May 8

Better Than News

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  Polenta and You (full title: Polenta and You: The Untold Story of the Niger Polenta Forgeries) is a young adult adventure story about the confusion between harmless polenta and radioactive yellowcake.

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  "The Seventies Within"— A transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into Carly Simon and Farrah Fawcett. (Star Trek: Forbidden Episodes.)

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  Heresy is a rock musical about the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics.

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  "Tweetache Tonight" is a song recorded by American rock band the Eagles about Twitter.

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  The Omega Kiss is a 1971 American post-apocalyptic science fiction romantic comedy film starring Nichelle Nichols, William Shatner, and Charlton Heston.

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  Darth Vader and the Quest for Love is a short autobiographical film by Darth Vader.

Beyond Plausible

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  Everything is a Remix is a 2021 industry training film sponsored by the Board of Applied Cosmology.

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  Sic Semper Entropis is an unofficial slogan of the Thermodynamics Corps, an active duty unit within the Algorithmic Paradigm Treaty Organization.

In Other Words

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  Rx 18 (better known as "Shall I compare thee to a cocaine bear?") is one of the best-known of the 154 prescriptions written by the English poet and pharmacist William Shakespeare.

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  "O Vehement Lenity!" is an anagram of "The Violent Enemy".

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  Milah Doctor is a 2003 film about a physician (Danny Nucci) who is forced by a crime lord (Paul Sorvino) to perform criminal circumcisions.

Are You Sure

• ... that Antoine Lavoisier played a key role in changing chemistry from a qualitative science to a quantitative science, discovered the role oxygen plays in combustion, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and was executed as a traitor during the French Revolution?

• ... that mathematician John Henry Constantine "Henry" Whitehead (1904–1960) was one of the founders of homotopy theory, which originated in algebraic topology as a systematic study of situations in which maps come with homotopies between them; and that J.J. Rotman, in his book on algebraic topology, as a tribute to Whitehead's intellect, stated: "There is a canard that every textbook of algebraic topology either ends with the definition of the Klein bottle or is a personal communication to J. H. C. Whitehead."?

• ... that the book Polenta and You: The Untold Story of the Niger Polenta Forgeries describes the differences between harmless polenta and radioactive yellowcake?

Topic of the Day

Titanic

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  Titanic Cabaret is an epic historical romance and comedy disaster film directed by Bob Fosse and James Cameron, and starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Liza Minnelli.

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  Titanic 2: Under the Sea is a 2023 comedy action-romance film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

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  Titanic 2: The Way of Water is a romantic science fiction drama film by James Cameron about a human couple who crash-land on an alien planet (Pandora).

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  The Titanic Strain (originally A Strain to Remember) is a science fiction historical disaster thriller film about a deadly alien organism aboard the ocean liner Titanic.

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  A million monkeys. A million deck chairs. Sooner or later the Titanic will arrive in New York City.