October 28

Better Than News

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  Great Red Spot Cat Toys is an unlicensed transdimensional corporation which manufactures and distributes novelty oversized laser pointer toys for cats.

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  Who's Eating Gilbert Grape? is a 1993 coming-of-age film about a deranged masked cannibal.

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  The Subletting of Hill House is a 1959 property management horror novel by American author Shirley Jackson. The story relies on contract negotiations and litigation proceedings to elicit emotion in the reader, exploring complex relationships between the tenants, subtenants, sub-sub-tenants, and so on.

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  The Day After Barbie is a fantasy disaster film directed by Greta Gerwig and Roland Emmerich, starring Margot Robbie, Dennis Quaid, Ryan Gosling, and Jake Gyllenhaal.

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  The Usual Jokers is a neo-noir mystery thriller film directed by Tim Burton and Bryan Singer, starring Jack Nicholson and Kevin Spacey.

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  12 Grams of 21 Monkeys is a science fiction crime drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Terry Gilliam.

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  Steel Pizzas is a romantic comedy-drama film directed by Donald Petrie and Herbert Ross, starring Julia Roberts, Annabeth Gish, Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Lili Taylor, and Olympia Dukakis.

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  Severed is a 1995 American neo-noir psychological horror film about a troubled police detective (Brad Pitt) who find his own severed head in a cardboard box.

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  Pulp Timecop is a 1994 American science fiction action crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino and Peter Hyams, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman.

Beyond Plausible

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  The Secret Life of Walter Cronkite is a 1947 Technicolor comedy film, loosely based on the career of journalist Walter Cronkite. The film stars Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming journalist (later anchorman) for CBS News and Virginia Mayo as the girl journalist of his dreams.

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  The Bad Bear Omens is a 1976 supernatural horror comedy film starring Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal, Lee Remick, and Gregory Peck.

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  Star Wars: Ministry of Information is a science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam and George Lucas.

In Other Words

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  The Omission: Type Two Errors is a 1976 supernatural mathematics horror film about a series of violent deaths caused by Satan which go undetected due to Type II errors.

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  Indiana Jones and the Sands of Arrakis is a 2023 science fiction action adventure film starring Harrison Ford as interstellar archaeologist Indiana Jones.

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  Marta and She-Hulk is a 2023 science fiction legal drama superhero television series starring Yvonne Craig and Tatiana Maslany.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician and academic Gerhard Ringel was a pioneer of graph theory, and that Ringel contributed to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (later the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four color theorem?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1703: Mathematician and engineer Antoine Deparcieux born. He will make a living manufacturing sundials.

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  1841: Chemist and academic Johan August Arfwedson dies. Arfwedson discovered the element lithium in 1817 by isolating it as a salt.

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  1892: Charles-Émile Reynaud performs the first of his Pantomimes Lumineuses shows in Paris using his animated film projection system, the praxinoscope.

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  1919: Mathematician and academic Gerhard Ringel born. Ringel will be a pioneer of graph theory and contribute significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (later the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four color theorem.

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  2005: Chemist and academic Richard Smalley dies. Along with colleagues Robert Curl and Harold Kroto, he was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs.

Topic of the Day

Batman

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  Bane Capital is a legal thriller film about a renegade aerospace engineer (Tom Hardy) who blackmails Gotham City into issuing municipal bonds for the upgrade of aging runways at Gotham City International Airport.

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  The Dark Slice is a 2008 cooking thriller film about a deranged short order cook (Heath Ledger) who seeks to undermine Chefman's influence and burn all the meals in Gotham City.