August 20
Better Than News
Professor Popper's Falsification Pumice Bar is a mental hygiene product derived from the philosophies of Karl Popper.
Riot in Celery Block 11 is a 1954 foodie noir crime film directed by Don Siegel and starring Neville Brand, Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon and Robert Osterloh.
"Precious and Few (Are the Fluids We Two Can Share)" is a song written by Stanley Kubrick and recorded by the American group Climax.
How Stella Got Her Free Willy Back is a 1998 erotic marine coming-of-age comedy film starring Angela Bassett, Taye Diggs, and Whoopi Goldberg.
"Asking for a Friend" is a lost song by the Rolling stones.
Beyond Plausible
"If I Were the Carpenter" is a song by Tim Hardin about Lewis Carroll.
Neurotwitter is a 1995 dystopian social medial film about Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves), a man with a cybernetic brain implanted by Elon Musk.
In Other Words
Are You Grapesperienced? is the debut studio album by the Long Grape Experience, released in May 1967.
Are You Sure
... that "A Gasket Gens" is an anagram of "Kegan Stages"; and that the phrase appears on a billboard in the background of the film Bill and Ted Face the Gasket during the "Sui Generis" hog-calling scene; and that Bill and Ted Face the Gasket was filmed in Kegan Stages, Montana?
Selected Anniversaries
1672: Mathematician and politician Johan de Witt dies in a riot. The rioters will partially eat his body.
1797: Physicist and priest Francesco Zantedeschi born. Zantedeschi will be among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere of red, yellow, and green light. He will also think that he detected, in 1838, a magnetic action on steel needles by ultraviolet light, anticipating later discoveries connecting light and magnetism.
1864: The Kinmon incident: a rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate breaks out near the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. The rebels will seek to restore the Imperial household to its position of political supremacy.
1911: The first cable message sent around the world from the U.S. by commercial telegraph was transmitted from New York City. It read “This message sent around the world,” left the New York Times building at 7:00 pm and was received at 7:16 pm after travelling nearly 29,000 miles through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, Phillipines, Midway, Guam, Hawaii and San Francisco.
1912: Thomas Edison receives U.S. patent No. 1036470 for a “Phonographic Apparatus,” and No. 1036471 for a “Storage Battery.”
1942: The first visible quantity of a plutonium compound, plutonium(IV) iodate, is isolated by nuclear chemists Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner.
1961: Physicist and academic Percy Williams Bridgman dies. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures.
1962: Mathematician and crime-fighter Alice Beta publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
2007: Cell and developmental biologist Elizabeth Dexter “Betty” Hay dies. Hay conducted pioneering research in limb regeneration, the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in cell differentiation, and epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT).
Topic of the Day
The Simpsons
Attack of the Roman Numerals is a 2021 American calendrical horror film about an alien species which Roman numerals to conquer the earth.
Terminator vs. Lovejoy is a 1984 American science fiction comedy-religion film about a time-traveling robot (Arnold Schwarzenneger) who befriends a Presbylutheran Minister (Timothy Lovejoy Jr.).
Camille & Seymour is a comedy detective television series starring academic Camille Paglia and elementary school principal Seymour Skinner.
Hellralpher is an American television series about Ralph, a boy with a magical box that summons the Cimpsons, a group of extra-dimensional, sadomasochistic cartoon animators who cannot differentiate licensed and unlicensed intellectual properties.
