20 May: Honore de Balzac Quotes

Honore de Balzac, French novelist was born on this date in 1799. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

1. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
2. There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
3. Love is the poetry of the senses.
4. The more one judges, the less one loves.
5. Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
6. Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
7. It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
8. When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
9. Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.
10. People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

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19 May: Dame Nellie Melba

This date in 1861 was the birthdate of Nellie Melba, Australian operatic soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century.

1. Her name at birth was Helen Porter Mitchell. Melba grew up in the country estate of Lilydale, near Melbourne. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town. Nellie was her family's nickname for her.
2. According to one story, at the age of ten she met a fortune teller, who looked at her palms and said, "I see you everywhere in great halls, crowded with people. And you are always the centre of attraction—the one at whom all eyes are directed."
3. At 21, she married an Irish immigrant called Charles Armstrong. They moved to Queensland and had a son, George. However, the rural life didn't suit her at all, so she left her family and went to London to pursue a musical career.
4. It wasn't working out, so she moved again, this time to Paris where she studied with the renowned teacher Mathilde Marchesi. On hearing Nellie sing, Marchesi said to her husband, “J’ai trouvé une étoile!” ("I've found a star!").
5. She went back to London and made her Covent Garden début in May 1888, in the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. Her fame spread across Europe and to America, debuting at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1893.
6. Despite being one of the most famous opera singers ever, her repertoire was small; in her whole career she sang no more than 25 roles and was closely identified with only ten.
7. She was a bit of a diva. The door of her dressing room at Covent Garden had a sign that admonished: 'SILENCE! SILENCE!"
8. She was the first Australian to appear on the cover of Time magazine, in April 1927.
9. She died in 1931, from a blood infection contracted after a facelift operation. She left strict instructions about her funeral: She'd had a photograph taken of her portraying Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and after her death she was made up to look like the photo, her bed strewn with frangipani. She was buried at Lilydale Cemetery under a monument on which are her reported last words: "Addio! Senzor Rancor"—"Farewell, without bitterness."
10. The Australian $100 note features her image.

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18th May: May

What do poets and writers make of this month? Read on and find out.

1. Horticulturally, the month of May is opening night, Homecoming, and Graduation Day all rolled into one. Tam Mossman
2. May is a pious fraud of the almanac; A ghastly parody of real Spring. James Russell Lowell
3. It was one of those beautiful, lengthening days, when May was pressing back with both hands the shades of the morning and the evening. Amelia E. Barr
4. The world's favourite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May. Edwin Way Teale
5. Among the changing months, May stands confest The sweetest, and in fairest colours dressed. James Thomson
6. When April steps aside for May, Like diamonds all the rain-drops glisten; Fresh violets open every day: To some new bird each hour we listen. Lucy Larcom
7. Sweet May hath come to love us, Flowers, trees, their blossoms don; And through the blue heavens above us The very clouds move on. Heinrich Heine
8. I thought that spring must last forevermore For I was young and loved, and it was May. Vera Brittain
9. Queer things happen in the garden in May. Little faces forgotten appear, and plants thought to be dead suddenly wave a green hand to confound you. W. E. Johns
10. When fishes leap in silver Stream; And forest bees are humming near, And cowslips in boys’ hats appear; We then may say that May is come. John Clare

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17 May: Montreal

On this date in 1642 Montreal, Quebec, Canada was founded. Montreal is the second largest city in Canada.

1. It's built on an island. A 30-mile-long island along the convergence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, called Montreal Island, to be exact. A tunnel and 15 bridges link the island to the mainland. It's the largest of over two hundred islands known as the Hochelaga Archipelago, also known as the Montreal Islands.
2. The settlement founded on 17 May 1642 wasn't called Montreal - it was called Ville-Marie or “City of Mary,” and was located on the southern shore of Montreal island. It was 1705 before the name Montreal began appearing on official documents. It was incorporated as a city in 1832. The name Montreal comes from Mount Royal, a 764 feet high hill in the heart of the city.
3. The hill has a 103 ft high illuminated cross at its summit. In 1642, the new settlement was threatened with flooding. A man named Paul de Chomedey prayed to the Virgin Mary for the flooding to stop. He made a bargain with her - if she answered his prayer, he would erect a cross on top of Mount Royal. The flooding did stop, and de Chomedey kept his part of the bargain. He climbed the hill with a wooden cross and planted it there. Today, the cross is usually lit in white LED lights. There's also a rule that says no building in the city can be higher than the cross.
4. The world’s first recorded indoor ice hockey game was played in Montreal on March 3rd, 1875 at the Victoria Skating Rink. James Creighton, a student from McGill University, organised the game. For people keen on less physical pursuits, the video game Assassin’s Creed was created in Montreal by Ubisoft. The world's first online search engine was also invented here in 1990 by three students. It was called "Archie".
5. Montreal was the location for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace in 1969. Their first choice was New York, but at the time John was banned from entering America. The Bahamas was considered but rejected for being too hot; and the couple settled on the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The song, Give Peace A Chance was composed during the bed-in.
6. Famous people from Montreal include singers Leonard Cohen and Céline Dion; Formula One drivers Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve; Justin Trudeau, 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; William Shatner, aka James T Kirk and Autumn Phillips, wife of Peter Phillips, the eldest grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II.
7. Montreal has a number of sister cities including Hiroshima, Brussels, Dublin, Lyon, Manila, Port-au-Prince and Shanghai.
8. Montreal's Metro rail system was inaugurated in 1966. It has four lines and 68 stations. Each station was designed by a different architect and has a theme and original artwork. Seven of the stations are underground, and form part of the Underground City. The Underground City is 20 miles of tunnels which connect shopping malls, museums, universities, hotels, banks and offices. This is so residents don't have to go out in the bitterly cold winter weather. On average it snows 60 days a year in Montreal and there are 12 days each year when the windchill is below -30 C. They also come in handy for avoiding the heat in summer.
9. Montreal's Flag has five symbols on it. A cross for Christianity, and the symbols of the main nationalities which make up the population: a fleur-de-lis is for the French, a shamrock for the Irish, a thistle for the Scottish and the Lancastrian Rose for the English.
10. It's a great place to eat out - it has the second highest number of restaurants per capita in North America and the highest in Canada. Only New York has more. Visitors to the city can visit Mount Royal Park, located on the hill. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also was a co-designer of New York City’s Central Park; La Ronde, Canada’s second largest amusement park, built on man-made islands; or the "Midgets Palace", once home to Rose and Philippe Nicol. They were both under four feet tall and the house was designed specially for them.

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May 16: Drawing Day/Pencil Day

Today is Drawing Day, or Pencil Day. So here are ten things you might not know about pencils.

1. There are two theories as to where the word pencil comes from. One is that is comes from the Latin pencillus, meaning "little tail". The other is that is comes from the French word pincel, meaning “little paintbrush.”
2. There is no Lead in a pencil. The Black stuff in the middle which makes the marks is actually a mixture of graphite and clay, which has been fired in a kiln at more than 800 degrees Celsius. The word graphite was coined by an 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, from the Greek graphein, “to write.” So why do we call it lead, then? The story goes that some Shepherds in Borrowdale, Cumbria, were out looking for some lost sheep in 1564 when they stumbled across a massive deposit of pure graphite. The stuff was assumed to be lead, since science wasn't so advanced back then. One of its early uses was to mark sheep. It was also used for rust-proofing and as a home remedy, mixed with ale and Wine. Typically, people only got really wealthy from it when they found a way to use it for war - for coating cannonballs. Suddenly it was worth £5,000 a ton, armed guards were brought in for the mine and miners had to strip after their shifts to ensure they weren't stealing any. Seven years in a penal colony was the punishment for stealing graphite.
3. Okay, so a murder plot where someone gets stabbed with a pencil and dies of lead poisoning isn't going to work. However, it used to be possible to get lead poisoning from a pencil up until the middle of the 20th century - by chewing it, because they'd be painted with lead paint. Now, however, a writer would have to be content with the victim dying from an infection caused by a pencil stab wound.
4. Why are so many pencils painted Yellow? I came across two possible explanations. One is that the Rolls Royce of pencils in the 19th century was a brand called Koh-I-Noor, named after the famous yellow diamond and based in Austria-Hungary, which had yellow in its Flag. The other is that the best graphite was from China, and pencil producers wanted people to associate their products with the Orient and with quality - so they chose yellow because it was a colour associated with Chinese royalty. China still produces more than half of the world's pencils today.
5. The average pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, or write 45,000 words. Or so they say. Nobody has actually tested this out.
6. We've all heard that old joke about how NASA spent millions of dollars designing and making a pen that would write in zero gravity, while the Russians merely got on with it and used pencils. The Americans did use pencils in space, but after the Apollo 1 fire, they were deemed to be a fire hazard. Bits of graphite floating around in zero gravity were a hazard too. It was for these reasons that NASA started using the Fisher Space Pen in 1965.
7. The standard size of a pencil is 19 cm (7.5 in) long, and 6mm (a quarter of an inch) high. The largest pencil ever made is a Castell 9000, which is on display at a pencil factory in Kuala Lumpur. It is 65 feet high. The smallest was made by engineers at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Theirs is essentially an atomic force microscope rather than a traditional pencil. It can draw lines 50 nanometers (two millionths of an inch) wide. On average, a pencil can be sharpened 17 times.
8. Pencils are classified according to their hardness or blackness. That is why you'll see the letters H, B and numbers on pencils. Pencils with more clay in the mix are harder and lighter. H9 is the hardest and lightest. Pencils with more graphite are softer and darker. The softest and darkest is a B9.
9. What about coloured pencils? Their cores are wax or oil based and contain pigments and binding agents.
10. Some famous writers would use nothing but pencils to write their novels - Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck among them. Hemingway held that writing the first draft in pencil and then typing it meant you got an extra chance to edit your work and improve it. Another writer, Henry David Thoreau, had a job as a pencil designer at his father's pencil factory before becoming a writer full time.

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15 May: Dinosaur Day

Dinosaurs lived on Earth from about 230 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. They lived during all three periods of the Mesozoic (“middle life”) Era: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Here are ten fascinating dinosaur facts.

1. The word “dinosaur” was coined by British paleontologist Richard Owen in 1842. It's Greek for "terrible lizard". Back then the word "terrible" didn't have exactly the same meaning as it does today. To Owen, it would have meant "awe inspiring." The term refers, officially, to land-dwelling reptiles with a specific hip structure, so many of the creatures commonly believed to be dinosaurs - such as mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and Dimetrodon, actually aren't.
2. Not all dinosaurs are big. Some were - they had Skulls as big as a car and tails over 45 feet long. A Tyrannosaurus rex had teeth 6 inches (15 cm) long and ate 22 tons of meat a year; The biggest plant eater was the Argentinosaurus at 98 feet (30m) long, and it would eat a ton of vegetation a day. Most of them were considerably smaller, however. Most were about the same size as a human, or even smaller. The smallest dinosaur skeletons ever found belonged to the young of a creature called Mussaurus (“mouse lizard”) while the smallest fully grown ones were Lesothosaurus (“Lizard from Lesotho”), which is about the size of a Chicken, and Fruitadens haagororum which was only 4 inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than two pounds. There are animals alive today which are bigger than any dinosaur - the blue whale - which measures 108 feet (33m).
3. Talking of chickens, scientists now believe dinosaurs were more closely related to modern birds than to lizards. The possibility that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds was first suggested in 1868 by Thomas Henry Huxley. It was discovered that many dinosaurs, including the T. Rex, were actually covered in a type of feather. There are even some studies which suggest that dinosaur DNA lurks, not in insects petrified in amber, but in modern chickens. In 2005, biologists at the University of Wisconsin were able to turn on the gene that controlled the development of teeth, producing a chicken embryo with teeth. Their colleagues at McGill University think it's possible to produce a chicken with little arms.
4. The dinosaur with the longest name is Micropachycephalosaurus (“small thick-headed lizard”).
5. One of the earliest dinosaurs was the Eoraptor (“dawn stealer”), so named because it lived at the dawn of the Dinosaur Age. It was about the size of a German Shepherd Dog.
6. The first to be described in scientific literature was the Megalosaurus. Part of one of its bones was found in a quarry in Oxfordshire in 1676. The bone was passed on to Robert Plot, then Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, who quickly worked out it belonged to an animal bigger than anything alive in Britain. He thought at first it was the thigh-bone of a Roman war Elephant, or a giant human, such as those mentioned in the Bible. While the bone has been lost, Plot made detailed drawings of it, so later scientists could study it, too and identify it as belonging to a Megalosaurus. The bone also gave rise to the first Latin species name given to a dinosaur. Richard Brookes included a picture of it in his 1763 book. In the caption, he called it "Scrotum Humanum". I know what you're thinking, and you're right. Brookes thought the bone looked like a pair of human testicles.
7. Scientists believe that there could be as many as 1,850 different species of dinosaur, many of which haven't been discovered yet. Dinosaurs lived on all the continents, including Antarctica. 108 species of dinosaurs have been discovered in Britain.
8. Like birds and lizards, dinosaurs built nests and laid eggs. It's even thought they took care of their young, as birds do. About 40 kinds of dinosaur eggs have been discovered, ranging in size from 3 centimetres long weighing 75 grams, to those of a meat eater in Asia called segnosaurus (“slow lizard”), around 19 inches long.
9. Scientists disagree about how fast a T. Rex could run. Some say as fast as 18 mph (28 km/h), while others say it was too big to run at all. The fastest dinosaur was the Ornithomimus, which could run up to 43½ mph (70 km/h). That is not as fast as a Cheetah.
10. So what happened to them all? The most common explanation is that a massive Meteorite hit the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico 65.5 million years ago. This is known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or the K-T event. This killed off anything on land which was bigger than a large dog. Some scientists think it was more gradual - small mammals came along and ate all the dinosaur eggs; the dinosaurs' bodies got too big for their brains (The Stegosaurus, for example, had a body the size of a van, but its brain was the size of a walnut); there was a plague; or it was global warming caused by huge numbers of the massive animals Farting.

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14 May: Morecambe and Wise

This date in 1926 saw the birth of Eric Morecambe, English comedian, best known for his work with Ernie Wise. 10 facts about Morecambe and Wise.

1. Eric Morecambe was born John Eric Bartholomew, and Ernie Wise was originally Ernest Wiseman.
2. They first met in 1941 when they were each booked separately to appear in Jack Hylton's revue, Youth Takes a Bow, at the Nottingham Empire Theatre. There was a break when they both got called up to serve in World War II - Wise joined the Merchant Navy, while Morecambe was conscripted to become a Bevin Boy and worked as a coal miner in Accrington. After the war, they met at the Swansea Empire Theatre, again by chance, and joined forces.
3. Ernie shortened his last name to Wise, and for a while the duo was called Bartholomew and Wise. Eric decided to change his name, to Morecambe, after his home town. For a while, Ernie considered re-naming himself Leeds after his home town, but decided in the end that Morecambe and Leeds sounded too much like a day out on the train.
4. They did the rounds of theatres and Radio before first appearing on TV in 1954. Although they were to become one of, if not the, most popular duos ever, their first show, Running Wild, didn't go down so well. A Newspaper review of the time read "Definition of the week: TV set—the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise." It's said Eric carried that review around with him ever after.
5. They starred in some films, too. The Intelligence Men (1965), That Riviera Touch (1966), The Magnificent Two (1967) and Night Train To Murder (1983).
6. They didn't sing Bring Me Sunshine at the end of every single show. Sometimes they sang another song called Positive Thinking - but it's Bring Me Sunshine which really caught on.
7. Ernie is said to have made the first mobile phone call in the UK in 1985 when he called Vodafone's Headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire from St Katharine Docks, east London. While it later came to light that Sir Ernest Harrison, chairman of Vodafone had already had a mobile phone call from his son, Michael, Ernie's was still the first call to be made by a member of the public.
8. In 1976, they were both awarded the OBE.
9. They both died of heart attacks, Eric in 1984 - he had his third heart attack as he left the stage of the Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury after a show and died later in hospital. Ernie lived until 1999. he had two heart attacks while on holiday in Florida and had a triple heart bypass in Fort Lauderdale. He was flown home by an air ambulance, but died a few weeks later.
10. There are statues dedicated to both in their home towns. In March 2010, Ernie's widow Doreen unveiled a statue of him in his home town of Morley, West Yorkshire, and there is a statue of Eric in Morecambe. He is shown with binoculars around his neck, to acknowledge that he was a keen birdwatcher in his spare time. Little and Large nearly called their act Syd Blackpool and Eddie Daft, but decided in the end that nobody could copy Morecambe and Wise.

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I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

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