April 24

Better Than News

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  Welcome Back, Joker is an American sitcom thriller starring Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher in charge of a racially and ethnically diverse criminal class called the "Arkham Hogs".

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  Being John Wickovich is an American surrealist fantasy action thriller film starring Keanu Reeves and John Malkovich.

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  Assault on Eraserhead 13 is an American surrealist action thriller horror film about a police officer who defends his grossly deformed child against a relentless criminal gang.

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  Ocean's Plan 9 is a 1957 independent American science fiction-horror heist film about World War II veterans Danny Ocean and Jimmy Foster, who resurrect the corpses of nine comrades from their unit in the 82nd Airborne to simultaneously rob five Las Vegas casinos.

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  To Shave Man is a musical science fiction horror-comedy television series about alien barber-chef Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and his delicious assistant (Helena Bonham Carter).

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  Rotary Phone Rescue Service is an international service organization which promotes rotary phone technology, and provides resources for combatting the scourge of Touch-Tone™ services.

Beyond Plausible

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  Torrid Hazy Trek is an anagram of Zero Dark Thirty.

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  "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Huckleberry?" is a song by Louis Jordan and Val Kilmer.

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  Hellcuppa is a 1987 British supernatural horror film about a mystical coffee cup which summons the Caffobites, a group of extra-dimensional, sadomasochistic beings who cannot differentiate between caffeinated and decaffeinated.

In Other Words

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  In film and television, a meet stochastic is a scene in which the two people who will form a future romantic couple whose first meeting has the property of being well described by a random probability distribution.

Are You Sure

• ... that cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died in Soyuz 1 when its parachute fails to open, and that Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission?

• ... that mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke introduced the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant?

• ... that film directors John Carpenter and David Lynch released separate director's cuts of their collaborative film Assault on Eraserhead 13?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1656: Mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke dies. He introduced the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant.

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  1914: The Franck–Hertz experiment, a pillar of quantum mechanics, is presented to the German Physical Society.

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  1967: Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when its parachute fails to open. He is the first human to die during a space mission.

Topic of the Day

Star Wars

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  Big Trouble on Little Tatooine is a 2020 comedy-adventure film starring starring Kurt Russell. It is the first major motion picture in the "Big Trouble in the Star Wars Franchise" series.

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  Star Trek Wars is a science fiction buddy comedy film about an angry moisture farmer (Luke Skywalker) and an excessively logical Starfleet officer (Spock of Vulcan) who must learn to work together.

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  Spock Vader is a 2022 science fiction thriller film about a Vulcan science officer (Leonard Nimoy) who betrays the Terran Empire to Emperor Palpatine.

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  Spice Wars is a 1977 American epic science fiction film about a young water farmer (Luke Spicewalker) who becomes involved in guerilla warfare against the CHOAM spice mining operation on Arrakis.