7 June: Beau Brummell

George 'Beau' Brummell was credited with introducing and establishing as fashion the modern man's suit, worn with a tie. He was born this date in 1778.10 things you might not know about him.

1. He was born in London and was the son of William Brummell, a middle class politician. His full name was George Bryan Brummell. His father wanted him to be brought up as a gentleman and sent him to school at Eton and later, Oxford. His reputation for dressing well began at school when he adapted and modernised the school uniform. He was popular at school and was known as “Buck Brummell” to his schoolmates.
2. He had a brief sporting career at school, playing for his school's first eleven at Cricket and one match for Hampshire at Lord's, but he wasn't that keen on cricket. He once horrified one of his teachers by declaring that he thought cricket was "foolish".
3. After university, he joined the 10th Hussars as a cornet, the lowest rank of commissioned officer. It was there he met George, Prince of Wales, and the two became friends. It didn't go down well with the rest of the regiment when the prince used his influence to get Brummell promoted, even though he'd done all he could to avoid drills and exercises. His military career came to an end when the regiment was relocated to Manchester. Brummell resigned because he wanted to stay in London with his friend Prince George. He took a house on Chesterfield Street in Mayfair and started mixing with high society circles.
4. Although his father had died and left him about £30,000, a lot of money back then, he was careful with Money, at least to begin with. He kept horses, but wouldn't spend money on carriages. For a while, he managed to avoid getting drawn into gambling with his richer friends, but in time they exerted their influence and he started gambling, even though he couldn't really afford to. As a friend of the prince, he was always able to borrow the money to pay any gambling debts.
5. When Prince George became Regent, he abandoned his old friends. He'd snub them. One day the prince greeted several friends but ignored Brummell, who turned to one of them, Lord Alvanley, and remarked, "Alvanley, who's your fat friend?" After that, he and the prince were no longer friends but he still had many friends in high society and was still a leader in fashion.
6. Brummell would probably have strongly disapproved of being called a "dandy". He didn't dress in bright colours, maintaining that the cut and the tailoring of outfits was the important thing. His favourite style was a dark coat with full length trousers, a waistcoat and a cravat. This style evolved into the suit and tie which is standard wear for men today. When asked how much it would cost per year to keep a young man in similar clothes, Brummell is said to have replied, "Why, with tolerable economy, I think it might be done with £800." One thing which would certainly be seen as extravagance today was that Brummell advocated cleaning one's boots with Champagne to make them shine.
7. He was particular about cleanliness, too. In a time when most people thought washing their face and arms each day was enough, Brummell took a daily hot bath. He was also particular about shaving and cleaning his teeth. He didn't drench himself in scents or perfumes, because, he said, he was clean enough not to need them.
8. It was unlikely he'd ever have showed up for a breakfast meeting. He wasn't an early riser, saying that whether it was summer or winter, he always like to "have the morning well-aired" before he got up. What's more, once he was up, his cleanliness and dressing routine was said to take him five hours. He never ate his five a day, either. Once at a dinner party, a lady observed that he had no vegetables on his plate and asked if he ever ate any veg, to which he replied, “Yes, madam, I once ate a Pea.” He was even said to have turned his back on a possible future wife because the lady in question liked Cabbage.
9. Eventually, his gambling debts caught up with him and he was forced to flee to France to escape debtor's prison. He got a position in Caen which provided a small income but his posessions, left behind in London, had to be sold to cover his debts. Among them was a snuffbox, which had a note inside it. The note read, “This snuffbox was intended for the Prince Regent, if he had conducted himself with more propriety towards me.”
10. At the end of his life, he was penniless and insane, and died eventually from strokes. His last words were said to be "My wallpaper and I are fighting a battle to the death. One of us has to go!"

Closing the Circle

A stable wormhole has been established between Earth and Infinitus. Power Blaster and his friends can finally go home.

Desi Troyes is still at large on Earth - Power Blaster has vowed to bring him to justice. His wedding to Shanna is under threat as the Desperadoes launch an attempt to rescue their leader. 

Someone from Power Blaster's past plays an unexpected and significant role in capturing Troyes.

The return home brings its own challenges. Not everyone can return to the life they left behind, and for some, there is unfinished business to be dealt with before they can start anew.

Ben Cole in particular cannot resume his old life as a surgeon because technology no longer works around him. He plans a new life in Classica, away from technology. Shanna hears there could be a way to reverse his condition and sets out to find it, putting herself in great danger. She doesn't know she is about to uncover the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious past.

Available from:

Amazon (Paperback)

Amazon Kindle

Completes The Raiders Trilogy. 

Other books in the series:

Book One

Book Two

              

June 6: Aleksandr Pushkin Quotes

Born this date in 1799, Aleksandr Pushkin, Russian Romantic author. 10 quotes from him:

1. It is better to have dreamed a thousand dreams that never were than never to have dreamed at all.
2. Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool.
3. Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.
4. Write for pleasure and publish for money.
5. Don't be sad, don't be angry, if life deceives you! Submit to your grief - your time for joy will come, believe me.
6. Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth.
7. My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?
8. Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.
9. Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.
10. I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.

Closing the Circle

A stable wormhole has been established between Earth and Infinitus. Power Blaster and his friends can finally go home.

Desi Troyes is still at large on Earth - Power Blaster has vowed to bring him to justice. His wedding to Shanna is under threat as the Desperadoes launch an attempt to rescue their leader. 

Someone from Power Blaster's past plays an unexpected and significant role in capturing Troyes.

The return home brings its own challenges. Not everyone can return to the life they left behind, and for some, there is unfinished business to be dealt with before they can start anew.

Ben Cole in particular cannot resume his old life as a surgeon because technology no longer works around him. He plans a new life in Classica, away from technology. Shanna hears there could be a way to reverse his condition and sets out to find it, putting herself in great danger. She doesn't know she is about to uncover the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious past.

Available from:

Amazon (Paperback)

Amazon Kindle

Completes The Raiders Trilogy. 

Other books in the series:

Book One

Book Two

              

5 June: Lizzie Borden

On this date in 1893, Lizzie Borden went on trial for the murder of her parents. The case inspired the popular skipping-rope rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.”

1. The crime took place in the morning of 4 August 1892. Lizzie's father Andrew and his wife, Abby, Lizzie's stepmother, were killed by an axe murderer in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The bodies were “hacked beyond almost beyond recognition”.
2. The Borden family were pretty well off. Andrew was a property developer and furniture maker. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at $300,000, - about $8.17 million in today’s money. That said, Andrew Borden had a reputation as a cheapskate, and was known to have enemies. Lizzie is known to have commented that she feared someone might harm her father because “he is so discourteous to people.” He hadn't, as many wealthy people had at the time, installed plumbing or Electricity in their house. Did Lizzie kill him for his Money? Seems unlikely as she had $1,000 in the bank, had income from rent from a property of her own, and wasn't in debt.
3. A few days before the murders, the family had all been violently ill. While it could have been simply food poisoning from re-heating mutton several times, Abby Borden had feared someone was trying to poison them. To add even more intrigue, at the trial, a local shopkeeper testified that Lizzie had tried to purchase cyanide from his drug store the day before the murders, but he'd refused to sell it to her because she didn't have a prescription.
4. Could there have been a motive other than money? Entirely possible. It doesn't sound like they were a happy family. Abby was Andrew's second wife, Lizzie's stepmother. They didn't get on - Lizzie thought she was a gold-digger and insisted on calling her "Mrs Borden". There had been tensions in the family over gifts of property Andrew had made to Abby's family. Lizzie and her sister Emma rarely ate meals with their parents, according to the maid, and just before the murders, there had been a family argument after which the sisters had gone away to New Bedford in order to get out of the house for a while.
5. Lizzie's sister, Emma, went away again soon after, and was still away when the murders occurred, so no suspicion ever fell on her. However, she did have a key to the house - she could, perhaps, have given the key to someone else and had them do the dirty deed. Could Emma and Lizzie have planned it all while they were on holiday in New Bedford? We'll never know. Emma stood by Lizzie all through the trial and afterwards, until Lizzie invited an actress Emma didn't like to a party. After that, the sisters fell out and never saw each other again.
6. Another theory which has been put forward is that Lizzie, who'd never married, was a lesbian and was having an affair with the family's maid, Bridget Sullivan. Lizzie had been brought up in a churchgoing household - she went to church regularly and used to teach Sunday School. Perhaps, speculated author Ed McBain, she had been caught doing naughty things with the maid by her parents and killed them to protect her secret. While Lizzie was subject to rumours in later life that she was gay, the same wasn't true of Bridget, who got another job and married a man she met at her new position. Not that her marriage rules out a possible dalliance when she was younger. No suspicion ever fell on the maid, either, even though she was in the house at the time of the murders.
7. There is evidence against Lizzie being responsible for the killings. She claimed to have been in the barn at the time of her father's death, and a neighbour did testify to seeing her leaving the barn at about the right time. There was also no Blood on her clothes or on any of the axes in the Borden's cellar. The murder weapon was never found. Could Lizzie have disposed of the weapon and her blood stained clothes in the time she had between the killings and the time the police arrived? There had even been speculation that there were no blood stained clothes because she committed the crime in the nude - but she would still have needed time to clean herself up and dispose of the weapon. She was seen by a friend tearing up a dress the morning after in order to burn it, but claimed she was doing so because the dress had paint on it.
8. In the days before the murders, there had been several visitors to the house, business contacts of Andrew's. An unidentified Portuguese man who was a former employee of Borden’s, and a man who'd called about renting a store front.
9. Lizzie is often portrayed as an odd, reclusive spinster. However, before the murders, she did have friends and was an active member of the community. It was after the trial, even though she was acquitted, that she lost all her friends. The people of the town ostracised her, not wanting to be associated in any way with the scandal. When she died at the age of 66, no-one attended her funeral.
10. The house where the murders took place has been a museum and a bed and breakfast since 1996, capitalising on what happened there. The rooms have photos of the crime scene and signs warning guests to “watch your head.” The room where Abby Borden was killed is allegedly the most requested bedroom.

4 June: Yogurt

On National Frozen Yogurt Day, 10 things you might not know about yogurt.

1. The word yogurt comes from a Turkish word meaning to knead, coagulate or thicken.
2. The first person to mention yogurt in writing was Pliny the Elder, who noted that certain "barbarous nations" knew how "to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity". Yogurt had already been around a while by then, since it is believed to have been invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC.
3. Yogurt is made by heating Milk, leaving it to cool, adding some good Bacteria, and leaving it to ferment. Greek yogurt is strained as well, which is why it is thicker and creamier. Most of the yogurt on sale in shops in the west is made from Cow's milk, but it can be produced from the milk of Goats, Camels, yaks, sheep, and water buffalo. It can also be made from soy, Rice, Almond or coconut milk for vegans and people who are lactose intolerant.
4. The bacteria in yogurt are Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, both believed to be benficial for health.
5. Yogurt was introduced to Western Europe after Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, sent a doctor to advise his ally, the French king François I about his recurrent gastrointestinal problems. The doctor prescribed yogurt, which did the trick, and François I spread the word about the miracle cure.
6. Eating yogurt has been associated with longevity. According to Persian tradition, Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt. More recently, Russian Nobel laureate and biologist Ilya Mechnikov hypothesized in the early 20th century that Bulgarian peasants had unusually long lifespans because they ate yogurt.
7. Mechnikov was one of the people who worked to promote yogurt as a healthy foodstuff. Another was John Harvey Kellogg, who prescribed it at his sanitorium, not only to eat, but also to use as an enema.
8. An 8 ounce serving of yogurt contains about 20 percent of the recommended daily protein intake for the average adult. It is also rich in vitamin B12 and riboflavin, with a moderate content of protein, phosphorus, and selenium.
9. According to Hindus, yogurt is the food of the gods. Panchamrita is a sweet drink made from Honey, sugar, milk, yogurt, and clarified Butter, which is used in Hindu rituals. The word panchamrita comes from the Sanskrit words for "five" (the five ingredients listed above) and “nectar of immortality”.
10. Since today is really about the frozen variety of yogurt, I'll end with that. In the 1970s in the US, technology used to make Ice cream began to be used to make frozen yogurt for people who wanted a sweet, cold food that was healthier than ice cream. The first frozen yogurt store was opened by TCBY in 1981. Other companies jumped on the bandwagon and in the mid 1980s to mid 1990s frozen yogurt accounted for 10% of the frozen dessert market.

June 3: Dolls

Broken Dolls Day is celebrated on 3 June in Japan. It's a Buddhist ritual for little girls. Girls attend Buddhist funeral ceremonies in which they bury their old dolls. Here are ten facts about dolls.

1. Dolls are possibly the earliest type of children's toy - wooden dolls dating back to the 21st century BC have been found in Egyptian tombs. There have also been ancient dolls found made from clay, stone, bone, ivory, leather, or wax. There may have been cloth dolls, too, but none of these have survived. The oldest rag dolls date back to 300 BC, in Rome.
2. In some cultures, dolls were more than just playthings for children - they had spiritual, magical and ritual value. Sometimes, dolls which had been used for rituals were given to children to play with afterwards; in other cultures dolls were deemed to special and holy to be played with. Which brings us to voodoo dolls. The idea of people sticking pins in effigies as part of a spell to make someone suffer isn't actually a feature of the Haitian Vodou religion. Popular culture has made this connection, and the main function of voodoo dolls to the Haitian people is to make money out of selling them to tourists. European witchcraft, however, did make use of effigies to cast spells on people, using dolls known as "poppets" (which makes "Poppet" as a term of endearment a little sinister, if you ask me!) There was also an African equivalent called a nkisi or bocio.
3. In North America, the Amish people are known for making rag dolls with no faces. They are said to have originated when someone gave a young Amish girl a normal doll with a face for Christmas. Her father was enraged, because it violated the commandment against graven images. "Only God can make people," he declared, cut the doll's head off and replaced it with a faceless stuffed stocking. The child was apparently not too upset, and played with the doll for many years.
4. In the early days, dolls eyes were usually Brown. Blue eyes only became popular in the Victorian era, because Queen Victoria had blue eyes.
5. At that time, porcelain or bisque dolls were popular. They are still popular among collectors today. A bisque doll made by French manufacturers Bru and Jumeau could set you back almost $22,000. The most expensive bisque doll ever sold went for £242,500.
6. Then there are Russian dolls, wooden figures with a series of smaller figures nesting inside. Often wrongly referred to as Babouska dolls, the correct name for them is Matryoshka dolls. The name literally means, "Little Matron". The outside doll is usually portrayed as a woman in traditional peasant dress and the smallest doll is often portayed as a tiny baby. Vasily Zvyozdochkin made the first Matryoshka dolls in 1890. There has been a tradition in Russia to make sets of dolls representing Russian leaders, with the current one on the outside and their predecessors as the smaller dolls inside. The largest set of matryoshka dolls in the world was made by Youlia Bereznitskaia in 2003. There are 51 of them. The outside doll is 53.97 centimetres (21.25 in) and the little one in the middle is 0.31 centimetres (0.12 in).
7. Some people find dolls creepy. The word for a fear of dolls is “pediophobia”. Psychologists like Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and more recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori have studied the tendency to find dolls, and in the case of Mori, robots, creepy. It may stem from an uncertainty about whether something is human or not. If it obviously isn't, its human characteristics stand out and will be considered cute. The more realistic a doll or robot becomes, the more people will notice the non-human characteristics and find them disturbing. Feeling slightly creeped out or disturbed rather than having a full-blown phobia is known as the uncanny valley effect.
8. Workshops for fixing broken dolls known as "doll hospitals" have been around since 1830, when one was founded in Lisbon. In 1888, another was set up in Melbourne, Australia. Most of the clients of such establishments, however, are not children, but adults in their 50s and 60s.
9. In some cultures, when a girl reaches puberty there are ceremonies in which they formally give up their dolls, because as adults, they no longer need them. In Greece and Rome, boys dedicated their toys to the gods when they reached puberty; Girls dedicated theirs to the goddesses when they married. In parts of Latin America a ritual called is known as La última muñeca, or "the last doll", where a girl relinquishes one of her dolls, is part of the celebration of a girl's 15th birthday.
10. There has even been a doll in space. Stargazer Lottie Doll was the first doll to go into space. She was designed by a 6 year old Canadian girl and spent 264 days aboard the International Space Station during the Principa Mission.

2 June: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place on this date in 1953. Here are ten things you might not know about this historic event.

1. The coronation took place a year after the accession of The Queen. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the ceremony has to be planned and arranged (The person who gets this job is The Earl Marshal, The Duke of Norfolk. It was the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk who organised this one) and secondly because a monarch has usually acceded because a relative has died and a big celebration soon after a death is deemed inappropriate. The date was chosen because meteorologists said 2 June was statistically the most likely to have good weather. However, the British weather did what it usually does - it rained.
2. The Queen and her maids rehearsed ahead of the coronation using sheets tied together to represent the coronation robes. On the big day, the Queen is said to have said to her maids, “ready girls?” before they set off.
3. What did the Queen wear? Her coronation gown was designed by Norman Hartnell and was practically a state secret until the day, with a police guard outside the room where it was being made. It was made at the Royal School of Needlework and everyone at the school, even the cleaners, got to sew at least one stitch in. Even so, most of them didn't get to see the whole dress - the rest of it was covered up. The design featured the floral emblems of each country of the UK (the English Tudor Rose, Scottish thistle, Welsh Leek, Irish shamrock) and those of other states within the Commonwealth (Canadian maple leaf, Australian wattle, New Zealand silver fern, South African protea, lotus flowers for India and Ceylon, and wheat, cotton, and jute for Pakistan). As for Prince Philip, he wore full dress naval uniform with his duke's robes over it.
4. Queen Elizabeth II was the 39th Sovereign to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, and the sixth to be crowned Queen in her own right. Prince Charles was the first Royal heir in history to attend his mother’s coronation. He received a special hand-painted children’s invitation. Princess Anne was deemed too young to attend.
5. It was the first coronation to be broadcast on television, despite politicians, including Winston Churchill, opposing the idea. The Queen over-ruled them. About 27 million people tuned in to watch, many of whom had bought a television specially for the occasion. The coronation is thought to have helped make TV popular. 2,000 journalists and 500 photographers from 92 nations were in London to cover the event. One of them was Jacqueline Bouvier for the Washington Times-Herald, who would later become First Lady of the United States. The cameramen filming in the Abbey, espcially those in the organ loft, were chosen because of their slightness of build.
6. The Queen arrived at Westminster Abbey in the Gold State Coach, which was pulled by eight grey geldings named Cunningham, Tovey, Noah, Tedder, Eisenhower, Snow White, Tipperary and McCreery.
7. The ceremony itself was steeped in traditions dating back centuries. There were six parts: the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, which includes the crowning, the enthronement and the homage. The tune Zadok the Priest was sung at the coronation at the moment of crowning, as it has been at every coronation since the music was composed for the coronation of George II. The words have been spoken at every coronation since that of King Edgar at Bath Abbey in 973.
8. The Anointing Oil contained oils of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris. Usually, a batch is made to last for a few coronations but the phial containing it had been destroyed by a bomb during WWII and the company that had made it had gone out of business. However, it was possible to find the recipe and make some more.
9. On her way to the Coronation, Her Majesty wore the George IV State Diadem, which was made in 1820 for George IV’s Coronation. It contains 1,333 diamonds and 169 pearls and is the one you see the Queen wearing on stamps. She was crowned with the St Edward’s Crown. She could have chosen a lighter one called the lighter Imperial State Crown, but chose to adhere to tradition and use the crown her father had been crowned with. As well as the crown, she was presented with the golden spurs, the symbol of chivalry, a jewelled sword, the armills, the golden bracelets of sincerity and wisdom, the cloth of gold Robe Royal (Imperial Mantle), the orb, the coronation ring (often referred to as ‘The Wedding Ring of England’), the glove, which was newly made and presented by the Worshipful Company of Glovers, and the sceptre.
10. Constance Spry came up with the recipe for something for the foreign guests to eat after the ceremony. It was cold chicken in a curry cream sauce with salad and rice. Her recipe has been known as Coronation Chicken ever since.

1 June: Olive Green

Today is National Olive Day. It celebrates the fruit, but since I've already covered the olive fruit (here), today I'm presenting facts about the colour olive.

1. Is it really Green, though? It could be said to be a shade of dark Yellow, since adding Black or Grey to yellow paint would result in shades of olive. However, darker shades of olive can be achieved by mixing dark colours with green.
2. In computers and printing, dark olive is composed of roughly 33.3% Red, 42% green and 18.4% Blue.
3. The word "olive" referring to a colour first appeared in late Middle English, between 1150 and 1500.
4. Olivine is a mineral, a magnesium Iron silicate which is common in the Earth's subsurface but weathers quickly on the surface. It has also been found in meteorites, on the Moon and on Mars. Gemstones made from this are mineral peridot and chrysolite. Its olive green colour is thought to be a result of traces of nickel. In Europe it is most commonly found in Scandinavia where is marketed as an ideal rock for sauna stones, because it is resistant to repeated heating and cooling.
5. Mrs Delany, an 18th century writer, recorded having a room "painted a sort of olive for the sake of my pictures".
6. In interior design, olive is considered a warming colour.
7. In fashion, olive is considered to be a conservative colour which is flattering to most skin tones.
8. Talking of skin tones, "olive-skinned" is sometimes used to describe shades of medium-toned skin which is darker than average for Caucasians, for example, people from the Mediterranean area.
9. Olive drab is a colour often used for military uniforms such as those of the US Army during WWII. Soldiers often referred to their uniforms as "OD's" because of the colour. Since 1981, however, US soldiers wear a camouflage pattern called “woodland” - flecks of sand, Brown, green and black.
10. In Aura Soma, a colour system devised by Vicky Wall, olive represents robustness, integration of male and female, female leadership, female wisdom, flow, releasing that which is stuck, and bitterness.