14th December

Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, reached the South Pole today in 1911, the first man to do so. He left the Norwegian flag there and a note for Robert Falcon Scott leading a British team trying to beat him there. It simply said 'Bobby - Nah-Nah-di-Nah-Nah. Love, Ro.'

In other news ...
Max [no relation] Planck came out with the quantum leap notion in Physics today in 1900. Not everybody was impressed. Isaac Newton turned in his grave and Alfred Nobel coined the expression 'thick as a Planck'.

28th November

The German physicist Max [no relation] Planck said it all today in 1934 when he wrote, 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die out and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'

So, in reality, every word of the Bible is true; the earth is about 6,000 years old (and flat); Phlogiston occurs in every chemical experiment; Frank Sinatra had a good singing voice and babies are delivered by storks.

I knew it!

In other news ...
Horse racing was banned today in 1967 because of an epidemic of Foot and Mouth disease. Whenever such disasters occur, the government of the day leaps in with ludicrous, over-the-top measures. Foot and Mouth? Destroy all cattle. Salmonella in eggs? Destroy all chickens. Oil tanker spillages? Destroy all tankers. Global warming? Stop spraying your armpits.

Actually nature has been coping with all these issues for centuries, without the help of the British government or its biased, obsessive scientific think tanks.

And on a personal level, it would be not humanly possible to be in a room with up to twenty teenage boys without the addition of many gallons of Lynx. You may mock that most sledgehammer of deodorants, but without it ... I don't want you to even have to imagine it!