29 - Linking Buckingham Palace to California to ABBA to Liverpool to GAA

Q - There is a town in California called 29 Coconuts - true or false ? Read on ....

The big event of today is the royal wedding of William and Kate - it can't get more newsworthy than that!

It may be a coincidence that they are getting hitched on the 29th and the fact that they were both born 29 years ago in 1982. Kate ( or Catherine Duchess of Cambridge as she will be titled) is older as she was born on Jan 9th so she is in her 30th year. William is 29 as he was born on Jun 21st so he is 163 days younger than his bride.

A few other numbers you will hear about todays event:
1500 - the number of guets invited to the wedding cermony in Westminster Abbey
650 - the number of guests invited by the Queen to lunch in Buckingham Palace
300 - the number of guests invited to dinner, in the evening, by Prince Charles
9 - the number of years the couple have been in a relationship
5 - the number of horse drawn carriages in the procession from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace
3- the bells of Westminster Abbey will ring for 3 hours after the wedding
150,000 - the number of souvenir programmes of the event that will be printed and sold
100 - the number of members of the public who will get to attend the wedding in the Abbey. They were chosen by random draw.

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Other trivia (non-royal) on the number 29

• We live on just 29% of the earths surface - yes the earth is 29% land and 71% under water.
• The Scandanavian (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish) alphabets have 29 letters - the regular 26 plus what are known as diacritic characters examples of which are  é, è, ê, ó, ò, â (basically letters with a glyph).
• A heads up (pun) - the human skull has 29 bones
• Who was Lt. Hiroo Onoda? He was the last soldier to drop his arms after WW2. A Japanese soldier, he spent 29 years on a remote Philippine island,  failing to heed communications that WW2 ended and continuing to hide in the jungles and serve his country until 1974 when he finally surrendered. More
• 29 Palms - the name of a town, sorry, city in California which is home to The Joshua Tree National Park. The Joshua Tree  was made famous by the U2 album of that name. The actual Joshua tree (not sure if it was in the Park) that was photographed for the iconic image for the album became a tourist attraction but actually fell in 2000. It's still an attraction and an entrepid fan has marked the spot with a plaque with the inscription ' Have You Found What You're Looking For?" How cool is that?
• 29 Palms - a hit for Robert Palmer (ex Led Zepplin) in 1992
• Peru, Venezula and Afghanastan have populations of around 29 million
• 29 Songs - believe it or not (and it can only happen in America) this is not a musical tag but is in fact the the label of a unique red wine produced by a Californian vineyard (what is it with California and 29?). The name has connections with a certain blues musican by the name of Robert Johnson but not sure how exactly.
• Just to show that California doesn't have a monopoly on the number 29 in the US the 29th state to join the union was in fact Iowa in Dec 28th 1846 and if you add all the digits in that date together it adds up to .... yes 29 !
• 29 million copies sold - ABBA Gold - Greatest Hits and The Backstreet Boys Backstreets Back
• How much for a 50 year old, second hand, Soviet space capsule that carried a live dog into orbit in 1961? Well 2 weeks ago it was auctioned at Sothebys New York for 2.9m $ (not strictly 29 but surely qualifies). As an unrelated aside the year 1961 was the last 'upside down year' i.e. turn the number upside down and it's still 1961. That happen previously in 1881 but it won't happen again for a long long time - in fact not until 6009.
• Andy Carroll - wears No. 29 for his new club Liverpool. He scored his first premiership goal on 29 July 2007 for Newcastle (against Juventus) and his first international goal for England on 29 March 2011 (against Ghana)

• Finally, 123 years ago on this day,  29th April 1888,  the first All Ireland Football Final was played in Clonskeagh, Dublin. Even though it was played in '88 it was in fact the '87 championship (not unusual in those days). For the record Limerick were the very first champions beating Louth 1-4 to 0-3. The Clonskeagh ground was the pitch of a club called St Benburbs which merged with Kilmacud Crokes in 1972.