May 24
Better Than News
Kolumbjak is an American police procedural television series starring Peter Falk and Telly Savalas as twin brothers with very different approaches to law enforcement.
Raging Casino is an American biographical sports gambling film written and directed by Martin Scorsese.
Cape Atmosphere is a 1962 American space flight psychological thriller film about a NASA meteorologist whose family is stalked by an astronaut he grounded from a critical flight.
The Three Stooges and the Pride of Jesse Hallam is a film about Jesse Hallam (Johnny Cash), an illiterate man who learns to write and write by watching Three Stooges films.
The Jeep Twin Liberty Hauling System is a mechanical device which couples two Jeep Liberty vehicles side-by-side, allowing them to pull a large semi-trailer.
Phrenology is brand of home surgical tools for the skull modification enthusiast.
Beyond Plausible
Ferris Bueller 2049 is a 2022 science fiction comedy thriller film about a high school Nexus-9 replicant "grade skipper" (Matthew Broderick) who skips school, with two of his friends, for a day hunting less advanced replicants, and who regularly breaks the fourth wall to describe the paradoxical and incomprehensible consequences of genetic engineering.
Frontier Without a Face is a science fiction television series about an unstable 17-year-old boy who uses his superhuman mental powers to hijack a starship.
Altered States 2: Back to Basics is a 1980 American neo-erotic science fiction film starring William Hurt and Blair Brown.
In Other Words
"Bears and Poison Ivy Don't Mix" is a public-service advertising campaign which educates the general public on the perils of bear attack, which may also result in poison ivy contact.
Are You Sure
• ... that physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker Gemma Frisius (1508–1555) created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day, and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation?
• ... that Recursive attorney disorder is a legal and psychological disorder in which an attorney requires the services of another attorney, who in turn requires the services of another attorney, and so on indefinitely; and that a commercial advertisement for the Recursive Attorney Disorder Support Group states: "Recursive Attorney Disorder is not found in the DSM. Actual disorder may differ from one shown. If you are an attorney, ask your attorney if Recursive Attorney Disorder is right for you."?
Selected Anniversaries
1089: Celebrated jurist and monk Lanfranc dies.
1543: Mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus dies. He formulated a model of the universe that places the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe.
1686: Physicist and engineer Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit born. He will help lay the foundations for the era of precision thermometry by inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer and the Fahrenheit scale.
1734: Chemist and physician Georg Ernst Stahl dies. His works on phlogiston continue to be accepted as an explanation for chemical processes until the late 18th century.
1844: Samuel Morse sends the message "What hath God wrought" (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.
1928: Mathematician Bertram Kostant born. He will be one of the principal developers of the theory of geometric quantization.
1940: Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.
1974: Physicist Clyde Cowan dies. Cowan, along with Frederick Reines, discovered the neutrino in 1956; Reines received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 in both their names.
2024: Alley (24 May 2024).
Topic of the Day
Star Wars
The Man From K.E.S.S.E.L. is an American science fiction buddy television series about a pair of space pilots (Robert Vaughn and David McCallum) who work for K.E.S.S.E.L., a secret interplanetary smuggling ring.
Alderaan Croutons from Grand Chef Tarkin. They're not for Seasoning. They're for Sending a Message.
Grateful Droid is a Grateful Dead cover band starring C3P0, R2D2, and a varying cast of supporting droids.