July 14

Sundown (14 July 2024) @ 9:14 pm. Chapman Street East and Second Avenue, view to the west.

Better Than News

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  Vast Eel Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the official gnostic day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year.

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  Napoleon: The Professional is an epic action-thriller historical drama film directed and produced by Luc Besson and Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jean Reno, Vanessa Kirby, Gary Oldman, and Natalie Portman.

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  Blade Runner Galactica is a science fiction television series starring Lorne Greene, Edward James Olmos, and Harrison Ford.

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  I Am Curious (Texas) is a 1967 Swedish erotic geography film.

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  "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Ark" is a song from the 2014 film NOAA.

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  Break In at Tiffany's is a 1961 American romantic heist film about Holly Getlightly (Audrey Hepburn), a naïve, eccentric café society con artist who falls in love with a struggling safecracker.

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  Matrix: The Last Straw is a science fiction comedy-drama film loosely based on the life of Salty MacTavish.

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  Ben-Hur 2 is an epic American religious animal rights horror film directed by Phil Karlson and William Wyler, starring Charlton Heston and Lee Montgomery.

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  Pivot Shock is a 1970 book by martial artist Alvin Toffler about the importance of re-directing an opponent's energy.

Beyond Plausible

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  Fiends is an American comedy-horror television series based on the album Friends by the Beach Boys.

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  Peak drainage basin is the moment at which erosion of drainage basins reaches a rate greater than that at any time in the past and starts to decrease.

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  Gray googly eyes is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating googly eye machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves.

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  Amanita Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Hyphae is a 2006 comedy sports mycology abuse film starring Will Farrell and John Allegro.

In Other Words

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  Do Androids Dream of Electric Tweets? is a 1968 social media novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.

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  An American in Peristalsis is a 1951 American musical biology film inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition An American in Peristalsis by physiologist-musician George Gershwin. The story is interspersed with dance numbers which illustrate radially symmetrical contraction and relaxation of muscles that propagates in a wave down a tube, in an anterograde direction, choreographed by Gene Kelly and set to Gershwin's music.

Are You Sure

... that German diplomat and intelligence officer Hans Bernd Gisevius was a covert opponent of the Nazi regime, and a radical communist; and that Gisevius served as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS, and the German Resistance forces in Germany?

... that Small Boy was a United States Army tactical nuclear weapon test-detonated at the Nevada Test Site ir 14 July 1962, and that the yield was 1.65 kilotons?

... that the The Custodian confiscates unlicensed nuclear weapons whenever possible; and that unlicensed nuclear war is absolutely forbidden and severely punished?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1856: Mathematician Charles Hermite is elected to fill the vacancy created by the death of Jacques Binet in the Académie des Sciences.

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  1904: German diplomat and intelligence officer Hans Bernd Gisevius born. Gisevius will be covert opponent of the Nazi regime, and a radical communist; he will serve as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS, and the German Resistance forces in Germany.

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  1962: United States Army tests Small Boy, a tactical nuclear weapon, at the Nevada Test Site. Yield was 1.65 kt.

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  1965: The Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos of another planet.

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  2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars celebrates fifty-second anniversary of the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars.

Topic of the Day

UFOs

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  Satan's School for Invaders is a made-for-television science fiction horror film about a group of young women at Radcliffe who make contact with a malign alien intelligence.

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  Close Encounters of the Spud Kind is a 1977 supernatural geology film which tells the story of [REDACTED], an everyday blue-collar UFO researcher in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with the Devil's potato masher.

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  Charley Third-Eye is an American science fiction revisionist Western film starring Richard Roundtree and Roy Thinnes.