Issue ^#885 - 11^th September 2026

Edited by and copyright ©2026 Simon Lamont
( Facebook  /  Bluesky )

tfir@simonlamont.co.uk

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Unless otherwise indicated dollar values are in U.S. dollars. Currency conversions are at current rates at time of writing and may be rounded.
The Friday Irregular uses Common Era year notation.

^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 11th September     - Day 254/365		-		An alliance of Germanic peoples inflicted the greatest defeat on the Roman Empire in its history at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 9. Political theorist James Harrington died, 1677. Explorer Mungo Park born, 1771. The Annapolis Convention to discuss inter-state trade began, 1786. Astronomy populariser Mary Proctor died, 1957. Actress Virginia Madsen born, 1961. National Day of Service and Remembrance and other 9/11-related observances in the USA.
Saturday 12th September     - Day 255/365		-		The Athenians and Plataeans defeated the first Persian invasion of Greece at the Battle of Marathon, 490 BCE [traditional date]. Blanche of Lancaster, mother of King Henry IV of England, died, 1368. Historian William Dugdale born, 1605. Switzerland became a federal state with the adoption of a new constitution, 1848. Singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles born, 1974. Actor and director Anthony Perkins died, 1992.
Sunday 13th September     - Day 256/365		-		Historian John Leland born, 1502. Explorer Henry Hudson reached the river that now bears his name, 1609. British general and military reformer James Wolfe was killed in battle, 1759. Francis Scott Key composed his poem "Defence of Fort McHenry", later set to the tune of a British song and known today as the United States' national anthem, 1814. Pianist and composer Clara Schumann born, 1819. Model and artist Lily Elbe died, 1931. Roald Dahl Day in the UK, Africa and Latin America.
Monday 14th September     - Day 257/365		-		Writer Dante Alighieri died, 1321. Artist Peter Lely born, 1618. George Frideric Handel completed his Messiah oratorio, 1741. Civil rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland born, 1941. Actress Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, died, 1982. Joe Kittinger became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon, 1984.
Tuesday 15th September     - Day 258/365		-		Explorer Marco Polo born, 1254. Gilles de Rais, one of the earliest known serial killers, was arrested, 1440. Sophia Dorothea of Celle, first wife of King George I of Great Britain, born, 1666. Landscape architect and gardener André le Nôtre, died, 1700. Charles Darwin arrived at the Galapagos Islands aboard HMS Beagle, 1835. Singer Helen Clare died, 2018. International Day of Democracy (United Nations). World Lymphoma Awareness Day.
Wednesday 16th September     - Day 259/365		-		King Henry V of England born, 1386. Owain Glyndŵr's followers proclaimed him Prince of Wales, 1400. Poet Anne Bradstreet died, 1672. Actress Anne Francis born, 1930. Xerox introduced the Xerox 914, the first successful plain paper photocopier, 1961. Inventor and entrepreneur Clive Sinclair died, 2021. International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer (United Nations).
Thursday 17th September     - Day 260/365		-		Polymath Hildegard of Bingen died, 1179. Boston, Massachusetts, was founded, 1630. Italian noblewoman and revolutionary Teresa Casati born, 1787. Abolitionist Harriet Tubman made her first attempt to escape from slavery, 1849. Outlaw Billy the Kid born, 1859. Photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot died, 1877.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Roald Dahl, in The Witches:

It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films starring Val Kilmer. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• Would you prepared if gravity reversed itself? The only thing I can't figure out is how to keep the change in my pockets... I've got it! Nudity.
• When these guys walk out the door of whatever score they're gonna take next, they're gonna have the surprise of a lifetime.
• I know a little German. He's sitting over there.
• - Mom, I told you to leave these meth-heads tied up until the cops got here!
  - I didn't call the cops and these guys are not meth-heads ok. They only look like meth-heads because they're from New Jersey.
• Where's your will to be weird, man?

Last issue's quotations from Laura Dern films were:

• - Greg, he's not responding to my treatment.
  - Really? To you waving your hands over him? He's not a Ouija board, Kevin.
      -- Little Fockers [2010]
• Uh oh. Baby, you'd better get me back to that hotel. You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.
      -- Wild at Heart [1990]
• Why did you think I chose the hardest location to find in the entire galaxy? I came to this island to die.
      -- Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi [2017]
• That's a human ear all right.
      -- Blue Velvet [1986]
• Dodgson, Dodgson, we've got Dodgson here! See? Nobody cares. Nice hat. What are you trying to look like, a secret agent?
      -- Jurassic Park [1993]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...

• A fish caught in a fishing net on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea has been identified as a spinach pipefish, a species only found in that one river system and not seen since the 1980s. ● A 148'- (45m)-long tunnel has been built under the new A421 dual carriageway in Cambridgeshire to provide a safe route for bats and other animals. The location was selected after ecological surveys identified the paths flown by bats. ● A previously unknown species of blind fish has been discovered living in a cave underneath a military installation in northern Alabama. ● There are plans to reintroduce pine martens to woodland in southeast England after successful trials in Devon, Somerset, the Lake District and Wales. Pine martens became effectively extinct in England and Wales early on in the last century as a result of sport hunting and loss of habitat. ● It has long been held that there is only one species of venomous snake in Britain, the adder, but new research in Italy suggests that the smooth snake is also capable of delivering venom, through its rear fangs. Smooth snakes mainly catch prey by constriction, so it is thought that the additional use of venom might speed the target's death or aid in digestion. Smooth snakes, common across southern Europe, western Asia and southern Russia, also exist on heathland in southern England. They pose no risk to humans. ● While - short of time travel - there will never be a way to honestly reconstruct the sounds dinosaurs made as their voice-making organs were soft tissues that did not fossilise scientists have studied 20 fossilised insects, with their wings intact, discovered in Mongolia to simulate how they would have produced sounds by rubbing their wings against ridges on their legs, in a similar way to modern insects. They discovered that one species would have produced sounds in the 20-22 kHz range, above that of human hearing, which brings into question the theory that insects developed ultrasonic sounds as a result of predation by bats; the insects lived millions of years before bats existed.


• While much attention is given to the two Voyager spacecraft another one, New Horizons, launched in 2006 to study Pluto and Arrokoth, an object in the Kuiper Belt, is nearing the edge of the Solar System and returning data on the solar wind that the Voyager craft could not, as they did not have the instruments to study it. New Horizon's mission was due to end in 2028/9 but it could be shut down early because of budget cuts imposed on NASA by the scientifically-illiterate US administration. ● The first evidence for dark matter may have been detected in a cavern almost a mile (1.6km) under the Black Hills of South Dakota. Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one contender for what dark matter is, but they travel through objects as if there was nothing there, although when a WIMP hits a xenon atom there is a microscopic flash of light and a release of electrons. The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector, in the cave where it is shielded from other particles, contains 9 tons (10 tonnes) of ultrapure liquid xenon kept at freezing conditions, and lots of detectors. They recently picked up a collision that stands at 2.6 sigma significance; there is just a 0.5% chance of it being explained by known particle science. The team operating the detector have not declared a discovery yet, as there is more analysis and research to do. ● It has been known since the Voyager fly-bys in 1980 that there is a hexagonal structure to the clouds around Saturn's north pole, but new images from the Hubble Space Telescope, amateur astronomers and a researcher at the University of Leicester have revealed a comparable ten-sided structure around the planet's south pole. ● The Perseverence rover on Mars has detected hundreds of examples of macromolecular carbon - large tangled networks of carbon atoms - on rocks in Neretva Vallis, a channel that fed a lake inside Jezero crater when there was liquid water on the Martian surface. While not clear evidence of organic life having existed on the planet in the distant past it is another piece of the jigsaw.


• A 3,200-year-old stone tablet discovered at the site of Tell Abu Seifi in Egypt which describes Horus, the falcon-headed ancient Egyptian god, as "Lord of the City of Mesn" might be an indication of the site of Mesn, a lost ancient city. The site also includes an ancient military road and a temple dedicated to Horus, suggesting that it might also be Mesn itself. ● Archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar have discovered 1.5 miles (2.4km) of roads in the jungle around Macchu Piccu, the ancient Incan settlement in Peru. The roads link the site to additional platforms and terraces, as well the Mandor Wall, a nearby 6-10'- (2-3m)-high structure thought to be defensive. ● Archaeologists in Kolomna, Russia, have discovered a ceramic jug buried in the centre of the old medieval town. The jug contained 2,600 silver coins from around 1400 CE. It is speculated that the hoard was buried by someone fleeing the epidemic that hit the area between 1425 and 1427, who never came back to collect it. ● Ancient cave art discovered in south-west Ireland has been dated to around 5,000 years before the previously earliest known humans in the country. It is speculated that whoever made the art had crossed from Wales on a now-lost land bridge. ● A Canadian team diving in Lake Ontario in search of a 1917 shipwreck instead discovered a fully-intact two-masted schooner, sitting upright, that could be a hundred years older, although much of the woodwork was covered in quagga mussels, eroding details that would help identify the ship. ● Scholars believe they have identified the earliest documented victim of a trebuchet attack. A skeleton excavated at Stirling Castle in Scotland in the 1990s had more than 160 fractures to his skull, vertebra, ribs and arms, new analysis of which suggested he was killed by blunt force trauma from behind by something equivalent to a modern car. Edward I used at least 17 trebuchets, the giant catapult siege weapons, in his attack on Stirling Castle in 1304, including the massive "Warwolf" that destroyed the gatehouse. ● There have been several supervolcano eruptions in Earth's history, one of the biggest of which was 454 million years ago, before the dinosaurs. Scientists think they have located the remains of the volcano, led by the mystery of a massive layer of volcanic ash in rocks across northern and eastern Europe. The volcano is centred deep beneath the Wash, the rectangular bay on England's east coast. There is, thankfully, no threat of it erupting again... ● A number of items linked to George Michael and Wham! are to be auctioned next month, including the guitar played in the music video for "Faith", tour itineries, a gold disc for "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses worn on stage during the 1988 Faith tour. They were in the estate of Michael's personal assistant Siobahn Bailey, who died in 2014. ● The life-sized bronze statue of John Lennon displayed on Penny Lane in Liverpool is to be auctioned, with an estimated value of up to £100,000 ($135,160). It will be replaced by a replica. ● A 450-year-old silver spoon made during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and thought to be one of the earliest known examples of Chester silver spoons, is to be auctioned later this month. It is estimated at £2,000-3,000 ($2,700-4,055).


• Thieves have made off with more than 800 barrels (over 70,000 pints) of Guinness stout worth about £115,000 ($155,430) in two HGV trailers driven off from a depot on the Whitehouse Industrial Estate in Runcorn last Monday. ● The latest art theft in Europe has seen two works by Renoir - "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" and "Young Woman at the Well" - stolen from the Renoir museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France. The thieves cut through a fence, got into the museum triggering an alarm at 5:48am on Tuesday morning, removed four paintings and fled, dropping two in the museum's garden when police arrived sooner than expected. The four paintings, a third of the museum's collection of Renoirs, have an value of €9m (£7.7m; $10.4m), according to French media.


• Eruptions of the Indonesian volcano Anak Krakatau last Friday and Sunday left more than 150,000 passengers stranded at airports after over 700 flights were disrupted as the ash cloud reached as high as 50,000' (15,000m). Anak Krakatau (Child of Krakatoa) rose from the sea early last century in the caldera left by the devastating eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. ● Ski resorts in Australia have closed up to a month earlier than normal due to the combination of global warming and the super-strong El Niño Pacific warming event. Meanwhile temperatures in Sydney have reached 33^oC (91.4^oF) in the warmest start to spring since the mid-1800s. ● The United Nations has warned countries around the world to be ready for a "danger zone of extreme weather" as the impacts of the unusually strong El Niño start to take effect. ● A small island in the middle of Williston Reservoir, the largest freshwater lake in British Columbia, Canada, appeared then disappeared from satellite images, then reappeared again. It is a floating island about the size of one-and-a-half football pitches, thought to have formed over years from accumulated driftwood on which plants and trees took root, and most likely drifted close to shore then back out into the lake. ● If Anak Krakatau was not bad enough parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines are covered in a weeks-long blanket of toxic haze from wildfires, many of which have been burning since mid-July. ● The Met Office has announced that provisional data shows this summer as being the UK's hottest on record with an average mean temperature (incorporating both day and night) of 16.5^oC (61.7^oF). There were five widespread heatwaves and 40 days when temperatures rose above 30^oC (86^oF) somewhere in the country. The previous record was 34 days. The heat was made 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change, according to the Met Office.

IN BRIEF: Dolly Parton has made British music charts history by having three of her singles in the top 10 of the official chart simultaneously for the first time, with "9 To 5" at #5, "Jolene" at #6 and "Islands in the Stream", her 1983 duet with Kenny Rogers, at #9. ● Rock stars of a non-musical kind gathered recently on the Scottish island of Easdale in the Inner Hebrides for the annual world stone skimming championships, first held in 1983, then every year since 1997 except for during the COVID pandemic. Last year's championships were hit by scandal after some entrants admitted to sanding down their stones for a more skimmable shape. ● The United Nations has passed the "Correct the Map" resolution to change the official map of the world used by its institutions from the Mercator projection to the Equal Earth projection created by a team of cartographers in 2018 to better represent the sizes of continents, especially Africa, which was too small on traditional maps. There were six abstentions but only one country voted against the non-binding resolution sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union - the United States...

The 2026 IgNobel Awards
"For research that makes people LAUGH... then THINK".

• Biomechanics:
      Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West, for devising a more precise definition of kissing - "non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer" - in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans. [UK, USA]
• Economics:
      Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children's supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behaviour. [USA, Mexico, Canada]
• Chemistry:
      Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Grey, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Staym Leonard Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamay, for discovering that milk proteins from vivaporous cockroaches pack three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows. [India, France, Japan, Canada, USA]
• Medicine:
      The late Tokuji Unno, for the study titled "How to Blow the Nose - An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing". [Japan]
• Biology:
      João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Aleida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima, and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes, repeatedly, at various temperatures and at various times of day, to try to learn what does and what does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human. [Brazil, Australia]
• Physics:
      Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott, Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal. [Canada, USA, China, Saudi Arabia]
• Technology:
      Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan A. Creighton, Jianyu Li, and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process dubbed "Necroprinting". [China, Canada, USA, Egypt]
• Olfaction:
      Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thonas Hummel, and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents, but teenagers do not. [Poland, Germany, Spain]
• Peace:
      Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams, and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike. [USA, Argentina, Australia]
• Soil Science:
      Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries, and then digging them up after two months. [Switzerland, The Netherlands, Germany]

^{^} OBITUARIES

Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson (New Moon Daughter, Loverly, named a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master in 2022, 70), actor Richard O'Sullivan (Man About the House, Robin's Nest, Dick Turpin, 82), musician John Pickles (Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, "Swing the Mood", "Let's Party", 84), singer and actor Craig Douglas ("Only Sixteen", It's Trad, Dad!, "Town Crier", 85), writer and feminist Gloria Steinem (co-founder the Women's Action Alliance and the Women's Media Center, My Life on the Road, co-founded Ms. magazine, 92), writer Raoul Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life, which helped inspire the May 1968 student uprising in France, 92).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:

16, 23, 32, 44, 52, 58

[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.

^{^} AND FINALLY...

    Little Jennifer's mother was showing her some old family photographs. "Look, Little Jennifer," she said, "this is me and Daddy on our wedding day."
    Little Jennifer looked at the photograph. "Why are you wearing a white dress, Mummy?"
    "Because it was the happiest day of my life, at least until you came along."
    Little Jennifer looked at the photograph again. "Then why is Daddy wearing black?"

---

          ^{^} ...end of line