February 5
Better Than News
Mandalorian Dog is a 1929/2020 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and celebrity polymath Werner Herzog. Show here: the infamous "Teasing Baby Yoda" scene.
Jurassic Piano is a 1993 erotic science fiction period action-drama film directed by Jane Campion and Steven Spielberg.
Rosemary's Inception is a science fiction psychological horror heist film directed by Christopher Nolan and Roman Polanski, and Mia Farrow, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Cassavetes, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The Man in the High Dojo is an alternative history novel martial arts novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.
Eight Will Do is a 2004 American supervillian film about a deranged scientist (Otto Octavius) who kidnaps the Bradford children, intending to use them as artificial appendages.
The Courtship of Eddie's Carpenter is an American home improvement psychological thriller television series based on the 1963 "Courtship Carpentry" fad of the same name.
Beyond Plausible
"One After 404" is a song by the English rock band the HTTPeatles from their 1970 album Let It Go.
This Is Supremes Tap is a 1984 documentary film about the history of spinal taps narrated by the fictional English heavy metal band Spinal Tap and the nonfictional American singing group The Supremes.
In Other Words
Tweet Free is a 1966 British drama film about Joy and George Adamson, a couple who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood, and released her into the wilderness of Kenya with a Twitter-enabled tracking device.
"Hydrangea" is a song by the English rock band and florists the Rolling Stones.
Are You Sure
• ... that on February 5, 1958, a hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb was lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered?
• ... that no extraterrestrial life forms were harmed during the filming of The Mandalorian Dog?
• ... that physicist and academic Val Logsdon Fitch shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with co-researcher James Cronin for a 1964 experiment which proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles (CP violation)?
• ... that although heavily fictionalized for dramatic purposes, the 1975 novel The Eagle Has Tweeted is loosely based on actual German efforts to impersonate Winston Churchill on Twitter near the end of the Second World War?
Selected Anniversaries
1724: Thief Jack Sheppard first arrested. He will be arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escape four times from prison, making him a notorious public figure, and wildly popular with the poorer classes.
1915: Physicist and academic Robert Hofstadter born. He will share the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".
Premiere of Tacky, an American sitcom about the employees of the fictional Sunshine Adhesives Company in Manhattan.
1988: Mathematician Dorothy Lewis Bernstein dies. She was the first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America.
2015: Physicist and academic Val Logsdon Fitch dies. He shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with co-researcher James Cronin for a 1964 experiment which proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles (CP violation).
Topic of the Day
The Eagle Has Tweeted is a 1975 novel by Tannery Strophe about a fictional German plot to impersonate Winston Churchill on Twitter near the end of the Second World War.
"Tweetache Tonight" is a song recorded by American rock band the Eagles about Twitter.