January 12

Better Than News

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  Rollerthief is a dystopian science fiction sports heist thriller film directed Norman Jewison and Michael Mann, starring James Caan, John Houseman, and Tuesday Weld.

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  The Oompa Loompas of Pelham One Two Three is a 1974 American thriller film involving Oompa Loompas.

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  Casino of the Damned is a 1995 crime horror thriller film directed by Martin Scorsese and John Carpenter, starring Robert De Niro, Don Rickles, Christopher Reeve, Lindsey Haun, and Sharon Stone.

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  The Bedtime Story is a 1973 comedy horror film directed by William Friedkin. It is loosely based on the novel The Exoricist by William Peter Blatty.

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  "Don't It Make My Dune Eyes Blue" is a song by Crystal Gayle and Frank Herbert.

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  In high-energy literature, Schrödinger's book review is a thought experiment that illustrates a paradox of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical book reviewer cat may be considered simultaneously both loving and hating a particular book as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

Beyond Plausible

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  "Tweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" is a song by British new wave music duo Eurythmics.

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  "Careful With That Bic, Eugene" is a fire safety awareness campaign song written and performed by Pink Floyd.

In Other Words

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  Our Thing (better known as The Little Rituals or Hal Roach's Rituals) is a series of religious short films chronicling a group of poor neighborhood children and their sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1607 – 12 January 1665) discovered an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown?

• ... that author Jack London (12 January 1876 – 22 November 1916) was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone?

• ... that mathematician and academic Hermann Minkowski (22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) showed that Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity can be understood geometrically as a theory of four-dimensional space–time, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime"?

Topic of the Day

Parasites

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  The Super-Hungry Parasite is a children's picture book starring a polymorphic alien organism which demonstrates a wide range of parasitic behaviors, eating its way through a variety of hosts before pupating and emerging as [REDACTED]. The winner of many children's literature awards and an ongoing series of emergency xenoparasitology research grants, it has infected almost 50 million hosts worldwide.

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  Nimrod Ichneumon, Parasite Hunter is a superhero entomology television series about a team of entomologists who hunt down and curb the vigor of the world's most prolific and troublesome parasite populations.

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  Here Come the Brides: The Tick-Check Years is a historical fiction television series loosely based on the Mercer Girls.

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  Walking Heads were an arctic rock band formed by a parasitic alien monster from the bodies of David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison. Described as "one of the most critically acclaimed nightmares of the '80s", the group helped to pioneer new horror music by integrating elements of isolation, freezing temperatures, and fear of a monstrous alien life form.

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  Demodex sydneyfolliculorum is a microscopic mite that can only survive on the skin of humans in Sydney, Australia.