July 15

Stage light (15 July 2024) @ 4:22 pm. Behind stage during rehearsals of Into the Woods (Northern Lakes Arts Association - Ely, Minnesota).

Better Than News

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  Beyond the Heat of the Night is an American comedy police procedural crime drama television series starring Carroll O'Connor and Howard Rollins as police officers who must work with an animatronic guitarist to keep order at Chuck E. Cheese.

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  "Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Androids" is a country science fiction song by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Yul Brynner.

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  The Fantastic Forum is an fictional superhero team. After a disastrous experiment in high-energy literature, four research scientists gain superpowers corresponding with an aspect of the Roman Forum.

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  Midnight Heart is an American neo-noir horror-comedy buddy film about the mysterious financier Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), who hires a criminal accountant known only as The Duke (Charles Grodin) to investigate the disappearance of a man known as Eddie Moscone. In a cross-country chase, Cyphre must deceive the authorities, exterminate the mob, and provoke The Duke into committing a series of horrific murders.

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  Doing Stuff is a 1979 American home cleanup and repair self-help film.

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  Defending Your Navel is a 1968 American science fiction religious film about an alien intelligence which threatens to "optimize" human anatomy. Starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Are You Sure

... that mathematician Derek Taunt worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II; that Taunt was assigned to Hut 6, the section in charge of decrypting German Army and Air Force Enigma signals; and that, after his wartime work, Taunt returned to Cambridge, where he worked on group theory?

... that the 1964 James Bond film Goldfisher involves a plot to destroy the United States Strategic Milt Reserve at Fort Knox?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  998: Mathematician and astronomer Abū al-Wafā' Būzjānī dies. His Almagest was widely read by medieval Arabic astronomers in the centuries after his death.

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  1573: Architect Inigo Jones born. He will be one of the first architects of the early modern period to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings.

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  1848: Engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto born. He will apply mathematics to economic analysis, asserting that the distribution of incomes and wealth in society is not random and that a consistent pattern appears throughout history, in all parts of the world and in all societies.

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  1865: Mathematician Wilhelm Wirtinger born. He will contribute to complex analysis, geometry, algebra, number theory, Lie groups and knot theory.

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  2004: Mathematician Derek Taunt dies. He worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II. Taunt was assigned to Hut 6, the section in charge of decrypting German Army and Air Force Enigma signals. After his wartime work, he returned to Cambridge, and worked on group theory.

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  2013: Computer scientist and academic John T. Riedl dies. He was a founder of the field of recommender systems, social computing, and interactive intelligent user interface systems.

Topic of the Day

Shopping

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  Tantrum is a 1979 shopping fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott 1.1 and written by [REDACTED] which follows an ensemble case of shoppers aboard the commercial space shopping mall Nostromo who encounter the eponymous Tantrum, an aggressive and deafening child set loose on the ship.

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  Tron-Mart is a 1982 American science fiction action-shopping film about a computer programmer and video game developer who is transported inside the software world of a corporate retailer where he interacts with virtual consumer goods in his attempt to escape.

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  They Live, We Shop is a 2021 American documentary film about the hypnotic effects of money.

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  The Shop of Things to Come is a science fiction consumer society novel by British writer H. G. Wells about a future shopping expedition which ends in madness, death, and the Final Checkout.

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  Cleanup in Aisle Two is a short erotic documentary film about people having sex while shopping in stores.

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  VALIS avocado shopping.

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  The Hunting of the Raspberry Beret is a nonsense poem by English writer [REDACTED] which borrows the setting, some creatures, and eight portmanteau words from his earlier poem "Rubberwookie". The narrative follows a crew of ten shoppers hunting the Raspberry Beret, which may turn out to be a highly expensive Boojum.

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  Inside me there are two cashiers fighting.