December 11

Better Than News

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  RoboChef is a science fiction foodie crime thriller film directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Peter Weller as a restaurant reviewer who is murdered by a gang of criminal restaurateurs and subsequently revived by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products as the cyborg RoboChef.

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  One Million Years Before Vin is a 1966 British adventure fantasy film directed by Don Chaffey about a prehistoric woman (Raquel Welch) and a modern Dungeons & Dragons player (Vin Diesel) who must work together to defeat the dinosaurs.

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  Conan the Barbarian: Curse of the X is an American epic sword and sorcery film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elon Musk which tells the story of a barbarian warrior named Conan (Schwarzenegger) who seeks vengeance for the death of his social media platform (Twitter) at the hands of Thulsa Doom (Elon Musk), the leader of a snake cult

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  Willy Wonka & the Citrus Factory an American musical fantasy foodie film starring Gene Wilder as citrus farmer Willy Wonka.

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  "The Mirror on the Edge of Forever" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.

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  Indiana Jones 2049 is an American neo-noir action-adventure film about K, a Nexus-9 replicant Whip Runner who uncovers a secret that threatens to destabilize the Indiana Jones franchise and the course of civilization.

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  Hellcuber is a 1987 British geometry horror film about a haunted Rubik's cube which summons the Cenobites, a group of extra-dimensional, sadomasochistic mathematicians who cannot differentiate between proofs and conjectures.

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  The Vitamin King is a 1994 American animated musical health education film about Simba (Swahili for lion), a young lion who is manipulated into thinking he was responsible for his father's malnutrition.

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  "You're So Veins" is a song by musician-physiologist Carly Simon

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  The Chronicles of Regular is a 2004 American science fiction action film which follows the adventures of rogue petroleum engineer Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel) as he attempts to elude capture after the events depicted in the 2000 film Sweet Crude.

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  "It is impossible to read the same tweet twice" is a phrase attributed to philosopher and social media influencer Heraclitus 1.1.

Are You Sure

• ... that physicist and mathematician Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function"?

• ... that Scroogebusters is a 1984 American supernatural Christmas film about a cynical and selfish parapsychologist who is haunted by a succession of ghosts on Christmas Eve intent on possessing Santa Claus?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1781: Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and writer David Brewster born.

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  1792: French Revolution: King Louis XVI of France is put on trial for treason by the National Convention.

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  1882: Physicist and mathematician Max Born born. He will win the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".

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  1922: Physicist Peter Mazur born. Mazur will pioneer the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

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  1998: Physicist and mathematician André Lichnerowicz dies. He worked in differential geometry and mathematical physics.

Topic of the Day

Blue orbs

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  Bucky Fuller, Orb King is a 2021 fantasy engineering film about a brilliant wizard (Buckminster Fuller) who uses tensegrity principles to construct a glowing blue orb.

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  The Salem orb trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of orbcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.

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  The Blue Orb Faction was a West German far-left militant organization founded in 1970. The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Red-Black-White Sphere past.