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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.

October 9

Better Than News

Sister Ghost is an American comedy action romance fantasy film starring Whoopi Goldberg as a recently deceased murder victim whose ghost must hide out among nuns.
The Gnoming is a 1980 horror gardening film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as an alcoholic groundskeeper who is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a murdered gnome.
Harkonnen is a science fiction heist film starring Burgess Meredith as a ruthless interplanetary crime boss.
Calaladan is a 2021 musical romantic comedy science fiction drama film about an aspiring actress (Emma Stone) and a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) who befriend a young aristocrat (Paul Atreides).
Charlie's E.T.s is an American science fiction action comedy television series directed by McG and Steven Spielberg, starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu.
Desperately Hanging Chad is a comedy documentary film about punched cards and electoral reform.

Beyond Plausible

Hellcheeser 2: Cheese of Cthulhu is a British supernatural cheese horror film about the Cheddarbites, a group of extra-dimensional, sadomasochistic beings who are locked in an eternal struggle with Cthulhu for the soul of cheese.

In Other Words

The Day the Bomb Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 Swedish-French war film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis.

Are You Sure ...

CIA officer Left: E. Howard Hunt. Right: "Three tramps" arrested after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

• ... that American intelligence officer and writer E. Howard Hunt (9 October 1918 – 23 January 2007) was a CIA officer from 1949 to 1970; that Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy and others, planned and committed burglaries and other criminal undercover operations for the Nixon administration; and that after Hunt's death, his sons, Howard St. John Hunt and David Hunt, stated publicly that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy?

• ... that mathematician and astronomer David Gregory (3 June 1659 – 10 October 1708) was "the first to openly teach the doctrines of the Principia, in a public seminary ... in those days ... a daring innovation."?

• ... that mathematician, scholar, and poet Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac (9 October 1581 – 26 February 1638) wrote a translation, from Greek to Latin, of the Arithmetica of Diophantus; and that it was this very translation in which Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous margin note claiming that he had a proof of Fermat's last theorem; and that the same text renders Diophantus' term παρισὀτης as adaequalitat, which became Fermat's technique of adequality, a pioneering method of infinitesimal calculus?

• ... that French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was falsely accused of treason, brought to trial, and convicted in 1884; that his enemies were motivated by anti-Semitism; that his trial became one of the most sensational political dramas in modern French history, with effects throughout Europe; and that Dreyfus was completely exonerated?

Selected Anniversaries

1581: Mathematician and linguist Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac born. He will do work in number theory and find a method of constructing magic squares.
1775: A paper by Leonhard Euler, Speculationes circa quasdam insignes proprietates numerorum, was presented at the Saint-Petersburg Academy. In this paper, he revisits the idea that has come to be called Euler's Phi function. He first introduced the idea to the Academy on Oct 15,1759 but did not include a symbol or name. Euler defined the function as "the multitude of numbers less than D, and which have no common divisor with it."
1859: Alfred Dreyfus born. He will be wrongly convicted of treason during the Dreyfus affair.
1903: "Fightin'" Bert Russell agrees to fight three rounds of bare-knuckled boxing at World Peace Conference.
1918: CIA officer and author E. Howard Hunt born. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt will plot the Watergate burglaries and other undercover operations for the Nixon administration.
1948: Mathematician Joseph Wedderburn dies. He made significant contributions to algebra, proving that a finite division algebra is a field, and proving part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras.

Topic of the Day

Vampires

Edge of Blade is an American science fiction horror film about an immortal vampire (Wesley Snipes) is trapped in a time-loop war between humans and aliens.
Blood Diamond Vampire is an American political action horror film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Tom Cruise.
Vampsie is a 1982 American satirical romantic horror film about a talented but volatile actor whose reputation for being difficult drives him to adopt vampirism to land a job.
Slake is a 1998 American superhero drinking game film about an alcoholic with vampire powers (Wesley Snipes) who must confront his inner demons.
How Stella Got Her Bordello of Blood Back is a romantic comedy-horror drama film starring Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, and Dennis Miller.
Moby-Vamp is a novel by Herman Melville about the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, a giant vampire whale.
John Wick's Dracula is a 1992 American Gothic horror film directed and produced by John Wick.
Morbius XII: So Very Anemic is an American science fiction horror-comedy buddy film about an aging starship captain (William Shatner) who befriends a deranged biochemist (Jared Leto).
Vampire Bivouac is a self-help wilderness retreat organization which provides camping supplies and services for vampires.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Scout is an action-horror-politics film starring Abraham Lincoln and Duke One. During the darkest hours of the American Civil War, President Lincoln scouts for vampires with on-court charisma while defending the terms of his Nike contract.
Love in the Time of Sugar Vampires is a 2022 horror-documentary film about vampires who have evolved to eat sugar, and not blood.