Tag Archives: June

Unblogged June

Being some things what I done, or what happened, during the month of June.


Monday 2
Had to unblock the pond pump again today as it is choked with mats of algae, in less than a week.


Tuesday 3
Dear God! It’s relentless. I’m still trying to catch up with everything I didn’t manage to do on Sunday. It mostly revolves around the 25th Anniversary Lunch for AP Soc on Friday – and I’m not even organising it! But the money is flowing through me, so it’s continual questions. Plus I’m expected to take all sorts of stuff like merchandise with me! I seem to have done nothing else for the last week. Heaven alone knows what they’ll do when I’m not here!


Friday 6
Blimey that was a tiring, but worthwhile, day. Celebration lunch for the 25th anniversary of the AP Soc at National Liberal Club. 65 attending, I think, including some well known names as well as some of AP’s extended family. Great to see everyone again, not having done so since before Covid.


Saturday 7
It’s surprising how much better one feels for a really good night’s sleep. I was so shattered after yesterday that I went out like a light, and although I woke up twice in the night I slept through to a few minutes before the alarm. For the first time in ages I woke up not feeling stressed and depressed, but awake and rested. More please!


Monday 9
If it’s happening, I don’t know anything about it. I’m still trying to catch up after Friday and its prologue. So I’ve been paying little attention to the world and its mess.


Tuesday 10
That made an interesting change, and a childhood memory of weekend tea. For a quick light tea this evening, when N got back from the hospital, I had sardines on toast. It’s nutritionally good, and seems very down market until one follows it with strawberries and thick double cream. Of course Queen Cat got a share of both sardines and cream!


Thursday 12
I do not understand couriers. Today I had two boxes of the literary society’s latest book delivered from the printer. Two identical boxes; labelled “1 of 2” and “2 of 2”. They arrived on two different couriers about 30 minutes apart. Mad.


Friday 13
When I sat down to lunch today I felt absolutely fine. By the time I stood up at the end of lunch I had a full-blown attack of vertigo and had to spend the rest of the day horizontal.


Saturday 14
Horizontal.


Sunday 15
Still horizontal.


Monday 16
Vaguely vertical.


Tuesday 17
Finally feeling almost back to normal – or at least I would if I’d actually had a decent night’s sleep. It didn’t help that I had to be up early and spend the morning at the doctors: meeting with Practice Manager, blood test and see my GP. GP agreed there’s not a lot one can do about the vertigo, although she did give me a link to information about the Brandt-Daroff exercises which are supposed to help remove crystals from the semi-circular canals. And the Practice Nurse who took my blood did say that vertigo always takes around 5 days to resolve – which is my experience.


Wednesday 18
Well it’s a medical week. Today I had a pre-op phone call with a nurse at our local private hospital, where in two weeks time I’m having surgery to remove my finally expired molar. I thought, OK this will be a 20 minute check in call. Not a bit of it. She spend nearer an hour and 20 minutes diving down every conceivable rabbit hole – although she didn’t quite get to demanding what my grandmother liked for breakfast. To cap it all she tells me that tomorrow I have to go to the hospital for blood tests and an ECG. Oh joy!


Thursday 19
OK, I know it’s private healthcare but well under an hour to go to the hospital (just a mile up the road), get blood tests and an ECG and get home. Just as well because it was meltingly hot out.


Saturday 21
Spent almost all day sans shirt, although I had to don a t-shirt for a literary society Zoom social call just after lunch. After less than 90 minutes I could have wrung the sweat out of the t-shirt!


Sunday 22
Why does doing simple tasks like putting things in envelopes for the post take so long. OK, I admit I had quite a bit to do to catch up on, but I ended up spending the whole day sorting our literary society stuff: mailing books; website updates; emails … and all the fallout therefrom.


Monday 23
It never rains but there’s a fucking hailstorm. Today, Boy to the V-E-T because his tail is drooping – which can be serious for cats. His tail is normally upright and waving around as if he was a foxhound; but since Friday evening his tail was drooping and he couldn’t hold it above horizontal. The vet found a puncture wound a the base of his tail (top and bottom); probably inflicted by another cat rather than the fox. So antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory for several days.


Tuesday 24
Gone 19:00 and I’m about to have tea when I pick up a phone call. It turns out to be the anaesthetist who’s on the team for my op next week. A 20 minutes discussion results in him saying he’ll do the op with sedation and local anaesthetic. If they can pull it off, that’s a definite result, because if I had a general anaesthetic (as originally planned) they will keep me in overnight; but with sedation they won’t. Not only much nicer but also a lot more convenient.


Thursday 26
Another result today. Had to go to Audiology at the local hospital to (a) have wax vacuumed out of my ears, and (b) take one hearing aid in for repair. The young lady who manages the centre, and does the ear vacuuming, was incredibly helpful. Having cleared my ears, she said “Oh I’ll repair your hearing aid now; it’ll take only five minutes”. In fact she actually replaced the hearing aid as the volume control had died. Job done and I’m out before the end of my appointment slot; with no need for another trip to collect the repaired device. A definite win.


Saturday 28
Something worth recording, although a bit out of sequence … I’ve had two rather nice raptor sightings recently, both new for me. First, several times over recent weeks I’ve seen a very swift-like raptor (but noticeably bigger than swift) jinking across the gardens. It has to be a hobby. I know they used to be around because local bird-watchers have told me about them. Secondly, on Thursday sitting outside Ealing Hospital one of their peregrines was flying around: practicing doing circuits; before disappearing behind the top of the building. It could have been one of this year’s young, although they should long have fledged. We know the peregrines nest there (and have done for several years) but I’ve never spotted one before.


Sunday 29
This afternoon I unloaded all the images from my trail cameras from the last three weeks – all 6500 of them – eeekkk! Well 20-30% were complete rubbish; just foliage waving in the breeze! Another 50% were the usual boring stuff: cats and foxes trotting hither and yon. But there were a couple of surprises. First one early morning at the birdbath there was a collared dove; no it’s a juvenile woodpigeon; oh no it isn’t it really is a collared dove. I thought I’d heard one around; but I’ve never before seen one here. Then a few days ago, again early morning, lucky Mr Fox is seen trotting off down the garden with a woodpigeon in his jaws; I saw not the catching, so I can only think the stupid bird hopped into his jaws.


Monday 30
Bugger! Had to cancel my dental op on Wednesday. Just don’t ask.


Sorry, no photos this month as everything has just been too manic.


Monthly Links for June

And so, already, we get to this month’s collection of items you may have missed.


Science, Technology, Natural World
Has any cat owner actually managed to fully decipher their cat’s meows? Well now researchers are trying to use AI tools to do just this. [££££]

Whether your cat is vocal or quiet may depend on its genes.

So, we’re still finding microbes we didn’t know about. In one case a microbe with a bizarrely tiny genome (above) which could just be evolving into a virus.

And in a further demonstration of how little we know about our home rock, scientists continue to be baffled by an apparent, and mysterious, link between Earth’s magnetism and oxygen levels. [££££]

Extending this lack of knowledge outward … Was the Big Bang really the beginning of our Universe? We don’t know, but there is research which suggests it could all have happened within a black hole!


Health, Medicine

Despite what they told you at school, insulin is made in the brain, and not just in the pancreas.

The ancient idea of the wandering uterus may be wrong, but the female reproductive tract is surprisingly mobile.


Sexuality

Who knew that semen allergy was a thing?

Another oddity … Orgasms can trigger colours in people with sexual synaesthesia. [££££]


Social Sciences, Business, Law, Politics

Denmark is deploying “saildrones” (above) in the Baltic Sea to monitor undersea cables and protect them from hostile action.


Art, Literature, Language, Music

English spelling will never make sense. Here’s something about why. [LONG READ]


History, Archaeology, Anthropology

One archaeologist thinks he’s uncovered a fraudulent scam involving Roman wine.

Also in the Roman world, a huge haul of fragments of Roman frescoes has been found in South London. What a nightmare jigsaw puzzle!

Here’s a review of a book on the making of books in the Middle Ages.

The Inca had a system of “writing” based on knotted strings, and some ancient examples are revealing Peru’s climate history.

There seemed little he couldn’t turn his hand to for the profit of humanity in general, making Benjamin Franklin (below) a phenomenon even during his lifetime.


London

Who knew that London still had sheriffs?

IanVisits investigates the one-time secret tunnels beneath Holborn, and looks at the plans to open them to the public.

In North London there’s a forgotten Tudor house that’s seen better days.

Coming right up to date … there’s to be a national memorial to Queen Elizabeth II. And of course it will be in London’s St James’s Park and being designed by Norman Foster. [No comment.]


Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs
Continuing one of our recurrent themes, here’s an article on helping people understand naturism and social nudity.


Shock, Horror, Ha ha ha!

So let’s end with two unlikely items …

Did you know that Disney produced educational films about periods and family planning as long ago as 1946?

And finally a Dutch museum has put on display a 200-year-old, mint condition, condom (below) decorated with an explicit scene of a nun and three clergymen. It is believed to have been a “luxury souvenir” from a fancy brothel in France.


June Monthly Quotes

Rather thin pickings in the way of quotes encountered this month.


In a sense, nothing in life is planned – or everything is – because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]


Most dictionaries define happiness as “the feeling of being happy”. This has the bizarre quality of being correct while containing no useful information whatsoever.
[Dr Dean Burnett, Science Focus, May 2025]


People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.
[Dalai Lama]


Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
[Carl Jung]


You can seem like a millionaire to one person and a homeless person to the next. The ants think you are a giant, and the trees don’t even notice you. You think you have a boring life, but the next person might be striving for your lifestyle. Comparison is the thief of joy, so stay kind and keep loving life. Life is all just a big game of perspective.
[unknown]


The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.
[Noam Chomsky]


Chocolate lines up planetarily with the sun. Chocolate is an octave of sun energy. In fact, it’s the energy of the centre of the sun.
[David Avacado Wolfe (b.1970)]


Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.
[James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)]


June Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to this month’s six quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

World Affairs

  1. Which political figure became Baroness of Kesteven? Margaret Thatcher
  2. What year was the United Nations established? 1945
  3. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus became the head of which United Nations agency in 2017? WHO (World Health Organisation)
  4. Who was US President in the year 2000? Bill Clinton
  5. What was the name of the treaty signed between the Allies and Germany that officially ended WWI? Treaty of Versailles
  6. The border between North Korea and South Korea is about 257km long and 4km wide. What is this buffer zone known as? Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ)

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2024.

This Month’s Poem

Trees
Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation

June Quiz Questions

Each month we’re posing six pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As always, they’re designed to be difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so have a bit of fun.

World Affairs

  1. Which political figure became Baroness of Kesteven?
  2. What year was the United Nations established?
  3. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus became the head of which United Nations agency in 2017?
  4. Who was US President in the year 2000?
  5. What was the name of the treaty signed between the Allies and Germany that officially ended WWI?
  6. The border between North Korea and South Korea is about 257km long and 4km wide. What is this buffer zone known as?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

June 1925

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.


8. The Noël Coward comic play Hay Fever opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the City of Westminster, England.

14. A significant German art exhibition of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement opened in Mannheim, with paintings by George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Rudolf Schlichter and others.George Grosz, 'Ecce Homo', 1923

15. Born. Richard Baker, English broadcast journalist and author (d.2018)

24. The Five Sisters window at York Minster was dedicated to the women who lost their lives in the line of service during World War I


Unblogged June

Being some of the things I did in June that I didn’t write about …


Saturday 1
So I was thinking what a dull and dismal day it was for the beginning of June – and it was. But then when we were eating this evening there’s a jay on the peanut feeder just a couple of meters from the dining room window. He was having a good tuck in too, and extracting large pieces of nut which disappeared whole. From the plumage it was almost certainly a juvenile, probably only passing through looking for its own hang-out. Although it may well be the one I saw a couple of days ago, salvaging some peanuts from the ground under the rambler roses. We don’t see jays going through the garden very often – maybe once a year – so good to have seen this chappie.


Sunday 2
There I was this morning sitting at the dining table doing some heraldry research, and I realised the jay was outside on the nut feeder again. When suddenly down swooped the magpie, driving the jay away. The gardener later reported that there were fledgling blue tits in the trees, and the parents were also seen scolding the jay. Meanwhile the jay has emptied the nut feeder!


Monday 3
As we have for the last couple of years, we’re leaving most of the lawn to grow unmown until at least some time in July. It does look a bit scruffy, but we are gradually getting a few wildflowers back; this year we have a nice small patch of buttercups. And of course the cats love the savannah: they can melt into the long grass and sit watching and waiting for anything that happens into their jaws – luckily this is mostly hapless insects.


Tuesday 4
We still have the jay around. Seen this evening attacking the nuts in the feeder up by the house, and just 2 metres from the dining room window. Of course it flew off as soon as I stood up and got a camera!


Wednesday 5
A good afternoon round at the doctor’s. I ran a “clinic” for anyone wanting help with online access to NHS health apps etc. Only 2-3 customers, but I was glad to help them. N and I also took charge of the waiting area noticeboards again – which the patient group had managed until Covid arrived. Hard work getting them rearranged but they ended looking much tidier and more welcomingly useful. We also met one of the new receptionists, who seemed polite, cheerful and helpful to everyone.


Thursday 6
I came in at lunchtime and looked out into the garden and thought: “What is that on our odd potato plant in the border?” On my way to feed the fish in the pond I took a look. It was a head of flowers. Now I know potatoes do flower, and they’re related to tomatoes and nightshade, so the flowers are similar. My past experience of potato flowers is that they are small and like white tomato flowers. But not these! They’re a rather fetching shade of pale lavender, and huge: probably 4cm or so across. And they’re rather pretty.group of pale lavender potato flowers


Friday 7
We still have our jay around, which I find quite remarkable. I know we have quite a few trees, including an oak, and there are some others around, but I wouldn’t have thought enough to make good territory for a jay. But then it is clearly a juvenile and there’s the attraction of fast food from out bird feeders. The magpies aren’t too impressed though.


Saturday 8
Something must be wrong. I actually made some time this afternoon to do some work on my family history, for the first time in months. Not that I made any progress, but still.


Sunday 9
Blasted tomcats. Well if next door will always have unneutered females it’s to be expected. Sadly. The current local alpha male is a lean, mean, spotted and striped, dark tabby – with nuts that look large enough to be used as ping-pong balls. He’s clearly at the top of his game because we get only the odd glimpse of any other tomcat. He’s persistent; in and out of our garden many times a day; and intrudes through our cat door to mop up any food our cats haven’t finished. He’s even been known to shelter from the rain in ours; and isn’t afraid of going upstairs either! He’ll get caught out, get scared witless, and be cured sooner or later – they always do! The sad thing is that if one could remove his appendages he’d probably be a nice cat; but for now he’s a pestilence. Why can people not get their cats neutered?


Monday 10
So this is June. Really? It is definitely on the cool side for June, and intermittently very windy. We’ve not yet managed to sit outside this summer with a coffee, let alone sit out into the evening over a bottle of wine, which was our habit some years ago. And it doesn’t look as if it’s going to improve this side of the General Election. Bah! Humbug!


Tuesday 11
Blimey! Rewriting, and checking, website code is absolutely knackering. A lot of the time you can do only a couple of hours without getting a completely addled brain. I’ve spent a lot of yesterday and today (on and off) doing little except checking and correcting the formatting of a new, very large and somewhat complex set of webpages – only 50 pages! That’s after days of work to check over the content. All(!) I have to do now is run the whole lot through a spellchecker. And then, barring any further errors, I can send them off to the developers to be added to our system.


Wednesday 12
An interesting cabaret at lunchtime. Arrives the jay (not seen for a few days); it bounces from the rose onto the small apple tree near the house and starts attacking the nuts in the bird feeder. It’s beak is extracting large chunks of nut which are going down whole. After a few minutes the magpie appears, and moves the jay on. Being slightly larger the magpie is definitely dominant. Magpie sits in apple tree and thinks about getting at the nuts – well if that jay can do it, so can I. It has a go, like the jay from a handy twig as a perch, but it isn’t that much better at it than the useless pigeons. Meanwhile a second magpie has appeared to sit on the fence. Magpie 1 departs. Jay reappears, via the rose, and resumes it’s assault on the nuts. Rinse and repeat. By the third round the magpie (not sure which it was) has definitely refined its technique and is being more successful than the jay at extracting large pieces of nut. Apart from the interplay between the young jay and (more dominant) magpie(s), what was interesting was that we’ve never before seen a magpie on a bird feeder!


Thursday 13
Why did I sleep so badly last night? It took me ages to get to sleep. Then I woke up just before 4 and was awake for at least an hour. So when the alarm went off at 8.30 I struggled to wake up.


Friday 14
About 20:15 this evening, while we’re finishing dinner, arrives the local fox (well one of them; we currently have at least two). I think the dog fox. He trots up the garden, stopping midway to stare intently at something in mid-air. He came right up to the house, bold as brass, stopping at one point to look at the cat door (from about a metre away). He then went to investigate one of the apple tree tubs – the one with the bird feeder hanging in the tree. Whatever he found to eat, there was a lot of it as it occupied him for a good 10 minutes. Although N said there was a small amount of fruit there (basically just a few grapes) this would not have occupied him for more than a couple of minutes. So either he’d cached something there, or some passing squirrel had tipped half the contents of the nut basket out. The latter is not that unlikely as the local squirrels, jay, etc. have emptied it completely in two days!


Saturday 15
So you go down the garden to feed the pond fish, and there are little tweety birds everywhere – along with the ubiquitous parakeets. Totally unable to see what they are: it’s just lots of generic tweeting (so possibly young ones) and of course they’re hidden in the depths of the boscage. They’re so uncooperative, these birds.


Sunday 16
The sweet sound of children’s voices! The evening has been raucous with the local brats screaming at the top of their lungs; the parakeets doing the same; and some thoughtful neighbour running a petrol mower. There’s an excuse for the parakeets: they’re wild. Mind you the children probably are too – I certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to make that much noise as a kid. And why do you need a petrol mower for a lawn 5x10m maximum which you could cut with scissors – or a borrowed goat?


Monday 17
Another of those days when you’re feeling like you didn’t sleep well (actually I probably didn’t) and someone stole all your elastic bands. So everything is an effort, mentally and physically. What a good job there’s nothing on and I can spend the day clearing up odd jobs.


Tuesday 18
On the way back from the hospital at lunchtime we’re just round the corner from home … Walking along was a young woman. OK, so what? She was tall-ish and very slim; wearing dark legs and a dark blue top. This was set off with a low crowned black straw hat with a brim about a metre wide – well it was certainly enormous! But the pièce de résistance: walking nicely at heel was a milk chocolate coloured standard poodle, beautifully clipped right down to it’s pom-pom boots! One of those occasions when you need your camera in hand and primed because you had at most 5 seconds to grab the shot.


Wednesday 19
It’s surprising how quiet it is without my hearing aids. My hearing appears to still be deteriorating so I could well be stone deaf within 10 years, if I survive that long. The problem is that you can’t properly hear the things you need to. And what you can hear is different because you’ve lost the high frequencies — so most birdsong is out, except for the lower tones like wood pigeons.


Thursday 20
A very quick trip to the hospital today to collect my repaired hearing aids. I spent more time waiting to be picked up afterwards than I did in the hospital (which was about 15 minutes, and I didn’t rush!). And more time in the taxi going and coming that actually at the hospital. Still I sat outside in the sun while waiting which was very pleasant.
Oh, and true to form, I now think it’s Friday!


Friday 21
What a lovely day. At last we get wall-to-wall sunshine and it’s hot. Too nice to be doing anything, so I mostly didn’t.


Saturday 22
The usual interesting quarterly literary society social call this afternoon. Mostly the usual suspects including attendees from Ireland, USA and Japan. A lot of discussion about the English class system, and the mobility between classes, which usually baffles the Americans.


Sunday 23
I’m not generally a fan of the small plume moths. They always seem dull and uninteresting. But the one which was sitting on our bathroom tiles this morning was, I thought, unusually large (wingspan 25-28mm) and quite prettily marked, even if in shades of beige. Probably the Common Plume, Emmelina monodactyla, which are quite variable.plume mothNote the spurs on the legs! This evening I made sure it went back outside to live another day.


Monday 24
So now I’m fed up with this ear infection. I’ve no idea what it is but is seems to be something swollen and sore in my ear canal – and it isn’t wax. I can’t hear anything in my left ear, and it is too sore to wear my hearing aids. At least it isn’t my usual vertigo. I’m hoping it’ll go away and I won’t need to bother the doctors. It’s the more miserable because the weather is hot (at last!) and very humid.


Tuesday 25
Much as I like being warm, and I’m naturally warm, I don’t like this humidity. It’s really draining. So much so that I spent a large part of the afternoon reclining on the bed in front of the fan with all the windows open – so I managed to accomplish very little.

Oh and let’s count the last few days according to my brain:
 Thursday was Friday
 Friday was Saturday
 Saturday was Sunday
 Sunday was no day at all
 Monday was Sunday
 Today? Well who knows?
Yes, I know, I’m going mad!


Wednesday 26
micro mothMeanwhile today I tried to photograph this tiny little insect on the bathroom wall – why do these things always sit where they’re almost inaccessible? It’s about 5mm in size and we often see them indoors. I’m not at all clear whether it’s a micro-moth or a fly; I suspect the former from the wing markings and that this one has feathery antennae redolent of a male moth. Anyway, here’s a very poor photograph; I shall try again sometime when I have more “go” and my proper camera gear to hand.


Thursday 27
Phew! It’s a bit cooler today, which is rather pleasant, but there’s a stiff breeze. In fact the breeze was so strong that I had to shut some of the windows to stop thee through draught. But it has been nice and sunny all day. I’m still struggling with this ear and it’s annoying me; it’s still sore and slightly inflamed, and I can’t wear a hearing aid in that ear. So I’ve got a call out to the doctors. I suspect it’s an abscess and will need some antibiotics. Very annoying!


Friday 28
We’re doomed; doomed I tell you. It’s the end of June and high summer. The buddleia is in full flower, but there’s not an insect in sight. Not a butterfly. Not a bee. Not a wasp. Not even a mouldy fly. The buddleia should be buzzing with insects. The only wildlife I’ve seen today are three woodpigeons. Gawdelpus!


Saturday 29
We have a fan in the bedroom, with a remote control. Last evening the remote was playing up. So I took a look today and the batteries were so corroded I was surprised it worked at all. Mind you we’ve had the fan for some years and they’re likely the original (cheap) batteries. I cleaned it up and put in new batteries. Nothing; it will not work. Check batteries; try another pair; ensure IR receiver on the fan is clean. Still nothing. Take the remote apart; clean it some more; and in the process snap a silly little wire right at a point where I can’t resolder it. Bugger! Unusually eBay doesn’t come up with a replacement; nor does anyone else. At least the fan still works, we’ll just have to get out of bed to turn it on/off. I can’t justify a new fan just for a broken remote – which has now been stripped down for recycling.


Sunday 30
It’s the end of june, so we’re halfway through the year. Well, no, actually we’re not. Count the days: the first 6 months of the year have 181 days (182 in a leap year), and the second 6 months have 184 days. So given that this is a leap year, today is day 182 and there remain 184 days. That means tomorrow, 1 July, is day 183 and there are 183 days remaining, so midnight on night of 1/2 July is halfway through the year. And in a normal year it would be midday on 2 July.


June 1924

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.


3. Died. Franz Kafka, Austrian author (b. 1883)


5. Ernst Alexanderson sends the first facsimile across the Atlantic Ocean, which goes to his father in Sweden


8. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine are last seen “going strong for the top” of Mount Everest by teammate Noel Odell at 12:50pm; the two mountaineers are never seen alive again


12. Born. George HW Bush, 41st President of the United States (d. 2018)