September 25

Better Than News

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  Cheers Club is a black comedy sitcom television series starring Brad Pitt, Ted Danson, Edward Norton, and Shelley Long.

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  Cream Soda is a 1988 comedy romance film starring Tom Cruise as a soft drink salesman in search of the ultimate flavor.

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  The Irisman is a 2019 American epic crime drama film which follows Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a floral truck driver who becomes a hitman involved with mobster florist Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his crime family, including his time working for Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), head of the powerful Floristers Union.

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  Strainer in a Strained Land is a 1961 science fiction guide to kitchenware by Robert Heinlein.

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  Six things to not do when sharpening pencils is a public awareness campaign intended to raise awareness of the perils of pencil sharpening.

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  Mycelia and Myceliation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by sociologist Jean Baudrillard which examines the relationships between reality, symbols, and fungal mycelium, in particular the significations and symbolism of fungal culture media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.

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  "You Make Me Feel Like Busting" is a song by Leo Sayer about Wilhelm Reich and his invention, the cloudbuster.

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  Third illustration from the Codex Nanobotica.

Are You Sure

... that mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius discovered the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space?

• ... that Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (1939–2017) of the Soviet Air Defense Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the Soviet nuclear false alarm incident on 26 November 1983?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1644: Astronomer and instrument maker Ole Rømer born. He will make the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.

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  1777: Polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert dies. He made important contributions to mathematics, physics (particularly optics), philosophy, astronomy, and map projections.

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  1789: The United States Congress passes twelve amendments to the United States Constitution: The Congressional Apportionment Amendment (which was never ratified), the Congressional Compensation Amendment, and the ten that are known as the Bill of Rights.

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  1819: Mathematician and Anglican theologian George Salmon born. He will work in algebraic geometry for two decades, then devote the last forty years of his life to theology.

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  1893: Mathematician and statistician Harald Cramér born. He will help found probability theory as a branch of mathematics, writing in 1926: "The probability concept should be introduced by a purely mathematical definition, from which its fundamental properties and the classical theorems are deduced by purely mathematical operations."

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  1992: NASA launches the Mars Observer, a $511 million probe to Mars, in the first U.S. mission to the planet in 17 years. The probe will fail eleven months later.

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  2002: Steganographic analysis of Humpty Dumpty At Bat reveals previously unknown biography of Babe Ruth by Lewis Carroll.

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  2003: Journalist, writer, literary editor, and actor George Plimpton dies. Plimpton is famous for his "participatory journalism": competing in professional sporting events, playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, performing a circus trapeze act, and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur.

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  2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars says that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the Mars Observer is a bittersweet event, because the spacecraft will be lost eleven months later.

Topic of the Day

Perfumes

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  Scentworld is a 1973 American science-fiction perfume film about an aromatic amusement park containing lifelike androids that unexpectedly begin to emit strange smells.

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  Armory (full title: Armory by Lauren Boebert) is a gun violence themed perfume manufactured by Jan 6 Industries under license to the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere.

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  Knights of the Old Spice Republic is an RPG video game series based Old Spice products and set in the fictional universe of Star Wars by George Lucas and Procter & Gamble.

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  Indigo Gin is a 1984 novel by Tom Robbins about dueling gin distillers in Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans who pursue a bottle of incomparable gin created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality.

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  Liquid Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (LCCBB) is a downloadable, user-reprogrammable cologne. The bottle's distinctive automobile design has an unusual feature — two decorative spare tires which conceal a Fleming valve. When activated, the valve emits "putt-putts" of ionized cologne.