. A mated queen and a large number of workers will swarm to a new nest site, which some of the workers will have scouted beforehand. When they all get there, they will build the nest. In other species, the queen establishes a colony on her own, or the workers build the nest before she arrives.
7. A single honey bee worker produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
8. Only female bees can sting. Male drones do not have a sting, but instead have larger eyes so that they can find the queen during her mating flight.
9. Everyone knows bees do a "waggle dance" to communicate to each other where the flowers are, but they also do a "tremble dance" which lets the worker bees know they are home and ready to have their nectar collected. Some species also do a kind of Mexican wave by flicking their wings and arching their bodies, which is intended as a warning display to would-be intruders.
10. A bee can fly at up to 15 miles per hour. This is fairly slow compared to other insects, because bees are built for short flights from flower to flower.

13th October: Face Your Fears Day

For Face Your Fears Day, 10 quotes about fear and courage:

1. If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal. Paolo Coelho
2. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Helen Keller
3. Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No-one can tell the difference. Life’s Little Instruction Book
4. It is not because it is difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult. Lucius Anneaus Seneca
5. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. Marianne Williamson
6. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the judgement that something else is more important than fear. Ambrose Redmoon
7. Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears. Rudyard Kipling
8. Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway. John Wayne
9. Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong. Peter T. Mcintyre
10. You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Christopher Columbus

12th October: Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, born this date in 1875, is said, by many to have been the "wickedest man in the world." Whether he was or not is a matter of opinion. Surely Hitler and Osama bin Laden must be in the contest, too? Read the 10 facts and decide for yourself.

1. Crowley actually had a strict religious upbringing. His father was a travelling preacher with the Plymouth Brethren and would read a chapter of the Bible to his family every day after breakfast.
2. Aleister was not Crowley's given name. His parents named him Edward Alexander, but he disliked both names and all their derivatives. Aleister is the Gaelic form of Alexander. Another reason he chose it was because, coupled with his surname, it was a favourable name for becoming famous.
3. Although he described his father as his hero and his friend, his relationship with his mother was not good at all. She called him "the Beast" (which he secretly rather liked). Some scholars believe that his misogynistic views in later life may have stemmed from the dysfunctional relationship with his mother.
4. Crowley was a keen mountaineer and during his life he climbed Beachy Head, the Eiger, Trift, Jungfrau, Mönch, and Wetterhorn. He attempted K2, which had never been climbed at that point, but had to turn back. He also attempted to climb Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, widely recognised as the world's most treacherous mountain. On this expedition, he didn't get on with the rest of the team, who thought he was too reckless. In the end, the team mutinied and turned back, even though it was near nightfall. Crowley warned then that this was very dangerous, but they didn't listen to him and set off anyway. On the way down there was an accident and several of them were killed. The mountaineering community blamed Crowley for this, even though he had actually tried to stop them.
5. He was also very keen on chess and considered becoming a professional chess player.
6. For a while, he owned a house on the shores of Loch Ness.
7. Known for having countless affairs with both men and women, when Crowley married, it was, to begin with, a marriage of convenience so that his wife, Rose, would not have to enter into an arranged marriage. However, during their honeymoon, he fell in love with her for real.
8. He was hired by George Montagu Bennett, the Earl of Tankerville, to help protect him from witchcraft. Crowley recognised that witchcraft had nothing to do with Bennett's paranoia, but rather, it was caused by cocaine addiction, and a long holiday to France and Morocco should do the trick. In later life, Crowley himself became addicted to heroin (after his doctor prescribed it to him for his severe asthma) and cocaine.
9. Many believe that Crowley was recruited as a spy while at Cambridge. He has been criticised for appearing to support Germany in World War I and writing for an American pro-German magazine - but in actual fact, he was spying for Britain at the time, and the articles he wrote were excessively hyperbolic and intended to make the magazine and its supporters look ridiculous to the American public. Some of the travelling he did was thought by some to be intelligence gathering missions.
10. While widely described as a Satanist, Crowley would never have described himself as such. He didn't worship Satan because, having rejected the Christianity he was brought up with, he didn't believe that Satan even existed.