July 3

Better Than News

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  Legends of the Canticles Fall for Leibowitz is a novel by Walter M. Miller and Jim Harrison. It was adapted as a 2022 film starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, and Julia Ormond.

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  Octaman of Arabia is an epic biographical adventure monster film directed by David Lean and Harry Essex.

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  2001: A Species Odyssey is a short documentary film about the ethical dilemma faced by two astronauts (Frank Bowman and David Poole) when they discover an alien-human hybrid child stowed away on their spaceship.

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  Philosophical Beasts: Socrates versus Dumbledore is a fantasy adventure film in which Albus Dumbledore tasks Newt Scamander and his allies with a mission that takes them into ancient Greece during the time of Socrates.

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  Pooh vs. Alien— Piglet and Eeyore are caught in the crossfire of an ancient battle between Winnie-the-Pooh and aliens as they attempt to entertain children long enough for their parents to have some overdue sex.

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  Martin Prince Jr.'s Wide Wide World of Video Games is a television series starring gifted child and video game connoisseur Martin Prince Jr.

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  Dr Quadruped: The Battle for Hoth is a science fiction thriller film about a brilliant inventor (Otto Octavius) who becomes dangerously obsessed with four-legged creatures after failing to construct a mechanical octopus.

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  What's the best time of year to fall in love? Now. —The Butterfly Nebula

Are You Sure

... that the Soviet N1 rocket was a super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to deliver payloads beyond low Earth orbit; that the project was underfunded and rushed, and badly derailed by the death of its chief designer Sergei Korolev in 1966; that each of the four attempts to launch an N1 failed; that during the second launch attempt the N1 rocket crashed back onto its launch pad shortly after liftoff and exploded, resulting in one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history; and that the N1 was kept secret almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, with information about the N1 first being published in 1989?

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

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1518: Physician and scientist Li Shizhen born. He will develop many innovative methods for the proper classification of herb components and medications to be used for treating diseases, earning a reputation as the greatest scientific naturalist of China.

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  1881: Astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Hasan Tahsini dies. He was one of the most prominent scholars of the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.

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  1969: The biggest explosion in the history of rocketry occurs when the Soviet N1 rocket explodes and subsequently destroys its launchpad.

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  2007: NASA approves a mission extension for Stardust, sending the spacecraft to comet Tempel 1.

Topic of the Day

Non-Fungible Tokens

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  2001: An NFT Odyssey is a 1968 American science fiction NFT film about an advanced computer (HAL 9000) which attempts to market itself as non-fungible tokens.

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  The Dark NFT is a 2008 superhero NFT film about the Joker (Heath Ledger), a deranged database engineer who threatens to delete all the non-fungible tokens in Gotham City.

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  NFTspotting is a 1996 British black comedy-drama film about a group of NFT addicts in an economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life.

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  The Dragons of NFT is a 1977 book by Carl Sagan, which combines anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science to give a perspective on how intelligent non-fungible tokens may have evolved.