14 May: Israel was proclaimed a state

Israel was proclaimed a state on this date in 1948. 10 things you might not know about Israel:

1. More than half of the land area of Israel is desert. The Negev desert covers 16,000 square kilometres (6,178 sq mi).
2. Israel is 290 miles (470 km.) in length and 85 miles (135 km.) in width at its widest point and 15 km (9 mi) wide at its narrowest. At 1,208 metres (3,963 ft) above sea level, Mount Meron is the highest peak in Israel. Its lowest point is also the lowest point on Earth, the Dead Sea, at −417 m (−1,368 ft). The Sea of Galilee, .212 km below sea level, is the lowest freshwater lake in the world as well as the largest in Israel. The longest river is the River Jordan at 320 kilometres (199 mi).
3. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and therefore the only one where official school and work holidays are determined by the Jewish calendar. Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, is the official day of rest, and it is possible for people who observe the Sabbath to buy cheaper car insurance which doesn't cover Saturdays. The glue on Israeli stamps is kosher.
4. It's also the only state in the world to have revived a historic language, Hebrew, and made it one of the official languages of the nation. The other official language is Arabic.
5. Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. While Einstein was deeply moved by this gesture, he declined.
6. Israel is home to the largest ancient cemetery for Dogs, at Ashkelon, and also the world’s oldest continuously used cemetery for people, the Mount of Olives.
7. Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world.
8. The martial art of Krav Maga was developed in Israel for military personnel and the police force. It consists of a wide combination of techniques from Aikido, Jujutsu, Boxing, Judo, Wrestling and street fighting skills.
9. Israel’s national bird is the hoopoe and the national flower is the Cyclamen persicum.
10. The city of Beersheba has the highest number of chess grandmasters per capita in the world.

13th May: Daphne du Maurier

The writer Daphne du Maurier was born this date in 1907. Here are some quotes by her:

1. Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
2. Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
3. When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
4. Luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.
5. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
6. There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.
7. We've got a bond in common, you and I. We are both alone in the world.
8. And he went on eating his marmalade as though everything were natural.
9. I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people.
10. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.

12th May: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born on this date in 1820. Some things you might not know about the nursing pioneer:

1. She was born in Florence and named after the city she was born in.
2. Florence Nightingale's family didn't want her to go into nursing. They wanted her to get married and have babies. She didn't listen - she educated herself in the science of nursing instead.
3. She turned down at least one marriage proposal, from politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, because she was convinced marriage would interfere with her vocation.
4. Despite rejecting traditional roles for women and pursuing a career, she wasn't a feminist and believed that women were not as capable as men.
5. She was good at maths as well as nursing and was a pioneer in the use of graphics to illustrate statistical information. She was an early adopter of the pie chart and even developed a new type of pie chart, the polar area diagram, sometimes also called the Nightingale rose diagram, a circular histogram, to illustrate patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed.
6. When inspecting her Crimean hospitals, she would travel on horseback or in a Mule cart. She only started using a carriage with a hood and curtains after her mule cart overturned and she narrowly escaped serious injury.
7. She set up the first secular nursing school, the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860. By 1865, her first class of trainees had started work at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Her school is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, and is part of King's College London.
8. She wrote a book, Notes on Nursing, which is still read by trainee nurses today as it deals with the fundamentals of nursing - patient care and cleanliness.
9. In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In 1908, she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London.
10. It is said that during her lifetime, Nightingale owned over 60 Cats, and at one point had 17 at once. Her favourite was a large Persian called Mr. Bismarck. “Cats possess more sympathy and feeling than human beings,” she said. The fact that they helped control the disease-carrying Rats in field hospitals probably helped, as well.

11 May: Salvador Dali

The artist Salvador Dali was born on this date in 1904. Some things you may not know:

1. He believed he was the reincarnation of his older brother, also called Salvador, who died nine months before Dali was born.
2. Although primarily known as an artist, he was also a film maker - he wrote the script for the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), directed by Luis Buñuel. He is responsible for the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound; and even contributed to a Disney film, a short film called Destino.
3. He was nearly an actor - in a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune in the 1970s. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky cast Dali in the role of the Padishah Emperor. Dali said he would only do it if he was made the highest paid actor in Hollywood. Jodorowsky agreed, planning to cut Dali's screen time to the bare minimum, so he could say that he was being paid more per minute than anybody else. The film was never made.
4. His marriage was unconventional to say the least. His wife's name was Gala, she was ten years older than him and when he met her, she was already married to someone else. Her first husband, French poet Paul Eluard, was a witness at her wedding to Dali. Dali's father disapproved of the match to the extent that he disinherited his son. Gala had lots of affairs well into her 80s. Dali tolerated this - he even bought her a castle in Púbol, where she would entertain her lovers. They agreed that Dali was not allowed to go there unless she sent him a written invitation. Nevertheless, they remained married until she died.
5. Dali had a pet ocelot called Babou. He took Babou everywhere with him on a leash, including restaurants. When a fellow diner expressed alarm, Dali told her that Babou was an ordinary cat that he had painted over in an op art design.
6. He was renowned for being a bit of a miser. He was nicknamed “Avida Dollars,” which is an anagram of his name and a reference to his love of making money. He had a crafty trick for avoiding paying the bill in restaurants. He would appear eager enough, writing a cheque with a flourish for the full amount, but then, as the waiter watched, he would doodle on the back of the cheque, assuming, usually rightly, that the restaurant would not cash a cheque with an original Dali drawing on it.
7. Dali was interested in science. It is thought that the melting watches in his painting The Persistence of Memory were symbolising the idea that time is relative and not fixed, inspired by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He got the idea from watching Cheese melt on a hot summer's day.
8. He had a phobia of grasshoppers and of exposing his feet.
9. Always a showman, he once delivered a lecture in a full deep sea diving suit. He almost suffocated, but refused to take it off until the lecture was over.
10. A Dali drawing was hung in the dining room of the Rikers Island jail in New York for sixteen years. Eventually, the authorities decided it wasn't safe there and moved the picture to the prison lobby - from whence it was stolen in 2003 and has never been found.

10 May: Sid Vicious

Sid Vicious was born on this date in 1957. Some things you might not know about the punk rocker.

1. His birth name was John Simon Ritchie; when his mother married his step-father he took the name John Simon Beverley.
2. The nickname came from a hamster belonging to John Lydon, which bit John Ritchie, who said, "Sid is really vicious!"
3. Vicious replaced Glen Matlock in the Sex Pistols in 1977. Before this he had been the drummer for Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Flowers of Romance.
4. He was supposed to be the bassist, but wasn't very good at playing the Guitar. His bandmates disliked his playing so much that they would sometimes unplug his amplifier when they were on stage; and another bassist played on the band's albums.
5. Chrissie Hynde once tried to persuade him to marry her so she could get a UK work permit.
6. He was to audition as lead singer for The Damned, but failed to turn up for the audition.
7. Manager Malcolm McLaren said of him, "if Johnny Rotten is the voice of punk, then Vicious is the attitude."
8. It was Sid Vicious who started the "pogo" jumping dance move.
9. Vicious was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen after she was found in the bathroom of their hotel room with a single stab wound.
10. He died of a heroin overdose before he could stand trial. His mother, before she died, claimed to have killed him by administering the dose. Whether or not he asked her to kill him is unknown. A few days after Vicious' cremation, his mother allegedly found a suicide note in the pocket of his jacket, which read, "We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots Goodbye."

9 May: JM Barrie

Today was the birthday of JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Here are some things he said:

1. Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
2. Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
3. Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
4. God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
5. Temper is a weapon that we hold by the blade.
6. Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
7. To die will be an awfully big adventure.
8. Every man who is high up likes to think that he has done it all himself, and the wife smiles and lets it go at that.
9. Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
10. A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

8th May: Iris Day

Today is celebrated as Iris day in Japan. Here are 10 things you might not know about irises:

1. There are more than 200 species of Iris.
2. The name of the flower is derived from the Greek word for rainbow, as the flowers come in most colours of the Rainbow - Pink, lilac, Yellow, Orange, purple, and white. There are no red irises.
3. An Iris flower has 6 petals, three of which stand upright in the middle of the flower and three that grow out horizontally with tips which fall backwards. The fleur-de-lis symbol is actually a stylised iris flower.
4. The Giardino dell'Iris in Florence is the most famous Iris garden in Europe. It holds an annual competition for iris breeders.
5. Iris plants have been used in herbal medicine and aromatherapy as a sedative, a liver purge, for coughs, skin diseases and the juice is used to remove freckles from the skin. Some of the rhizomes are toxic, though, and while not usually fatal they can make people quite ill - so don't try treating yourself!
6. The most common use today is for making perfume. Some brands of Gin contain iris roots and flowers for flavour and colouring.
7. Iris plants can be used in water purification. Strategically planted, they consume some pollutants and improve water quality.
8. A flower which appears on the Sphinx in Egypt is thought to be an Iris. It also appears on a 28th Egyptian Dynasty bas relief.
9. The Iris is one of the state flowers of the US state of Tennessee. Greeneville, Tennessee holds an annual Iris Festival celebrating the Iris.
10. Iris is the birth flower for people born in February. In the language of flowers, it means faith, wisdom, peace of mind, friendship and hope. Different coloured blooms have different meanings. Yellow is passion, white is purity and blue is hope and faith.