22 August: Dorothy Parker Quotes

Dorothy Parker, US writer famed for her caustic wit, was born on this date in 1893. Here are 10 examples of her caustic wit: 

1. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
2. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
3. Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.
4. Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.
5. If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
6. Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty.
7. Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
8. I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
9. By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying - Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
10. If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

If you like superhero stories, you might like to check out My Books. This is the latest:

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

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21 August: Barley

On this date, the French Revolutionary Calendar celebrated Six-row Barley. Here are some things you might not know about barley:

1. The scientific name for barley is Hordeum vulgare. The word Hordeum comes from a Latin word meaning “bristly” referring to the texture of the ears. It’s a member of the grass family, which grows in temperate climates.
2. Humans have been cultivating it for over 8,000 years. According to Pliny, it was the special food of Greek gladiators, who were also known as “barley eaters”.
3. Barley has 14 chromosomes. The genome was sequenced in 2012.
4. Russia is the biggest producer of barley, producing 14% of the world’s supply. Australia, Germany, France and Ukraine are also major barley producers.
5. A 100-g serving, cooked barley contains 123 Calories and is a good source of essential nutrients, including vitamin B, Iron and manganese. It has also been found to lower cholesterol and help regulate blood sugar.
6. Gruel is Porridge made from barley rather than oats.
7. As well as being a key ingredient in Beer, Whiskey and barley wine, it can be used to make barley water and barley tea. In Italy barley is sometimes used as a substitute for Coffee.
8. Other uses for barley include animal feed, including as an ingredient for food for fish such as Trout and Salmon. The straw can be used to prevent the growth of algae on ponds if floated on the surface in a mesh bag.
9. The character John Barleycorn in the folk song is a personification of barley. The things which happen to him in the song represent the stages of barley cultivation.
10. Barley was used as a measurement in olden times. An inch was three barleycorns up until the 19^th century when a more standardised inch became the norm.

If you like superhero stories, you might like to check out My Books. This is the latest:

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

20 August: Hair

• Today is Bad Hair Day, the Birthday of US boxing promoter Don King who was famous for his bad hair. 10 things you might not know about hair.

1. The average person has 100,000 – 150,000 strands of hair. How many you have depends to some extent on the colour of your hair. Blondes have the most and redheads have the fewest.
2. Hair is made of keratin, which is the same stuff Horses’ hooves are made from. More specifically, hair is 50 percent carbon, 21 percent Oxygen, 17 percent nitrogen, 6 percent hydrogen, and 5 percent sulphur.
3. Hair is the second fastest growing tissue in the body after bone marrow. It grows .3 – .5 mm per day, 1.25 centimetres or 0.5 inches per month, and 15 centimetres or 6 inches per year. Contrary to popular myth, Brown hair doesn’t grow faster than blonde hair. How fast hair grows is genetic, but the gene controlling it and the gene controlling hair colour are not linked. The myth may have arisen from the fact that blonde hair is finer and more likely to break. Hair grows faster in warm weather, because heat stimulates circulation and encourages hair growth. Stress slows hair growth down but injuries like cuts can speed it up. One source even said that anticipation of sex makes hair grow faster.
4. In ancient Rome, women used Pigeon dung to dye their hair blonde.
5. We have Alexander the Great to thank for the military buzz-cut. He was the one who first ordered his troops to cut their hair short so that an opponent wouldn’t be able to grab them by the hair in combat.
6. The most common hair colour in the world is Black. Red is the rarest with only about 1% of people in the world having red hair. Blonde is almost as rare at 2%.
7. Some hair related words: the scientific term for Grey hair is canities and for split ends, trichoptilosis. An irrational fear of hair, usually loose hair strands, is called trichophobia. The word alopecia, the scientific word for hair loss, comes from the Greek word for fox, alopex. In ancient Greece, people associated human hair loss with that of mange-ridden foxes.
8. Your hair is pretty strong stuff. It’s stronger than a Copper wire of the same diameter. A single strand can support up to 6.5 pounds of weight. It can stretch up to 30% longer when wet.
9. Hair is naturally covered in sebum, oil from the sebaceous glands. It was this knowledge which inspired a hairdresser in Alabama to test out whether hair could absorb other types of oil, too. He found that untreated hair was an effective way to clean up motor oil and hence mats of hair were used to clean up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay in 2007. Disposing of huge amounts of oil soaked hair afterwards, however, can be a problem so it’s not a method used every time.
10. Forensic scientists can tell from a person’s hair anything that has been in their bloodstream, such as drugs. The one thing they can’t figure out from a hair sample, however, is the gender of the person it came from, because male and female hair is identical in structure.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

19 August: Earwigs

• On this date in 1775 a rain of earwigs fell over Stroud, England; so here are 10 things you might not know about them.

1. Earwigs belong to the Dermaptera insect order. The name of the order is made up of the Greek words for skin and wings. There are about 200 species in the family, but only four of them live in the UK.
2. The largest species of earwig is the Australian giant earwig which is about 2 inches (5cm) long. There’s one extinct type of earwig, the Saint Helena earwig, which was over 3 inches long.
3. The common name of earwig comes from an old myth that says the insects would crawl into people’s ears and lay their eggs in the Brain. It is exactly that – a myth. “Ear” is pretty obvious. The “wig” comes from the Old English word wicga, meaning insect or beetle.
4. In some parts of England they are called battle twigs and in Japan, they’re called “penis cutters” because they were frequently found in Toilets.
5. Another name they’re sometimes given is pincher bug, because of the pincers on their rear ends. The pinchers pose no threat to people but are used by the earwig to fight off other creatures that see it as prey.
6. You can tell the sex of an earwig by looking at its pincers. A male’s pincers are more curved. It’s possible they use them for mating rituals.
7. Earwigs live for about a year. Female earwigs lay their eggs in early spring so that they will hatch as the weather gets warm. She will lay around 40 eggs at a time and protects them until they hatch. Then, she feeds the hatchlings until they can fend for themselves, after their second moult. Newly hatched earwigs are called nymphs and they will moult five times before they are fully grown. In winter, they mostly hide underground.
8. They do have wings and can fly, but they very rarely do so.
9. Are they pests? They’re mainly scavengers eating decaying plant and animal material so as long as there is plenty of that around they’re actually beneficial. It’s only when they run out of dead things to eat that they might munch on living plants and that’s when they’re seen as pests.
10. They are largely solitary and like to hide in cool, wet, dark places (a human ear would probably be too warm for them). Their bodies are flat so that they can squeeze into dark crevices. They don’t like it too cold, though. They’re found in temperate and warm climates and wouldn’t survive a hard winter.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

18 August: Pluto (Disney character)

On this date in 1930, Pluto The Dog first appeared in The Chain Gang by Walt Disney. 10 things you didn’t know about Pluto:

1. He’s one of the “Sensational Six” Disney characters along with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck and Goofy.
2. He is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog, and he is of mixed breed. Unlike the other biggest Disney stars, he’s not anthropomorphic and not dressed as a human.
3. When he first appeared in The Chain Gang he didn’t have a name and wasn’t Mickey’s friend at all – Mickey had escaped from prison and Pluto was the bloodhound tracking him down. In his second film, The Picnic, he was Minnie’s pet and was called Rover.
4. So why change it to Pluto? The people at the Disney studios decided Rover was too common a name for a dog and wanted something more unusual. So they started calling him Pluto the Pup. It just so happens that the planet Pluto was named the same year. The Disney Corporation says it has no evidence that there’s any connection, but the animators at the time believed Disney named Mickey’s pet Pluto to take advantage of the furore over the naming of a new planet.
5. The first time Pluto had a lead role was in a cartoon called Playful Pluto, in which he gets stuck in fly paper.
6. Pluto doesn’t speak, but rather shows his emotions through facial expressions. His barks and sounds are produced by the same voice artist who does the voice of Goofy.
7. Pluto’s love interests are Fifi the Pekinese and Dinah the Dachshund. It would appear to be Fifi who wins his heart in the end and becomes Mrs Pluto. They have five puppies which appear in the 1937 short film Pluto’s Quin-Puplets. The fact that the Dionne Quintuplets were causing a sensation around that time is not a coincidence. In 1942 Pluto appeared with a son, Pluto Junior who may or may not have been one of the five.
8. Pluto also has a brother called K.B.
9. More than 40 US military units during WWII chose Pluto as their mascot and asked Disney to design insignia for them, featuring the pooch.
10. A cartoon featuring Pluto won an Academy Award in 1942. The cartoon was called Lend a Paw and it also won an award called the Boscar, “the Tailwagger’s own Academy Award” for being the most promising dog actor of the year. 

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

17 August: Philadelphia

On this date in 1790 the capital city of the United States moved from New York City to Philadelphia. 10 things you might not know about Philadelphia:

1. When William Penn acquired the land for the Pennsylvania colony, he planned a city which would serve as a port and a seat of government. That city was Philadelphia. The name is composed of the Greek words for love (phileo) and brother (adelphos), hence one of the city’s many nicknames is “The City of Brotherly Love”.
2. Penn planned the place to be more like a rural town than a city, using a grid plan for roads which kept houses and businesses apart with room for gardens and orchards for the residents. However, his plan was scuppered by the people who moved in, who subdivided their lots and sold them off.
3. Many of the streets in central Philadelphia are named after trees. While nobody knows for sure why this is, there are a couple of theories, both connected with William Penn. One is that he was simply a nature buff and named the streets after trees because he liked them. Another is that it was an idea he came up with to help illiterate people find their way around the city. They wouldn’t be able to read the street signs, but they would be able to recognise the type of tree planted along the street.
4. Philadelphia is known for a number of American firsts. The first American daily Newspaper (The Philadelphia Packet and Daily Advertiser, which began in 1784) The first zoo, chartered in 1859; the first church for African American people (Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1787); the first general purpose computer (which weighed either 27lbs or 27 tons depending on which source you read); America’s first Piano (built in 1775 by John Behrent); the first hospital (founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and Benjamin Franklin to care for “the sick-poor and insane” living on the streets of Philadelphia) and by association, the first medical school. One in six of all doctors in America train in Philadelphia.
5. Philadelphia’s first business was a brewery called the Philadelphia Brewing Company.
6. Philadelphia’s City Hall is the largest municipal building in the country. It was also the tallest building in the country until 1908. The trouble started, though, when a building called One Liberty Place was built in 1987 – because it was taller than the statue of William Penn on City Hall, it unleashed a curse on the city’s sports teams. No Philly team would win a championship so long as there was a building taller than the statue. So in 2008, when an even taller building, the Comcast Center, was built, the builders installed a 25in statue of Penn was installed at the top of the building, and sure enough that same year the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series. Now there’s an even taller building, The Comcast Technology Center, which opened in 2018; there’s a figurine of William Penn on top of that one, too and the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots in Superbowl that year.
7. The term “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving was coined in Philadelphia. It was nothing to do with profits or businesses being “in the black”. It came from the local cops to describe the horrible traffic conditions on that day.
8. Things to see in the city include the Liberty Bell and the Mütter Museum, where you can see slides of slices of Einstein’s Brain and a book bound in human skin. Fans of street art will have a field day here, too as there are more than 2,000 outdoor murals, making the city the “mural capital of the U.S.”
9. Famous people to come from here include Kevin Bacon, Bill Cosby, WC Fields, Richard Gere, Grace Kelly, Sidney Lumet, David Lynch, Will Smith, Louisa M Alcott, Isaac Asimov and The Three Degrees.
10. Philadelphia has eight official twin cities – Florence, Tel Aviv, Toruń (Poland), Tianjin (China), Incheon (South Korea), Douala (Cameroon), Nizhny Novgorod (Russia) and Frankfurt.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

16 August: Monty Python Day

Today is Monty Python Day, so here are 10 things you might not know about Monty Python:

1. Who are they? Monty Python is a comedy troupe consisting of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.
2. Palin and Jones met at university – they both went to Oxford. Chapman, Cleese, and Idle all went to Cambridge and were part of the Footlights Revue. Gilliam was an American cartoonist and animator who moved to England, where he worked on animated programmes for children, meeting the rest of the group through his work.
3. The group didn’t have a name until they were commissioned to make a comedy show for the BBC. Then, they came up with a number of names, including “Owl Stretching Time,” “The Toad Elevating Moment,” “A Horse, a Spoon, and a Basin,” Whither Canada?; Ow! It's Colin Plint; A Horse, a Spoon, and a Bucket; The Algy Banging Hour and “Bumwacket, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot.” In the end the BBC ended the dilemma by choosing one, Flying Circus, and actually printing it in their programming so it was no longer possible to change it. They decided the flying circus needed a name to go with it. Python is meant to represent something slithery while Monty is a name suggestive of a posh British drunk.
4. The show was nearly cancelled after just one episode because, according to one internal BBC memo, it went "over the edge of what was acceptable." The audience ratings weren’t great at first, either. Nevertheless, the BBC kept it and there were 45 episodes before it finally bit the dust in 1974, when John Cleese left.
5. The theme song is called The Liberty Bell by John Philip Sousa, played by the Band of the Grenadier Guards. One of the main reasons for choosing it was that the group were strapped for cash. This tune was in the public domain so they wouldn’t have to pay to use it.
6. The big foot in the opening credits isn’t just any old foot. It actually comes from an old painting by Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, dating back to around 1545. It was presented to King Francis I of France as a gift. It was in The National Gallery in 1969 where Terry Gilliam spotted it while searching for inspiration. The foot belongs to Cupid.
7. The Dead Parrot sketch was originally written for a US show called How to Irritate People and featured a customer complaining that the used car they’d just bought was falling apart and the vendor constantly denying the fact. They re-worked the idea for the BBC show.
8. Like many 1960s BBC shows, the original episodes were to be taped over. However, Terry Gilliam, on hearing this was about to happen, bought up all the tapes so they wouldn’t be lost.
9. The American channel ABC acquired the rights to show some episodes as late night specials in the States. However, 1970s America was so prudish that words like "damn," "hell," and "naughty bits" were considered too over the top even for a late night show. Their censorship meant that an awful lot got edited out. Monty Python weren’t at all impressed and sued ABC. The judge watched both versions, and even though he found the British version funnier, still ruled in favour of ABC. The Pythons appealed and this time they were given back the rights, which they sold to another channel.
10. They also made some films – And Now for Something Completely Different, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life (which was intended, the Pythons admitted, to offend absolutely everyone).

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book