13 July: Live Aid

On this date in 1985 the Live-Aid concerts, put together to help starving people in Africa were held in Philadelphia and London. 10 things you didn't know about Live Aid:

1. It was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, who had already collaborated on the charity single, Do They Know it's Christmas? released the previous December. It had reached No. 1 on the UK charts and raised more than $28 million, but it wasn't enough to finance Geldof's vision of a fleet of trucks to move food and supplies to Ethiopians in need, so more action was called for.
2. There were two main concerts lasting 16 hours, taking place simultaneously in Wembley Arena in London and the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. Other nations also held benefit concerts on the day including Austria, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Russia and Yugoslavia.
3. One star actually appeared live at both concerts. Phil Collins performed with Sting in London, then boarded a Helicopter piloted by Noel Edmunds to take him to Heathrow where he boarded Concorde to New York and then another helicopter, arriving in Philadelphia in time for his set. He began his set with the words, "I was in England this afternoon. Funny old world, innit?" His jaunt across the Atlantic had another unexpected result as somewhere on the trip he'd bumped into Cher, who didn't know about the event but said she would have liked to take part. Phil told her, “Just show up!” so she did, and was a surprise last minute addition to the show.
4. The acts were each allocated a dressing room at the stadium but the facilities there were too basic for Elton John. Instead he brought his motor home along and set it up in the car park with with pot plants, a picket fence and a barbecue.
5. Live Aid attracted a lot of criticism for not being diverse enough, and not having enough black artists in it. Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson not only refused to appear but tried to organise a boycott of it. Ironically, had all the black artists who were invited – Prince, The Pointer Sisters , Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross among them, not declined, it would have been more diverse. Prince declined because he was taking time out from performing live at the time but did contribute a video.
6. Queen almost didn't perform, either, because Freddie Mercury thought it might look like a political statement. Geldof persuaded him otherwise and Queen's set turned out to be a highlight of the concert.
7. The first song to be played was Status Quo's Rocking all Over the World. The final song at Wembley was Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, and at the JFK Stadium USA for Africa closed the show with We Are the World.
8. Live Aid broke the record for the most watched TV special in history, with 1.9 billion viewers in 150 countries. Ticket sales and donations brought in around £80 million.
9. Geldof wanted the concert to be a once in a lifetime experience and demanded that all the TV footage be destroyed after the show. The American TV companies complied but the BBC didn't. The BBC's archives make up most of the DVD.
10. Not everything went to plan, of course, and there were technical glitches and instruments and voices off key. One technical fault was especially well timed – just as Roger Daltrey was singing the line "Why don't you all fade away", the feed cut out. Meanwhile, Pete Townshend accidentally stepped on the warning light which told acts when their time was up, and broke it, so their set over-ran by five minutes.

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12 July: Josiah Wedgewood

Today is the birth anniversary of pottery founder Josiah Wedgewood. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was born in Burslem, Staffordshire.
2. Josiah Wedgewood was the eleventh and youngest child of a potter named Thomas Wedgwood and his wife, Mary, so pottery was in his blood. Josiah was proving himself to be a skilled potter by the age of nine.
3. However, a bout of smallpox left him with a weakened knee, which meant he could no longer operate a potter's wheel, so he had to turn to designing pottery for other people to make.
4. He also studied chemistry in order to understand how clay and glazes and fire actually worked. This meant he could develop new and different glazes so his designs stood out from everyone else's. One of his innovations was a pyrometer, a device to measure the temperatures in kilns during the firing of pottery. For this, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1783.
5. There seemed to be a fair amount of inbreeding in his family. In 1764 Wedgwood married Sarah Wedgwood, his third cousin. Their daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin and became the mother of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who would later marry Emma, who was the daughter of their son, Josiah Wedgwood II, his first cousin.
6. Wedgewood's pottery soon became known and desired in high places. Queen Charlotte ordered a range of pottery from him, he persuaded him to let him name that line "Queen's Ware". Anything Wedgwood made for the Queen was automatically exhibited before it was delivered.
7. Later on, Catherine the Great ordered the Frog Service from Wedgwood, which consisted of 952 pieces and over a thousand original paintings, for her holiday home, the Kekerekeksinen Palace (which means palace on a frog swamp in Finnish). More recently, a 1,282 piece Wedgewood dinner service graced The White House during President Roosevelt’s time in office, and was used for the banquet to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
8. Josiah had one particular obsession in his work and that was to make a good replica of the Portland Vase, a Roman cameo glass vase, dating back to between AD 1 and AD 25. He eventually produced what he considered to be a satisfactory copy in 1789.
9. A visit to the Port of Liverpool brought his attention to the horror and cruelty of the slave trade, after which he became an abolitionist. He went on to produce an anti-slavery medallion depicting a slave in chains and bearing the words "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" which was the most famous depiction of a black person in 18th century art.
10. He died in 1795 aged 64.

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11 July: Skylab

On this date in 1979 the abandoned US space station Skylab, which had been orbiting the Earth since 1973, fell to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia. 10 things you might not know about Skylab:

1. Skylab was the first United States space station, occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974. Three crews of three men spent time on the station, each one breaking the endurance record for time spent in space. The record set by the final crew was not broken by an American astronaut for over 20 years.
2. The first crew was Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joe Kerwin, who spent 28 days in space. The second was Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott. They spent 59 days in space. The final crew was Jerry Carr, Bill Pogue and Edward Gibson, and they set the record at 84 days in space. There was a fourth mission planned, but it was cancelled.
3. Aside from damage to a solar panel (fixing it was the first job for the first crew to restore full power) everything went pretty smoothly, but NASA did have plans in place for a rescue mission if necessary. Had they needed to, they could have sent two more astronauts up to bring the crew back.
4. Skylab weighed in at 199,750 pounds (90,610 kg) and also had a 31,000 pound (14,000 kg) Apollo command and service module attached. It included a workshop, a solar observatory, and hundreds of life science and physical science experiments.
5. Just as important, it was home for three guys during the time they were up there and included private bedrooms for each, although they were pretty small – the size of a small walk-in wardrobe. There was a shower, but taking a shower in space turned out to be a mission in itself because it had to be set up each time anyone wanted to use it and they'd have to prevent droplets of water from floating about and damaging electrical equipment. It would take about two and a half hours to take a shower. Meals were taken standing up, because sitting to eat in weightless conditions would strain the astronauts' stomach muscles.
6. The scientific observations the teams were asked to do included observing the Sun, and the Earth and the many experiments the crews had brought with them, such as watching Spiders spin webs in low gravity. Also, the astronauts were observing themselves and performing medical evaluations of each other was an important part of the mission. Observing the effects of time in space on the human body was deemed so important that the toilet was designed to collect all the urine and poo for analysis back on Earth – and had a rescue mission had to be deployed, rescuing the waste samples would have been one of their priorities.
7. The astronauts had some free time as well. When the station was being equipped, they were offered an entertainment system so they could watch films and play games, but they opted for books and individual music players, darts and Playing cards. However, they would often carry on experimenting in their free time, doing experiments they had designed for themselves. Watching the Earth out of the window was a popular way to relax.
8. The original plan was that there would be another mission, a shorter one, using a space shuttle, with the purpose of moving Skylab to a higher, more stable orbit so it could be used again later. There were delays with the production of the Space Shuttle, however, and it didn't come into service in time to prevent Skylab's orbit from decaying and for the station to come crashing down to Earth. Which it did on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
9. NASA couldn't predict exactly where Skylab would fall. They calculated the odds were 1 in 152 of debris hitting a person and 1 in 7 of it hitting a city. While ground crews did all the could to re-orient the space station to prevent it from coming down in an inhabited area, they couldn't be certain it would work and so they had teams on standby to deploy to any inhabited area it might hit. Meanwhile the general population either panicked (there was so much panic in the Philippines that President Ferdinand Marcos had to appear on national television to reassure the public) or had fun with it. Hats with targets on were popular, and one neighbourhood in Nebraska painted a big target on the ground for Skylab to aim for. People were organising sweepstakes as to where the station would land and The San Francisco Examiner offered a US$10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab delivered to its offices. While no-one was actually hit, a county in Western Australia did issue a fine to NASA for littering. The fine was written off, but did get paid in the end when a radio station got its listeners to contribute. A piece of debris was on display on stage at the 1979 Miss Universe contest in Perth. Analysis of the debris showed that the station had disintegrated 10 miles (16 km) above the Earth, much lower than expected.
10. During the time it was occupied, Skylab orbited Earth 2,476 times. Astronauts performed ten spacewalks, totalling 42 hours and 16 minutes and spent around 2,000 hours on experiments. They photographed 8 solar flares. Data from Skylab helped Riccardo Giacconi to win a Nobel Physics Prize in 2002 for his study of X-ray astronomy.

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10 July: 10 quotes about silence

Today is Silence Day. 10 quotes about silence:

1. He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence. William Dean Howells
2. Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard. Anon
3. We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them. Ram Dass
4. I played a blank tape on full volume. The mime who lived next door complained. So I shot him with a gun with a silencer. Steven Wright
5. Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalising. William S Burroughs
6. It's better to be silent than to be a fool. Harper Lee
7. Silence is often the best thing to say. Frank Herbert
8. He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. Elbert Hubbard
9. Music is the silence between the notes. Claude Debussy
10. Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. George Bernard Shaw

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9 July: 190

9 July is the 190th day of the year, so here are 10 things you might not know about the number 190:

1. As a Roman numeral, 190 is a palindrome: CXC.
2. It's the emergency telephone number in Brazil.
3. In London, the 190 bus runs between George Street, Richmond and West Brompton Station.
4. The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 is a German fighter aircraft used in World War II. It was designed by Kurt Tank.
5. 190 is the smallest multiple of 10 for which the sum of its digits is 10.
6. In the year 190 AD General Dong Zhuo seized power in China and placed a child, Liu Xie, on the throne.
7. 190 Ismene is an asteroid discovered by C. H. F. Peters in 1878 and named after Ismene, the sister of Antigone in Greek mythology.
8. The Skilled Nominated Visa (subclass 190) is the document which allows skilled workers to live and work permanently in Australia.
9. Bar 190 in Kensington was the location for The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet album launch in 1968.
10. In numerology, the number 190 resonates with self reliance and exploration. People affected by the energy make their own choices, usually without consulting others. They are comfortable alone and can do without companionship, but is also compassionate and humanitarian.

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• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
• Friendship
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• Adventure
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8 July: Adele name day

Today is the name day, in Latvia, for people called Adele. Adele is a feminine given name meaning 'nobility'. here are 10 famous Adeles:

1. Adela of Champagne: Queen of France as the third wife of Louis VII. She was regent of France from 1190 to 1191 while her son Philip II participated in the Third Crusade.
2. Adele Adkins: professionally known just as Adele, English singer-songwriter whose hits include Someone Like You and Hello.
3. Adele Astaire: American dancer, stage actress, and singer, Fred Astaire's sister.
4. Adele Dunlap (1902–2017): American teacher who was the oldest living person in the USA at the time of her death.
5. Adèle Hugo: Youngest child of the French writer Victor Hugo. She developed schizophrenia as a young woman, which led to a romantic obsession with a British military officer who rejected her. Her story has been told in books and films, such as François Truffaut's 1975 film The Story of Adèle H.
6. Adele Rose: English television writer. She was the longest-serving scriptwriter on the soap opera Coronation Street, writing 457 scripts in 37 years. She was the first woman to write for the show. She also originated the series Byker Grove for teenagers.
7. Adele Emily Sandé: known as Emeli Sandé, Scottish singer-songwriter
8. Adele Verans: French ward of Mr. Rochester in the novel Jane Eyre.
9. Adele Stackhouse: Sookie's grandmother in True Blood.
10. Adele Ferguson: a character in the book Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough.

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• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
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• Secrets
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• Adventure
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7 July: Marc Chagall

The artist Marc Chagall was born on this date in 1887. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was born in the current day country of Belarus, the eldest of nine children. His father worked in a herring warehouse and his mother ran a grocery shop. On the day he was born his village was attacked by the Cossacks. In the first moments after his birth, he was unresponsive and had to be pricked with needles and dunked in cold water to make him cry. He was given the name Movcha, or Moses.
2. His family were Hasidic Jews, who believed it was forbidden to make representations of God's creation, so as Chagall grew up, there was no art or creativity in his home. It wasn't until a school friend showed him a drawing that he saw any art, and was immediately entranced by it. He asked his friend how he'd learned to draw. His friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it". Chagall did exactly that, and the rest, as they say, is history.
3. Needless to say, his decision to become a painter wasn't met with great enthusiasm by his family. As well as the religious rules, as the eldest child he was expected to help out in the shop. His mother relented eventually and let him go to a local art school. One of his uncles, however, was so furious about him painting figures that he refused to shake his hand.
4. In the Russian Empire at the time, Jewish children were not allowed to attend regular schools, so Chagall's early education was at a Jewish school, but later his mother bribed the headmaster of the local high school so he could attend there.
5. At 19, he left his home town of Vitebsk for St. Petersburg where he attended the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts. He didn't have an easy time of it there. He had no money and would sometimes collapse from hunger. He didn't like studying classical art, and at one point spent a week in prison for the crime of being a Jew in the city without a special permit. Chagall enjoyed his time in prison because there, he could paint in peace. And presumably got regular meals as well.
6. By the age of 24, Chagall had found a patron willing to pay him an allowance which enabled him to move to Paris. Even so the allowance wasn't much so he had to live on half a herring a day. New clothes were out of the question, so he would paint naked so as not to ruin his clothes by getting paint on them. Despite all this, Chagall loved Paris.
7. In 1915 he married Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of the wealthiest family in his hometown. She was his muse, often appearing in his paintings. When she died in 1944, Chagall plunged into a deep depression and didn't paint for months, until his daughter persuaded him to go back to it.
8. Needless to say, Paris became an unsafe place for a Jewish artist come the 1930s. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, made sure Chagall's name was on a list of European artists who needed asylum from Nazi persecution which meant he could relocate to New York with his family in 1941. He lived there for six years but never really settled. He was homesick for Paris and never bothered to learn English. “It took me thirty years to learn bad French, why should I try to learn English?” he said. His art became much darker during this time. Bella's death no doubt contributed to this. He eventually returned to Paris where he painted the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris at the age of 77. The painting features fourteen significant Opera composers and their work.
9. He wasn't just a painter. He also designed tapestries, ceramics, theatre sets, costumes and stained glass windows. His stained glass windows can be seen today in New York, France and Jerusalem.
10. He was also very shy. As a child he had a stutter and was prone to fainting, which he later explained as a fear of growing up. Even when he was a famous artist he shunned the spotlight. When people asked if he was the artist Marc Chagall, he would often deny it, and would point at someone else and say “Maybe that’s him.”

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• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
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If you want to read about superheroes who aren't the usual Marvel/DC staples, who don't all live in the USA.

If you like quirky tales.

If you like to support independent self published authors.

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