June 25

Better Than News

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  Jurassic Spock is a 1993 American science fiction action film about a team of scientists who recreate Spock from his DNA. When sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the global power and security grids, Spock must struggle to survive and escape Earth.

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  The Men Who Stare at Goatees is a satirical black comedy science fiction war film starring George Clooney and Leonard Nimoy.

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  Bugles After the Massacre is a Western feature film starring Ray Milland, based on Bugles corn snack food. The story features the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

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  Deal or Raw Deal is an American action game show reality television program starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Howie Mandel.

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  The Oort Patrol is an American action-astronomy television series about the exploits of four Allied astronauts — three Americans and one British — who are part of a long-range exoplanetary patrol group in the Oort Cloud campaign during World War II.

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  The Thalassocrats is a 2005 American documentary comedy film about maritime realms, empires at sea, and seaborne empires.

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  Sméagol Financial Advisors is a financial services transdimensional corporation owned and operated by Sméagol of Middle Earth.

Are You Sure

... that an unmanned Progress spacecraft collided with the Russian space station Mir in 1997?

... that the Planetary Catastrophe Recovery Task Force is a fully licensed transdimensional corporation which works towards recovery from planetary catastrophes, mainly in the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere, but also, to a lesser extent, in the Oort cloud and other nearby volumes of space?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1593: Physician and archaeologist Michele Mercati dies. He was one of the first scholars to recognize prehistoric stone tools as human-made rather than natural or mythologically created thunderstones.

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  1671: Priest and astromomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli dies. He experimented with pendulums and falling bodies, discussed arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and introduced the current scheme of lunar nomenclature.

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  1907: Nuclear physicist J. Hans D. Jensen born. He will share half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Goeppert-Mayer for their proposal of the nuclear shell model.

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  1997: An unmanned Progress spacecraft collides with the Russian space station Mir.

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  2011: Computer scientist, mathematician, and engineer Annie Easley dies. She was a leading member of the team which develops software for the Centaur rocket stage, and one of the first African-Americans to work as a computer scientist at NASA.

Topic of the Day

Denzel Washington

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  "Am Inferno" is an anagram of "Man on Fire" (2004).

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  American Gangbird is a 2007 American ornithology buddy crime film about a thieving bird (Russell Crowe) who smuggles bright shiny objects, and an Audubon Society detective (Denzel Washington).

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  The Tomahawk Bone Collector is an American crime revisionist Western thriller film starring Kurt Russell, Angelina Jolie, and Denzel Washington.

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  Sleepless in Philadelphia is a 2021 safe sex romance drama educational film starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Denzel Washtington.