14 November: Great White Whale Day

 In 1851, one of the world's greatest novels, Moby Dick, was published, which is why today is Great White Whale Day. 10 things you may not know about whales:

1. There are over 80 different species of whale. They range in size from the blue whale, the largest animal known to have ever existed at 30 m (98 ft) and 180 tonnes (180 long tons; 200 short tons), to pygmy species such as the pygmy sperm whale at 3.5 m (11 ft). Technically, Dolphins and porpoises belong to a branch of the whale family although most people view them as something separate.
2. Whales are the Hippopotamus's closest living relatives.
3. The shape of a whale's spout can help identify which species it is.
4. Whales are born tail first, to minimise the risk of drowning.
5. Whale milk is so rich in fats that it is the consistency of toothpaste. The female feeds her young by squirting the milk into its mouth. A baby blue whale may drink over 100 gallons of milk a day.
6. Scientists have found that baleen whales possess an organ that no other animal on earth has - the size of a grapefruit and located on their chins. They don't know what this organ is for, but are speculating that it has something to do with filtering out the vast amounts of water (sometimes as much as their own body weight) that they take in while feeding.
7. Female humped back whales have best friends. They reunite with their friends each year, and feed side by side, just hanging out together.
8. Whales in captivity have been known to try and communicate with humans by imitating human speech, and wild whales take a great interest in music played underwater, sometimes even seeming to dance to it.
9. Whales have been known to adopt other creatures. For example, a pod of sperm whales were observed to have a deformed bottlenosed dolphin hanging out with them. It seems likely the dolphin was rejected by its own kind because it couldn't keep up with them, and latched on to the slower moving whales for social contact. Scientists aren't sure why the whales were so happy to let the dolphin join their group. Beluga whales have been known to carry planks and other flotsam around like surrogate calves.
10. When whales die, their massive bodies sink to the bottom of the sea, and become mini eco-systems for scavengers, Bacteria, crustaceans who live among the bones, and finally organisms that live off the nutrients produced by the breakdown of the carcass. Scientists have observed around 185 different species living off the body of a single whale, for several years.

13th November: Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born on this date in 1850. Here are 10 quotes:

1. No man is useless while he has a friend.
2. Wine is bottled poetry.
3. Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
4. Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
5. You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
6. Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
7. The cruellest lies are often told in silence.
8. You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
9. I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
10. If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

12th November: Happy Hour Day

10 things you might not know about Happy Hour:

1. Today is Happy Hour Day, say many websites; because, they say, the first happy hour took place on this date in 1745, at a pub in Ireland. However, none of them say which pub it was or any more information than that.
2. Other sources like Wikipedia say that happy hours didn't start in Ireland at all, but in the USA. The first happy hours were social events on US Navy ships during the first world war, where sailors could get together for a smoke.
3. Happy hours connected to alcohol started during the prohibition. People couldn't get a drink with their meal in a restaurant, so they'd go to a speakeasy for a few cocktails before dinner.
4. Happy hours are actually banned in 23 US states, including Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina and Utah.
5. Other states are more relaxed - Pennsylvania, for example, doubled the duration of happy hours from two to four hours in 2011, and in 2012, Kansas re-instated them after a 26 year ban.
6. Happy hours may have started in Ireland, but they have been illegal there since 2003.
7. The original meaning of "happy hour" was pleasant times, and as such has been around for centuries. Shakespeare used the term in King Henry V: "Therefore, my lords, omit no happy hour That may give furtherance to our expedition..."
8. You know you're getting old when "happy hour" means a nap.
9. Happy hour is an excuse to eliminate that little bit of Blood that made it into your alcohol stream today.
10. Happy Hour is a 1986 song by The Housemartins, which reached number 3 in the charts.

11 November: Elevens

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, here are 10 interesting facts about the number 11:

1. In English, eleven is the smallest positive integer with three syllables, and is the first number which cannot be represented by a human counting on their fingers and thumbs.
2. 11 is the atomic number of the element sodium.
3. Apollo 11 was the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon.
4. After Judas Iscariot was disgraced, eleven apostles remained. Even though Judas was replaced by Matthias, the apostles were still frequently referred to as "the eleven."
5. Many people claim to be spooked out by repeatedly seeing 11:11 on digital clocks, and believe there is a spiritual significance to it; that it is a cosmic wake up call, that their DNA is being activated, or they are about to meet their twin flame.
6. It is common for young people, when noticing this combination of numbers, to stop what they are doing and make a wish.
7. Eleven is the number of people on a team in several sports: Soccer, cricket, field hockey and American football. In cricket, the 11th batsman is usually the weakest one (usually someone who is on the team because he or she is good at bowling).
8. The maple leaf on the Canadian Flag has 11 points.
9. If a number is divisible by 11, reversing its digits will result in another multiple of 11.
10. In London, the number 11 bus is said to be the cheapest way to sightsee, as it passes King's Road, Sloane Square, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Churchill War Rooms, The Cenotaph, Downing Street, Horse Guards Parade, Mansion House, the Bank of England, Admiralty Arch, Big Ben, Palace of Westminster and New Scotland Yard.

November 10th: Screaming Lord Sutch

Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party was born on this date in 1940.

1. Screaming Lord Sutch is Britain's longest-serving party leader, having led the Official Monster Raving Loony Party from 1983 to 1999.
2. Before entering politics, he was a musician. Although he freely admitted that he wasn't a great singer, he staged a horror themed stage show based on Jack the Ripper, in the 1960s.
3. He once co-owned a radio station with his manager, Reginald Calvert. They took over Shivering Sands Army Fort, a Maunsell Fort off Southend in 1964 and started Radio Sutch, to compete with other pirate radio stations such as Radio Caroline. Broadcasts consisted of music and Mandy Rice-Davies reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. Sutch got bored with it, though, and Calvert bought him out and ran it as Radio City until 1967.
4. Before the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Sutch represented the National Teenage Party.
5. Sutch founded the the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in 1983. He never won any of the 40 or more elections he contested - he often stood directly against existing party leaders - and although he sometimes gained a respectable number of votes, his highest ever share was 4.2%.
6. The party had better results in council elections and did take a couple of council seats from the Tories in the late 80s and early 90s.
7. Nevertheless, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party did help shape British politics in a couple of ways. It was after Sutch polled several hundred votes in Margaret Thatcher's Finchley constituency in 1983 that the deposit paid by candidates was raised from £150 to £500, to try and deter non-serious candidates. Sutch merely put on music concerts to raise the money and carried on. Then, in the Bootle by-election in 1990, he got more votes than the candidate of the Continuing Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by former Foreign Secretary David Owen. Devastated that they couldn't even beat the Raving Loonies, the SDP dissolved itself within days.
8. Not all Raving Loony policies were completely daft. Some of them actually became law, for example, votes at 18, "passports for pets", and all-day pub openings first appeared in Loony manifestos.
9. Screaming Lord Sutch, suffering from clinical depression after the death of his mother, Annie, in 1998, committed suicide on 16 June 1999. This didn't spell the end of the party, though. The members held a ballot, and the result was a tie between Alan "Howling Laud" Hope and his cat, Catmando so they became joint leaders. The cat sadly died in 2002, leaving Hope to lead the party by himself, as he does to this day.
10. Although Sutch never won an election in real life, he has done in some alternative realities. In the ITV comedy The New Statesman, he came second in the 1987 election, ahead of Labour and SDP. In The 2009 adventure game, Time Gentlemen, Please! the OMRLP were voted in and handed Britain over to the United States, allowing it to become the 51st state.

9th November: Remembrance Sunday/Poppy Day

World War I ended on 11 November, but many of the observances take place on the nearest Sunday to that date, ie today. 10 things you might not know about Remembrance Day traditions:

1. The UK's national ceremony is held in London at the Cenotaph on Whitehall and, since 2002, also at the Women's Memorial. It is organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with The Royal British Legion coordinating the March Past. It consists of the laying of wreaths by members of the royal family, Politicians and representatives of both military and civilian services, the two minutes' silence at 11am and the march past.
2. The music used in the march past is the same every year, and includes Rule, Britannia!, Heart of Oak, Men of Harlech, The Skye Boat Song, Isle of Beauty, Nimrod from the Enigma Variations The Last Post, O God, Our Help in Ages Past and ends with the national anthem, God Save The Queen.
3. The ceremony is the joint-longest running live televised annual event in the world, the record being shared with the Chelsea Flower Show, having been broadcast every year since 1946. The 1947 telerecording of the ceremony is the oldest surviving record of a broadcast of a live outside event.
4. The poppy symbol comes from a poem written by a Canadian doctor, Colonel John McCrae, the day after he had conducted the funeral of his friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, who had been killed by a mortar. Sitting in an ambulance and looking out over a graveyard where poppies were growing, he put all his anger and grief into that poem, which took him 20 minutes to write.
5. The poem nearly never saw the light of day at all. McCrae actually didn't think it was very good, and threw it away. Luckily, a fellow officer rescued it.
6. The tradition of wearing a poppy was started by Moina Michael, who was working in the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries' headquarters in New York. She read McCrae's poem, and was so moved that she wore one in remembrance two days before the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.
7. He wasn't the first to notice poppies growing on a battlefield, though. A writer in the 19th century is believed to have noted that the bright red flower, the colour of blood, seemed to sprout on the formerly barren fields after the battles of the Napoleonic wars had ended.
8. Today, there is disagreement about when you should start wearing your poppy. Some say it should be from 1 November, others say from the launch of the annual appeal in late October. However, it's generally agreed that nobody should be wearing one on November 12th as strictly speaking, they should have been left at a tomb or cenotaph during the ceremony.
9. Submariners hold an additional remembrance walk and ceremony on the Sunday before Remembrance Sunday, which has The Submariners Memorial as its focal point.
10. The Last Post bugle call originated in the British Army in the 17th century. An officer, accompanied by a bugler, would check to see whether soldiers were in their barracks for the night. The first post meant his rounds had started and those still not back at base should return. The ‘last post’ indicated that the sentries were in place for the night, and that soldiers could retire for the evening.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

John Macrae 

8th November: Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker, author of the original Dracula story, was born on this date in 1847.

1. He was distantly related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
2. He was bedridden with a mystery illness until the age of seven, when he completely recovered and went on to become a star athlete at his university, Trinity College, Dublin.
3. His first writing job was as a theatre critic. A favourable review of Henry Irving's Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin led to a dinner invitation from Irving, and a lifelong friendship.
4. Stoker's first novel was The Snake's Pass in 1890. Dracula followed seven years later.
5. Stoker was an artist as well as a writer and was a founder of the Dublin Sketching Club in 1874.
6. The original manuscript of Dracula was discovered in the 1980s. It was typed, and heavily corrected, but the main difference was the title - it was titled "The Un-Dead" rather than Dracula, suggesting that Stoker had changed his mind about the title at the last minute.
7. Although widely travelled, Stoker never visited Eastern Europe, where his most famous novel was set. Instead, he claimed that the English town of Whitby inspired the work.
8. Stoker's wife, Florence, had previously been courted by Oscar Wilde.
9. The first film adaptation of Dracula was released in 1922 and was named Nosferatu. It was directed by F. W. Murnau and starred Max Schreck as Count Orlock.
10. Florence Stoker was still alive then, and sued the producers because they had not asked her permission to make the film, and, having done so, did not pay her any money. She demanded that the negatives and all copies of the film be destroyed. She won the case, but some copies managed to escape the carnage, so the film survived to become well known today.

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Go to Amazon Kindle Store for the e-book and a free "Look inside" excerpt;

CreateSpace or Amazon for the paperback. (The link takes you to Amazon.co.uk, but it should be available in other countries' Amazon sites as well).

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Or visit my other blog which showcases my writing for an excerpt of Death and Faxes and other stuff. http://juliehowlinwriter.blogspot.co.uk/