January 10

Better Than News

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  Peggy Sue Got Moonstruck is an American fantasy romantic comedy-drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Norman Jewison, starring Kathleen Turner, Nicolas Cage, and Cher.

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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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  The Thomas the Apostle Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film about a millionaire businessman-sportsman (Steve McQueen), whose theft of a Gutenberg Bible draws unwanted attention from an independent insurance investigator (Fate Dunaway) and a restless Apostle (Thomas).

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  Assault on Birdcage 13 is an action comedy thriller film directed by John Carpenter and Mike Nichols, and starring Robin Williams, Austin Stoker, Gene Hackman, and Darwin Joston.

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  Zardoz Unchained is a revisionist science fiction Western film written and directed by John Boorman and Quentin Tarantino, and starring Sean Connery and Jamie Foxx.

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  Moonrashers is a 1979 spy cooking film in which James Bond (Roger Moore) must stop a deranged celebrity chef (Dom DeLuise) from burning the world's entire supply of bacon.

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  Metropolitan Triffid is a British police procedural science fiction television show about the Triffids, an aggressive alien plant which has taken hold in the Metropolitan Police Service.

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  Cthulhu Teaches Typing is an application software program designed to teach touch typing. Cthulhu Teaches Typing is not a game, rather a "system for teaching you how to type while yielding your sanity to the unimaginable terrors of the illimitable beyond".

Are You Sure

• ... that the Union ironclad USS Cairo was the first ship ever to be sunk by a mine remotely detonated by hand?

• ... that a musical electroplating ensemble is a musical group which uses electroplating technology to generate music?

• ... that computer scientist Donald Knuth contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it?

• ... that Project Diana marked the birth of radar astronomy later used to map Venus and other nearby planets, and was a necessary precursor to the US space program?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1776: Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet Common Sense.

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  1778: Botanist, physician, and zoologist Carl Linnaeus dies. He formalized the binomial nomenclature system of taxonomy.

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  1862: Engineer and businessman Samuel Colt dies. He founded Colt's Manufacturing Company.

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  1938: Computer scientist and mathematician Donald Knuth born. Knuth will contribute to the development of rigorous, systematic analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms.

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  1946: The United States Army Signal Corps successfully conducts Project Diana, bouncing radio waves off the Moon and receiving the reflected signals.

Topic of the Day

Medicine

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  Intravenous clam juice drip is a means of ingesting clam juice without tasting it.

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  Andy's Gangrene is a children's television medical program broadcast on the Gnomon Chronicles Network, hosted by actor-coroner Andy Devine 1.1.

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  The Bedpan Zone is a 1983 medical comedy film about Johnny Micturator (Christopher Walken), a professor of urinology at a prestigious medical teaching hospital who awakens from a coma to find that his body wastes foretell the future.

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  "I'll show you, when the chips are down, these—ah—"civilized people"? They'll pop pills." (The Dark Nurse)]]