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The Gnomon Chronicles is a work of fiction and nonfiction by Karl Jones (nonfiction). Fresh content daily.
Film buff? See Movie night.

May 14

Better Than News

"A Scoville in Bohemia" is the first short story, and the third overall work, featuring Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional English chef-detective Sherlock Holmes.
The Bounty Whacker is a 2010 American action comedy film about a landscape architect (Gerard Butler) hired to retrieve his ex-wife (Jennifer Aniston), who has skipped bail.
Law Abiding Bounty Hunter is a dramatic thriller film starring Gerard Butler, Jennifer Aniston, and Jamie Foxx.
Blowup Doll is a 1966 psychological horror film about a pornographer who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film.
Blow-Off is a 1966 psychological thriller film about a landscape maintenance worker who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder in scattered leaves.
Velvet Days and Mondays (Always Get Me Blue) is a musical noir thriller film directed by David Lynch and starring Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, and the Carpenters.

Beyond Plausible

Cop Has Fearsome Wild Mentality is an anagram of "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said".

In Other Words

The Man Who Replaced His Ears With Orchids is a 1975 floral industry training film about a brilliant but absent-minded surgeon whose obsession with orchids leads to frightening advances in medical botany.

Are You Sure ...

• ... that mathematician John Charles Fields (1863–1932) worked tirelessly throughout his career to promote the professional of mathematics, especially in his native Canada; and that in the late 1920's he began planning the now-prestigious Fields Medal, awarded to two to four mathematicians, under the age of 40, who have made important contributions to the field; but that due to deteriorating health, never saw the implementation of the medal in his lifetime, leaving $47,000 in his will to fund the award?

... that Garrison Keillor played a rogue android in the 1982 science fiction musical film Blade Wobegon?

Selected Anniversaries

1678: Writer and philosopher Culvert Origenes publishes Historia Culvertica, which will soon be widely plagiarized, influencing a generation of humanists.
1679: Astronomer and mathematician Peder Horrebow born. Horrebow will invent a way to determine a place's latitude from the stars.
1863: Mathematician John Charles Fields born. He will found the Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics.
1893: Mathematician Ernst Kummer dies. Kummer contributed to abstract algebra; in ring theory, he introduced the term ideal.
1916: Physicist and astrophysicist Robert F. Christy born. Christy will be credited with the insight that a solid sub-critical mass of plutonium can be explosively compressed into supercriticality, a great simplification of earlier concepts of implosion requiring hollow shells.
1917: Mathematician, codebreaker, and academic W. T. Tutte born. During the Second World War, he will make a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system.

Topic of the Day

Restaurants

1959: The Ham Omelette breakfast cafe and Shakespearean playhouse opens in New Minneapolis, Canada.
Sushi Cage is an underwater sushi restaurant.
Mesopelagium is a restaurant in New Minneapolis, Canada specializing in seafood from the mesopelagic zone.
Last Action Bistro is a 1993 fantasy restaurant management training film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Thumper King is an international chain of spiced hamburger fast food restaurants.
Nostromo Café is a restaurant located aboard the spaceship Nostromo.
Cronenburger is a Canadian-American extreme body modification restaurant chain inspired by David Cronenberg's 1981 film Scanners.
Olive Matrix is a science-fiction theme restaurant franchise with indentured franchises throughout the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere. Olive Matrix. When you're here, you're virtual.
Taconator 2: Judgement Meal.