8 May: King Lear

William Shakespeare’s King Lear was published on this date in 1605. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. It’s based on an old story about a legendary British king who was called Leir or Lyr and is said to have lived around the 8th century BC. Shakespeare wasn’t the first to adapt the tale. There had already been many re-tellings, including an anonymous 16th-century play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three Daughters.
2. The Bard was also influenced by Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's prose work Arcadia, in which a fallen king is blinded by his illegitimate son.
3. The story is about an ageing king who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. He asks them each how much they love him. Two of them, Goneril and Regan, don’t love their father much at all, but say they do so they can get their hands on the land. The youngest daughter, Cordelia, loves her father very much but says she can’t put into words how much. Lear misinterprets this and banishes her, dividing the kingdom between the other two. He soon finds out how wrong he was, and ends up being deposed by them and banished himself, along with his fool. He is reunited with Cordelia, but slowly goes mad. It’s not a happy ending. Cordelia doesn’t get to be queen, but is executed instead.
4. The play's first recorded performance took place at Whitehall on St Stephen's Day (December 26) in 1606.
5. There were people even in those days re-writing literature to make it more palatable to “modern” audiences. The English Poet Laureate in 1692, one Nahum Tate, decided to do that to some of Shakespeare’s plays, before he got the Poet Laureate gig. In 1681 he wrote a version of King Lear in which Cordelia survives, is betrothed to Edgar, and is named queen.
6. The play was banned entirely during the reign of George III because King Lear’s descent into madness mirrored what was happening to the real king too closely. All performances of King Lear were banned 1810 and 1820.
7. There are more references to animals and nature in King Lear than in any other Shakespeare play. Scholars have even counted references to "nature," "natural," "disnatured," and "unnatural”. They were mentioned 40 times. Characters are compared to animals frequently. Goneril and Regan are often compared to Wolves, Snakes, and Vultures, whereas the Fool likens Lear to “the hedge-Sparrow fed the Cuckoo so long/That it's had its head bit off by its young.”
8. This play is also one of just two of Shakespeare’s plays to mention Football (the other being Comedy of Errors). Kent insults Goneril's servant, Oswald by calling him 'Thou base football player.'
9. The youngest actor to play Lear in a professional production was Nonso Anozie, who was 23 when he took the title role for the RSC in 2002.The oldest was Alvin Epstein, who played Lear for the Boston Actors' Theater in 2006, at 81.
10. Possibly the wackiest of all adaptations was one by the English English playwright Missouri Williams in 2014. It was called King Lear With Sheep, and told the story of a director who decides to put on a performance of King Lear in which all the parts are played by Sheep. Needless to say the sheep won't cooperate; the director suffers a breakdown and begins acting out the narrative himself. The London performance featured nine actual sheep and just one human actor.

Character birthday

Sunlight, aka Hildy Muller. She is a member of the Ultra League, and her power is light based – she is able to generate light, which she has learned to concentrate into a laser beam through a ring she wears on her finger. She is gay and developed a crush on Shadow while training to be a social worker. on completing her course, Hildy left for London, hoping to find a Lesbian community there. Unable to find a suitable social work position, she applied for a job as a doctor's receptionist to pay the bills. Her prospective employer, Superwil, hinted that there may be greater opportunities for "the right person." The fact she was a variant and trained in a profession where discretion was highly important, she got the job.

She loved the work, and with Superwil's help, explored her own abilities. She appears in Eternal Flame.

Eternal Flame

The Freedom League's numbers have dwindled to three - but leader Unicorn knows his team isn't finished yet. The turning point comes with Russell, a boy with bright red hair and a genetic variant ability to start fires. He's the first of an influx of new members who will take the League into the future. 

Judith and Wil are child prodigies - Judith in physics and electronics, and Wil in medicine. They have another thing in common - they are both genetic variants. And another thing - they both have fiery red hair. They are drawn to one another as their destinies intertwine, but the course of true love doesn't always run smoothly!

Richard is not a variant. He's an Olympic athlete who has picked up useful knowledge from his unusual friends to add to his own natural abilities. A chance encounter with a dying alien throws him into a Freedom League mission in which his skills are put to the ultimate test, along with theirs.

The Freedom League's arch-enemy, the super-villain Obsidian, wants his family fortune all to himself. One person stands in his way - his niece, Fiona. Fiona, devastated by a family tragedy and her failure to get in to her first choice university, is miserable and has few friends. When she realises her brother's death was no accident, and his killer is also after her, she fears it may be too late to gather allies around her and learn how to use her own genetic variant powers.

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle

7 May: The Greek goddess Maia

This month is sacred to the Greek goddess Maia. 10 things you might not know about her:

1. She is the eldest of the Pleiades, the seven nymphs which make up the star cluster, said to have been turned into doves and flew off into the heavens to get away from Orion. They were also called the Atlantides.
2. Maia is the daughter of Atlas and Pleione, who is an Oceanid – one of the three thousand daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys.
3. The name “Maia” translates to “nursing mother.”
4. Shy and reclusive, she preferred to live alone in a cave near the peak of Mount Kyllene.
5. Like all her sisters, though, she was very beautiful and couldn’t escape being noticed by Zeus. He visited her cave in the dead of night and they started an affair. The result of that affair was the god Hermes, which gave Maia a high status as the mother of an important god.
6. The Romans revered her as well as the Greeks. To them, she was more than the mother of Mercury (the Roman equivalent of Hermes) but also a personification of growth. Her name in the Roman world was thought to be related to the word maius, maior, meaning "larger/greater".
7. As well as being the mother of Hermes, she also adopted Arcas, another of Zeus’s sons by Callisto, after she was turned into a bear by Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera.
8. The playwright Aeschylus identified Maia with Gaia, the mother of the Earth. He would use the two names interchangeably and sometimes used “Gaia Maia,” which means “nursing mother of the earth.”
9. Maia’s symbols are braided and knotted items.
10. The star named for her is a blue white giant star in the constellation of Taurus, also known as 20 Tauri. Maia is the fourth-brightest star in the Pleiades open star cluster and can be seen with the naked eye. The distance to Maia (around 400 light years) has been measured, appropriately enough, by the Gaia spacecraft.

Character birthday

Femforcer, aka Naomi Slater. She is a martial arts master and a feminist. She was a teacher at a girls’ school for a while, but was suspended for pushing the feminist agenda too much. During her suspension, she applied for the Combat Team martial arts contest and won a place. She chose to join Team Gamma, because this team had the only female owner, Madeleine Earnshaw.

6 May: Coronation of King Charles III

The Coronation of King Charles III takes place today. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His full name is Charles Philip Arthur George, and he was born at 9.14pm on 14 November 1948 at Buckingham Palace – the first royal baby to be born at Buckingham Palace in the 20th century.
2. He was the longest-serving heir apparent and Prince of Wales, and at the age of 73, became the oldest person to accede to the British throne.
3. He was the first heir apparent to attend school rather than be educated by a private tutor. His school days at his father’s old school Gordonstoun weren’t especially happy. He’s said to have described the place, noted for its rigorous curriculum, as "Colditz in kilts", although he would later say his time there “taught me to accept challenges and take the initiative" and that the "toughness of the place" was "much exaggerated". He went on to study archaeology, anthropology and history at Trinity College, making him the first monarch in UK history to get a university degree.
4. He can play the cello, Piano and trumpet, and is a keen watercolour painter. His speciality is natural landscapes and his favourite subject is the Balmoral estate.
5. He’s a writer, too. In 1991, he published The Old Man of Lochnagar, which follows the adventures of an old man who went to the caves near Balmoral looking for a quiet place to take a hot bath. The story is based on tales he would tell his younger brothers, Princes Andrew and Edward.
6. He takes a keen interest in the environment, and spoke out about plastic pollution as early as 1970. In 1990, he founded Duchy Originals, a brand of organic food. He’s planted many trees during royal engagements and every time he plants one, wishes them well by giving each branch a friendly shake or a tap.
7. He has a Frog named after him. Hyloscirtus princecharlesi was discovered by Ecuadorian scientist Dr. Luis Coloma in 2008.
8. On a visit to the USA when he was 21, the President at the time, Richard Nixon, introduced Charles to his daughter Tricia, and made sure the two of them were sat next to each other at every occasion, in the vain hope that Charles would fall in love with her and they’d get married. However, this only served to irritate Charles.
9. There was speculation for some time whether Charles would choose to reign under his given name. Monarchs can choose a different regnal name if they wish. His grandfather chose to use George VI rather than his given name, Albert. The first two Kings called Charles didn’t fare so well. Charles I was executed for treason and the monarchy was briefly abolished because of his actions; his son, Charles II, spent time in exile until the monarchy was restored. However, it seems Charles III didn’t have a problem with using his given name, and choosing to do so was one of the first decisions he made as King.
10. When he visits the US his Secret Service nickname is “Unicorn.“ His Coronation has been planned for years under the code name Operation Golden Orb.

Character birthday

Alexander Petrovitch, advisor to King Christopher III of Galorvia. He was in the background all the time the then Prince Christopher was at university incognito in England. During his own time at university, he had become firm friends with Ildas McNair, and contacted him to ask his help in smuggling Christopher’s twin daughters out of Galorvia when the revolution was brewing. Petrovitch went into hiding for many years after that. In later years he formed a relationship with the former nurse to the princesses. He 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

5 May: 125

Today is the 125^th day of the year. 10 facts about the number 125.

1. The InterCity 125 is a British diesel-powered high-speed passenger train built by British Rail Engineering between 1975 and 1982.
2. The Fiat 125 is a large family car which was manufactured and marketed by Italian car company Fiat from 1967 to 1972.
3. In New York, 125th Street, also called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is a two-way street that runs east–west in Manhattan. It is often considered to be the "Main Street" of Harlem.
4. In England, the A125 road runs between the A12 North of Romford and the A1306 at Rainham.
5. In London, the 125 bus runs between Colindale and Winchmore Hill.
6. The 125 dinghy is a class of sailing dingy popular in Australia.
7. 125 Liberatrix is a Main belt asteroid discovered by Prosper Henry on 11 September 1872, from Paris. The asteroid's name is a feminine version of the word "liberator".
8. The 125th Street Bridge crosses the Mississippi River in Minnesota.
9. 125 is the cube of 5.
10. In numerology, the energy of 125 is self-sufficient, cooperative, and a person who gets things done. They work independently, but value teamwork if it will help achieve the goals. It builds things that last, things that tend to have a long-term value to society. While they are generally focussed and like to have a plan, they can, on occasion, do something on a whim.

Character birthday

Frish, a member of the Ultra League who can transform into a greenish liquid. She is Russian, and in order to defect to the West, turned herself into liquid and was decanted into several bottles. Superwil was recruited to carry the bottles from Moscow to the UK, with strict instructions to pour the contents into a plugged bath as soon as possible. He had no idea what he was carrying and was astounded to find an unconscious, naked woman with green hair in his bathtub a few minutes later. This caused problems with his girlfriend, Judith (Electric Blue) who stormed out, and they were estranged for some years. Frish appears in Eternal Flame.

Eternal Flame

The Freedom League's numbers have dwindled to three - but leader Unicorn knows his team isn't finished yet. The turning point comes with Russell, a boy with bright red hair and a genetic variant ability to start fires. He's the first of an influx of new members who will take the League into the future. 

Judith and Wil are child prodigies - Judith in physics and electronics, and Wil in medicine. They have another thing in common - they are both genetic variants. And another thing - they both have fiery red hair. They are drawn to one another as their destinies intertwine, but the course of true love doesn't always run smoothly!

Richard is not a variant. He's an Olympic athlete who has picked up useful knowledge from his unusual friends to add to his own natural abilities. A chance encounter with a dying alien throws him into a Freedom League mission in which his skills are put to the ultimate test, along with theirs.

The Freedom League's arch-enemy, the super-villain Obsidian, wants his family fortune all to himself. One person stands in his way - his niece, Fiona. Fiona, devastated by a family tragedy and her failure to get in to her first choice university, is miserable and has few friends. When she realises her brother's death was no accident, and his killer is also after her, she fears it may be too late to gather allies around her and learn how to use her own genetic variant powers.

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle

4 May: Orange Juice

Today is National Orange Juice Day, observed to promote the health benefits of Orange Juice. 10 things you might not know about orange juice:

1. The word “Orange” derives from the Sanskrit word for “orange tree”. The word “juice” comes from Old French, from the words “jus, juis, jouis”, which mean “liquid obtained by boiling herbs”.
2. In American English, it is often abbreviated to “OJ”.
3. The USA is the second largest producer of orange juice. Brazil is top of the table and Mexico is third. Canada is the biggest consumer, followed by the USA.
4. 90% of Florida’s orange crop is used to make orange juice. It’s so important to the economy of that state that they made it the official state beverage.
5. In the UK, you have a choice: orange juice “with bits” (or possibly, “juicy bits” or “without bits”. The equivalent term in American English is “pulp”. Bits or pulp are juice vesicles which contain the juice of the orange and can be left in or removed during the manufacturing process.
6. The orange juice you find on supermarket shelves owes its existence to the second world war. American soldiers were provided with Vitamin C in the form of lemon crystals, but they didn’t like the taste; so the race was on to produce something which tasted nice and was better than the canned orange juice around at the time. The result was frozen concentrated orange juice. It was, however, too late for the soldiers. The beverage wasn’t perfected until after the war ended.
7. There are 118 calories in 250 ml of orange juice.
8. Surveys reveal that it is by far the world’s most popular fruit juice, way ahead of Apple juice in second place.
9. Although orange juice is a good source of vitamin C and other nutrients, some experts claim it’s not healthy at all because it has Sugar in it.
10. Some orange juice related world records: The largest glass of freshly squeezed orange juice was 1,525 litres (335.45 UK gal) made in Valencia, Spain, in 2016. The fastest orange juice squeezer is Ulas Bas, who managed to extract 880 millilitres (0.19 gal) of juice in one minute in 2019 at the GWR Live! Roadshow in Mersin, Turkey.

Character birthday

Vixen, aka Vicky Fox, is a genetic variant with super fast reaction times. She came to the attention of the Freedom League when she got into a fight with Ms Liberty over Firebolt, who was seeing both of them at the time. The two women were persuaded that it was Firebolt they should be directing their anger at, since he was the one who cheated. Vixen joined the League and she and Ms Liberty became firm friends. In due course, they left to form a female only hero team called Female Force. Find her in Eternal Flame.

Eternal Flame

The Freedom League's numbers have dwindled to three - but leader Unicorn knows his team isn't finished yet. The turning point comes with Russell, a boy with bright red hair and a genetic variant ability to start fires. He's the first of an influx of new members who will take the League into the future. 

Judith and Wil are child prodigies - Judith in physics and electronics, and Wil in medicine. They have another thing in common - they are both genetic variants. And another thing - they both have fiery red hair. They are drawn to one another as their destinies intertwine, but the course of true love doesn't always run smoothly!

Richard is not a variant. He's an Olympic athlete who has picked up useful knowledge from his unusual friends to add to his own natural abilities. A chance encounter with a dying alien throws him into a Freedom League mission in which his skills are put to the ultimate test, along with theirs.

The Freedom League's arch-enemy, the super-villain Obsidian, wants his family fortune all to himself. One person stands in his way - his niece, Fiona. Fiona, devastated by a family tragedy and her failure to get in to her first choice university, is miserable and has few friends. When she realises her brother's death was no accident, and his killer is also after her, she fears it may be too late to gather allies around her and learn how to use her own genetic variant powers.

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle

3 May: Bing Crosby

On this date in 1903, the American singer Bing Crosby was born. He made over 70 feature films and recorded more than 1,600 songs. Here are 10 facts about him:

1. His real name was Harry Lillis Crosby and he was born in in Tacoma, Washington, the fourth of seven children.
2. He got the name Bing from a comic feature in a local paper, called The Bingville Bugle, a parody of hillbilly newspapers. The young Crosby found this hilariously funny and would giggle uncontrollably when reading it. A neighbour started calling him "Bingo from Bingville" as a result, and it stuck, without the O. As a young adult he liked a drink and actually received another nickname: "Binge" Crosby.
3. By the time he was in his 30s, he was almost completely bald. He hated wearing a toupee, though, and would select film roles on the basis of most of his scenes being outdoors, so he could wear a hat, and where he could wear a nightcap in bed. In his early roles, he’d also have his large Ears pinned back.
4. He was married twice. His first wife was Dixie Lee, a fellow actress. Although they almost divorced after just six months due to Bing’s drinking and “mental cruelty”. However, he vowed to change his ways and they remained married for 22 years, until she died. After his wife died, Crosby had relationships with model Pat Sheehan (who married his son Dennis in 1958) and actresses Inger Stevens and Grace Kelly before marrying actress Kathryn Grant in 1957.
5. His fondness for a tipple and a gamble got him into other trouble as well. He once paid $10,000 to a gangster to cover a debt. Unsealed FBI files reporting on a gambling den sting in Burbank, California, said "approximately 100 patrons, among them Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, were permitted to leave the place." In his autobiography Call Me Lucky, Crosby recounts drinking with a gangster who had been involved in the St. Valentine's Day massacre and nearly being gunned down when a rival gang came for retribution.
6. He’s particularly famous for the song White Christmas, which he first sang on the Kraft Music Hall radio show on Christmas Day 1941. Bing had to re-record the song in 1947 because the original master was damaged so badly from pressing copies. He claimed the success of the song wasn’t really down to him, saying "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully".
7. Bing Crosby was the first actor to be Oscar-nominated for playing the same role twice. Having won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1945 for his performance as Father Chuck O'Malley in Going My Way, Bing made history by earning another nomination for the same role in the sequel The Bells of St. Mary's. Only six other actors have ever managed it.
8. He was a very keen golfer. One of the reasons he invested in early recording technology was so that he could record his contributions to several radio shows in one go and then clear off to play Golf. Golf was also the reason he turned down the role of Columbo in the TV series, although the producers were keen for him to play the role, which eventually was given to Peter Falk. Crosby thought the filming schedule would eat into his golf time too much. He was serious about his game and whittled his handicap down to two while playing in both the British and U.S. amateur championships.
9. Horse racing was another interest of his. He got together with a bunch of other celebrities, including Jimmy Durante and Oliver Hardy, to open the Del Mar Racetrack just north of San Diego. The track was the venue for to the famous winner-take-all two-horse race between Seabiscuit and Ligaroti, which was such big news that NBC radio made it the company's first-ever national broadcast of a horse race.
10. Crosby suffered a fatal heart attack on October 14, 1977, while playing golf in Spain, at the age of 74. He’s shown no sign of illness during the game and was in good spirits, complying with requests from people who recognised him for photos and a song. He won the game, and said to the rest of the group, "That was a great game of golf, fellas. Let's go have a Coca Cola." These turned out to be his last words, as he collapsed on his way back to the clubhouse.

Character birthday

Mortimer Atkins, head teacher at Rathbone Academy. He appears in Obsidian’s Ark.

Obsidian's Ark

Teenage years bring no end of problems. Daniel Moran's include getting hold of computer games his parents don't think he should have; a full blown crush on the beautiful Suki from Zorostan; maintaining his status as a prefect and getting his homework done. He must also keep from his parents and sister the fact that he is a superhero with a sword from another world.

Trish wonders how to get science whizz Tom to notice her; how to persuade him that the best way to stand up to the school bully is to fight back. She doesn't want her friends, especially not Tom, to know she is a genetic variant with superpowers. Little does she know that Tom has secrets of his own.

Suki struggles to make friends at school when she cannot understand everyday cultural references, and they all suspect her of being a terrorist. She, too, has a secret, but is it what her classmates assume?

When Daniel stumbles upon a plot by an alliance of supervillains to plunge the world into war, he tries to alert the established superheroes, but none of them believe him. When the Prime Minister's only daughter, Yasmin Miller, is abducted, Daniel knows the villains' plan is underway. It seems humanity's only hope may be Daniel and the ragtag bunch of teenage superheroes he recruits. Can he pull together, not only his own team, but the older heroes as well, in a bid to save the Earth from a devastating war?

Available from:

Amazon

Amazon Kindle

2 May: 122

Today is the 122nd day of the year. 10 fun facts about the number 122:

1. 122 is the number to call if you need the Fire Brigade in Austria, to report a traffic emergency in China, or you need the police in Bosnia/Herzegovina or Egypt.
2. The latter is the reason for the name of a 2019 Egyptian film directed by Yasir Al Yasiri about a young couple who find themselves in a hospital in the middle of nowhere after a car accident and caught up in a catastrophe.
3. In UK pre-decimal currency, it would represent 12 shillings and 2 pence.
4. The 122 London bus runs between Plumstead Station and Crystal Palace Parade.
5. It’s the atomic number of Unbibium, also known as eka-thorium, a hypothetical chemical element which hasn’t been discovered yet.
6. The oldest ever human being, Jeanne Louise Calment, lived to the age of 122.
7. The Roman numeral for 122 is CXXII.
8. In Binary, it’s 1111010.
9. The Stridsvagn 122 is a Swedish main battle tank.
10. In numerology, the energy of this number represents freedom, independence, curiosity and adventure. People under the influence of the number like to try new things and may often change their plans or direction in order to chase a new experience.

Character birthday

Fantasm, former drug addict whose power was triggered by her drug use as a teenager. She unwittingly attacked staff, residents and visitors to the rehab facility she checked into with her psionic power. She met Superwil at the rehab when he was called in to investigate the mysterious headaches people were getting. The power remained when she became drug free, so she joined Superwil’s Ultra League.