8 February: Snowboarding

On this date in 1998, snowboarding made its debut at the Winter Olympics. 10 things you might not know about snowboarding:

1. The snowboard was invented in 1965 in Muskegon, Michigan, by a man called Sherman Poppen, who bolted two skis together and added a rope for steering; a new toy for his daughters to play with in the Snow.
2. His wife originally called the new toy a “snurfer”, a portmanteau of surfing and snow. The idea caught on in Muskegon with a snurfing championship held there in 1968.
3. By the early 1980s, snowboarding had become very popular with young people many of whom who also embraced pop culture in the form of punk and hip hop music. Needless to say the established Skiing community wasn’t impressed. Snowboarding was dismissed as a dangerous teen craze and was actually banned in US ski resorts. Stratton Mountain was the first to lift the ban in 1983.
4. One of the first things a snowboarder learns is whether they are regular or goofy. Regular means you snowboard with your left foot forward and Goofy means you snowboard with your right foot forward.
5. Snowboarders are often seen riding on things other than snow – metal rails, boxes, benches, concrete ledges, walls, vehicles, rocks and logs. This is called “jibbing”.
6. Snowboarders are 50-70% more likely to get injured than skiers but are 3 times less likely to die in an accident. (one source I looked at said you were more likely to be killed by an angry cow while crossing a field than in a snowboarding accident!) The most common injuries include wrist sprains and broken arms and collar bones.
7. The first snowboarding world cup was held in Zürs, Austria in 1985. Its first appearance at the Winter Olympic Games was in in Nagano, Japan, in 1998 and at the Paralympic Winter Games adaptive snowboarding was introduced at the Games in Sochi, Russia in 2014. The first person to win Olympic gold in snowboarding was Karine Ruby from France.
8. The fastest speed reached on a snowboard is 125mph by Australian snowboarder Darren Powell at the French resort of Les Arcs in 1999. The record for the longest jump is 57 metres, set by Norwegian snowboarder Mads Johnson in 2005.
9. The world’s largest snowboard can hold 20 people. It’s 10 meters long and 2.15 meters wide and was invented by Arnold Schinder.
10. In 2017, 1,498 snowboarders at Sheregesh ski resort, Siberia, set a new world record for the most snowboarders to hit the slopes dressed in Bikinis.

Character Birthday

Firefox, aka Jason Warner. Middle child of Superwil and Electric Blue, he has fire based powers similar to those of Firebolt, and like Firebolt, works for the fire service. Growing up he found fame as one of the Warners Superhero Family and gained a significant fan following. Firebolt is his godfather and mentor, and as an adult, he joined the Freedom League. He appears in Tale of Two Sisters, Power of Love and Fire in Her Blood.

Fire in her Blood

A Superhero love story.

Sent away to school to get her away from undesirable company, Agnes finds herself homesick and lonely. A brief connection with Jason Warner leads to the teenage crush to end all teenage crushes. Jason is barely aware Agnes exists, but she plans her whole future around him.

It is only when they meet again as adults that the connection becomes mutual; but before it can develop, Jason makes a discovery which rocks his entire world. He needs time alone, away from everyone, including Agnes. When Jason is finally ready to go back to his old life, Agnes has moved on and he cannot find her.

Agnes is now a single parent to the remarkable Seraphina. The Power League want to harness Seraphina's powers for evil before the Freedom League become aware of her. Agnes has no idea her new colleague and friend is a supervillain with his own agenda, and his willingness to babysit is not as innocent as she thinks. As Incendio starts teaching Seraphina to use her powers, the Freedom League intervene. Little do they know that they have found one of their own.

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7 February: 38

Today is the 38th day of the year. Here are ten fun facts about the number 38

1. 38 is the sum of the squares of the first three prime numbers.
2. Gerald Ford was the 38th President of the United States.
3. 38 Mersenne primes were known to humanity prior to the 21st century.
4. Cats have a total of 38 chromosomes in their genome.
5. In the UK, the A38 road runs from Bodmin in Cornwall to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. It is 292 miles (470 km) long, making it the longest two-digit A road in England.
6. The 38th parallel north is the pre-Korean War boundary between North and South Korea.
7. 38 is the atomic number of strontium.
8. There are 38 plates in the Ishihara colour vision test.
9. If a sports league has 20 teams and each team plays each of the others once at home and away, each team plays 38 matches.
10. In numerology, 38 represents balance and the need to find equilibrium in both your personal and professional lives. The number 38 encourages you to strive for harmony in relationships and seek out moderation in all things.

Character Birthday

Jamie Swan, detective who appears in Death and Faxes and Glastonbury Swan. He enlists the help of psychic Tabitha Drake to help solve murder cases.

Glastonbury Swan

Every few weeks, there is a mysterious death in Glastonbury. They seem completely unrelated - an apparent suicide, a hit and run, a drug overdose, a magic act which goes horribly wrong - but is that what the killer wants people to think?

The police are certainly convinced - but one of the victims is communicating to medium Tabitha Drake that the deaths are linked.

Who is killing all these people and why? 

This is what Tabitha has to figure out - before it is too late to save someone very dear to her.

Paperback  Amazon

E-book Amazon Kindle

6 February; Kiwis

Today is New Zealand’s national day. Here are 10 things you might not know about their national symbol, the kiwi bird.

1. The name of the bird comes from the sound they make.
2. They belong to the order Apterygiformes and are related to Ostriches, emus, rheas, cassowaries and the extinct moa, which also used to live in New Zealand.
3. The Māori traditionally believed that kiwi were under the protection of Tāne Mahuta, god of the forest. They used to eat them and use their feathers to make ceremonial cloaks. Nowadays, though, kiwis are endangered and so the Māori no longer hunt them. They make cloaks only from the feathers of kiwis which have died naturally.
4. A kiwi is about the size of a Chicken, but its eggs are much bigger. On average, their eggs are about 15% of the female's body weight and can be as much as 20%, which is comparable to a 120-lb. (54 kg) woman giving birth to a 24-lb. (11 kg) baby. Hardly surprising, perhaps that it is the male kiwi which incubates the eggs while the female goes off foraging for a much needed meal, because the egg has taken up so much room in her body, her stomach has shrunk. The incubation period of a kiwi egg is 75 to 85 days. This is more than twice the typical length of time for birds, and is closer to the gestation period of small mammals.
5. Adult kiwis don’t need to feed their young as they are born with nutritious yolk sacs attached to their bellies. This sustains the chicks for about 10 days. After that they are ready to forage for their own food.
6. There are five species of kiwi: Brown kiwi; Little spotted kiwi (the smallest); Great spotted kiwi (the largest); Rowi (the rarest, with a population of just 450); and Tokoeka, unusual for being more active during the day. Most kiwi are nocturnal.
7. They can’t fly. They do have wings, but the wings are very small at around 1 inch (3 cm). Each wing has a small claw on the tip, which has no known use. Nor do they have the type of developed breastbone which allows a bird to fly, and their bones, unlike those of most birds, aren’t hollow. They make up for it by having powerful legs, which make up about a third of their body weight, so they can shift pretty fast if they need to and could outrun a human.
8. They’re also unusual in the bird world because sight isn’t their primary sense. Kiwi have highly developed senses of smell and touch which help them forage for food. They are the only bird in the world with nostrils at the end of its beak, so they can sniff out food in leaf litter.
9. Kiwi eat worms, grubs, bugs, berries and seeds.
10. They have the lowest body temperature of any bird at 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).

Character Birthday

Melody Lloyd, Viper agent and friend of Violet Parker. Appears in Who’s That Girl?

Who's That Girl?

Matt Webster lives in a tower block and attends a failing school. He dreams of being a spy like James Bond. Little does he know that he is being watched by someone who can make him into even more than that – a superhero.

His first solo mission is to attend a ball at the Decembrian Embassy and discover who is planning to steal a priceless diamond. While there, he meets the mysterious Lady Antonia du Cane, and is powerfully drawn to her. It soon becomes clear, however, that Lady du Cane is not what she seems. Matt’s quest to discover who she really is almost costs him his career.

A modern day Guy Fawkes gathers a coterie around him with the aim of blowing up Parliament with a nuclear bomb. To achieve this, they need money. Lots of it. Selling the Heart of Decembria Diamond will provide more than enough. All that stands in their way is the Freedom League – but the League is beset by internal disagreements. Can the heroes put their differences aside in time to save the day?

Prime Minister Richard Miller and his wife Fiona grieve for their daughter, Yasmin, who has been missing for three years, and is presumed to be dead. Viper agent Violet Parker could hold the key to what happened to Yasmin, but Violet is accused of giving away the organisation’s secrets. She is to be executed without trial. Will she take her knowledge of what happened to Yasmin with her to her grave?

Available on Amazon:

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5 February: 36

On the 36^th day of the year, 10 facts about the number 36:

1. 36 is the atomic number of Krypton.
2. +36 is the code for international direct-dial phone calls to Hungary.
3. In a regular pentagram, each interior angle is 36 degrees.
4. In London, the number 36 bus runs between Claremont Road and New Cross Bus Garage.
5. There are 36 races in a NASCAR Cup Series season.
6. The sum of the integers from 1 to 36 is 666.
7. In imperial measurements, there are 36 inches in a yard.
8. A standard Beer barrel is 36 UK gallons, about 163.7 litres.
9. The 36 officers problem is a mathematical problem with no solution. The question is how you’d arrange 36 officers from 6 different regiments in a square so that in each horizontal and vertical line there are 6 officers of different ranks and different regiments. According to folklore, Catherine the Great asked Euler to solve this problem while he was living in her court.
10. In numerology, people influenced by the number 36 are humanitarians. They tend to view the long term rather than looking for quick solutions. They are idealistic and fun loving, and enjoy family gatherings.

Character birthday

Multi-Girl, aka Shanna Douglas. She is from the Infinitus dimension and gained the power to clone herself when she travelled through a wormhole to look for her missing colleague Nathan Tate. She was one of a band of Infinitans who lived together in our dimension while seeking a way home. Her story is told in the Raiders Trilogy: Secrets and Skies, Over the Rainbow and Closing the Circle.

Secrets and Skies

Jack Ward, President of Innovia, owes his life twice over to the enigmatic superhero, dubbed Power Blaster by the press. No-one knows who Power Blaster is or where he comes from - and he wants it to stay that way.

Scientist Desi Troyes has developed a nuclear bomb to counter the ever present threat of an asteroid hitting the planet. When Ward signs the order giving the go ahead for a nuclear test on the remote Bird Island, he has no inkling of Troyes' real agenda, and that he has signed the death warrants of millions of people.

Although the island should have been evacuated, there are people still there: some from the distant continent of Classica; protesters opposed to the bomb test; and Innovians who will not, or cannot, use their communication devices.

Power Blaster knows he must stop the bomb from hitting the island. He also knows it may be the last thing he ever does.

Meanwhile in Innovia, Ward and his staff gather to watch the broadcast of the test. Nobody, not even Troyes himself, has any idea what is about to happen.

Available from Amazon or Amazon Kindle

4 February: Dick Tracy

On this date in 1935 The Adventures of Dick Tracy came to radio for the first time. 10 things you might not know about Dick Tracy:

1. Dick Tracy first saw the light of day in a Newspaper comic strip created by Chester Gould and based on U.S. federal agent Eliot Ness. Tracy was depicted wearing a fedora, a dark suit, a white shirt, and a necktie.
2. He was originally going to be called "Plainclothes Tracy", but when Gould pitched the idea to Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, Patterson suggested changing the hero's name to Dick Tracy.
3. Some facts about Tracy's creator: Chester Gould was the son of a minister and the grandson of some of Oklahoma's early settlers. He was a Christian. He took courses in forensics and investigative procedures, but wasn't a "planner" preferring to make the stories up as he went along.
4. Dick Tracy became a cop to avenge the murder of Emil Trueheart, the father of his love interest, Tess. Even before that, he had captured his first villain, Pinkie the Stabber, in 1931. He served as a lieutenant (senior grade) in US Navy Intelligence during World War II.
5. We may have Dick Tracy to thank for inventions such as mobile phones, smart watches and CCTV. The Dick Tracy strip included a character called Diet Smith, a milk-drinking industrialist and his blind son, Brilliant, who supplied advanced equipment to Tracy and the police department. Among the futuristic (at the time) gadgets he invented were the two-way wrist Radio, two-way wrist TV, and the two-way wrist computer. Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone, is said to have been inspired by these devices.
6. Dick and Tess had an adopted son, Junior, and a daughter called Bonnie Braids. Some of the stories were a soap opera style depiction of their family life. Some of the crime storylines involved members of the family. Bonnie Braids was kidnapped on one occasion by fugitive Crewy Lou, and Junior's girlfriend Model was accidentally killed by her brother.
7. Dick Tracy comics moved with the times. In the 1950s there were stories about television, juvenile delinquency and organised crime; in the 1970s Tracy grew his hair longer and acquired a hippie sidekick called Groovy Grove.
8. In the 1960s, Dick Tracy joined the space age. Diet Smith supplied him with the Space Coupe, a spacecraft with a magnetic propulsion system. He went to the Moon in 1964 and met a race of humanoid people living in "Moon Valley". They had large eyes, giraffe-like antennae, and laser powers. One of them was called Moon Maid. She married Junior Tracy and they had a daughter, with antennae, called Honey Moon Tracy. However, once Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and found no signs of life there, this storyline waned in popularity.
9. The villains were usually ugly and disfigured in some way with names which described the way they looked: Pruneface, Flyface, the Mole, Wormy, the Blank, Laffy, and Rhodent.
10. In April 1937, a poll of adult comic strip readers in Fortune voted Dick Tracy their third favourite comic strip after Little Orphan Annie and Popeye. However, in 1968, the day after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed, a panel in the strip read "Violence is golden, when it's used to put down evil." Although the strips were prepared months in advance and it was merely a coincidence, it attracted a lot of criticism and several newspapers dropped the strip as a result.

Character birthday

Queen Helena of Galorvia: Queen Consort of King Christopher III and mother of Jade and Gloria. She was killed in an uprising alongside her husband, having arranged for her daughters to be smuggled to safety in England. Appears in From A Jack to A King.

From A Jack To A King

A royal palace is burning. The King and Queen are dead. The only hopes for an ancient dynasty flee to England for their lives.

A boy runs from his mother and the people he believes want to mutilate him, and vanishes, seemingly forever.

Gary Winchcombe, the experimental "super-cop" pursues a notorious gang of bank robbers, and starts to discover that his friends and neighbours have secrets he never could have imagined.

Tod Reynard wants to turn his life around. When he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Jade, he knows she might just be the one to help him change his life for the better. He cannot possibly know just how much.

When Jade's twin sister Gloria is kidnapped, old rivalries must be put aside and new associations formed in order to save Gloria's life and restore the rightful order of things.

Available from: Amazon, Amazon Kindle

3 February: Felix Mendelssohn

On this date in 1809 the German composer Felix Mendelssohn was born.

1. Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg. His father, Abraham, was a banker and came from a prominent Jewish family. He had renounced the faith, however, and brought his children up accordingly. Hence young Felix did not undergo any traditional Jewish rites of passage.
2. Mendelssohn began learning to play the Piano when he was six, and gave his first public performance at the age of nine. He started composing Music at 12, writing his first symphony at 15. His String Octet in E-flat major was written when he was 16.
3. As a youngster, he wasn’t just good at music. Young Felix excelled as a painter, poet, athlete and linguist as well.
4. His letters show he was witty and good with words, and he’d include sketches and cartoons in his correspondence.
5. He travelled a fair bit. During the 1830s he visited Vienna, Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples and Britain.
6. In fact, he visited Britain ten times, and was particularly taken with Scotland. His Scottish Symphony and the Hebrides Overture were inspired by his visits there. In 1829, Mendelssohn took a trip to the Scottish Island of Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, and it impressed him so much that he began writing music inspired by it immediately. He sent a postcard to his sister with the first few bars of the Hebrides Overture written on it.
7. Queen Victoria was a big fan. She described Mendelssohn as 'the greatest musical genius since Mozart' and 'the most amiable man’.
8. Not everyone shared her opinion, though. Other composers nicknamed him "discontented Polish count" because they found him to be somewhat aloof, and sometimes lost his temper.
9. His marriage was a happy one. He married Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French clergyman and they had five children.
10. He was just 38 when he died from a stroke. He’d suffered several strokes and travelling exhausted him. He might have realised he wasn’t long for this world when he wrote to a friend saying that he saw death as a place ‘where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings’. Cécile died less than six years after her husband.

Character birthday

Dymo: aka Max Jordan, a protege of the super villain Professor Power. He is a power armour wearer which allows him to fly, shoot energy bolts and create force fields. He appears in Tale of Two Sisters when he tries to form a relationship with Black Rose.

A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon

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2 February: National Ostrich Day

Today is National ostrich day, so here are 10 things you might not know about ostriches:

1. Ostriches belong to the order Struthioniformes. There are two species: the common ostrich (Struthio camelus – because of the ostrich’s likeness to Camels, it used to be called “camel bird”) and the Somali ostrich (Struthio molybdophanes) which has been recognised as a separate species since 2014. Both live in Africa.
2. They’re the biggest birds in the world, and have the biggest Eyes of any land animal. Their eyes are about the size of a billiard ball and are bigger than their Brains.
3. They also have the largest Eggs. Ostrich eggs are 15cm long, weigh as much as two dozen chicken eggs, and a single ostrich egg contains 2000 calories, which is about the total daily recommended intake for an adult woman. However, ostrich eggs are the smallest in terms of relative size to the adult bird.
4. They lay their eggs in communal nests which are about 3m across. The dominant female’s eggs get the prime location in the middle where they are less likely to get pushed out. Male and female ostriches co-operate in the incubation of eggs and rearing of chicks. The female does the day shift sitting on the nest as her drab plumage blends in with the sand, and the male, with his black plumage, does the night shift as he’s harder to spot in the dark.
5. Ostriches have three stomachs.
6. They can run faster than any other bird, or indeed any other two legged creature. They can sprint at over 70 km/hr, covering up to 5m in a single stride. Their feet are designed for running. Most birds have three to four toes on each foot, but an ostrich has just two. This is believed to reduce the mass at the end of the ostrich’s legs and improve the ostrich’s ability to run. Humans have studied the ostrich’s running form and been inspired by it. Mechanical robot feet have been based on ostriches, and also the locomotion of the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park as ostriches are probably the closest living approximation to them in terms of size and gait.
7. Ostriches don’t bury their head in the sand when threatened. Nature is too smart to have a bird that can run at 70km/hour do that. When threatened, they’ll generally leg it. The myth could have come from seeing them caring for their eggs. Some ostrich nests are up to 2 feet deep, and when they bend down to rotate their eggs it may well look as though they’ve buried their head in the sand.
8. Ostriches can’t fly, but this doesn’t mean their wings are completely redundant. Ostriches’ wingspan is about 2 metres and they use them in mating displays, to shade chicks, and their own upper legs and flanks, and as “rudders” to help them change direction while running.
9. In some African countries, people race each other on the back of ostriches using special saddles, reins and bits. In Florida, ostrich racetracks were common in the late 19th century. Tourists could pay a small fee to ride an ostrich around the track.
10. In the wild, ostriches live an average of 30 to 40 years. In captivity, they can reach 70, and continue to breed well into old age. Though captive ostriches raised by humans are as likely to turn their courtship displays towards their human keepers as to other ostriches.

Character birthday

Duplex: Alien with probability altering powers from Penultima, second planet from the sun in the Numerrus system. The planet has two virtually identical moons which has led to a planet wide veneration of the number two. Hence Duplex will always defend characters who are twins or part of a partnership.