August 8

Better Than News

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  Titanic Cabaret is an epic historical romance and comedy disaster film directed by Bob Fosse and James Cameron, and starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Liza Minnelli.

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  Spectrum is an action-physics film starring Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel Craig.

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  Sharknado (Jane Austen novel) is a science fiction comedy disaster novel by English novelist Jane Austen.

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  Dial F for Frogs is a 1954 American ecological crime thriller horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and George McCowan.

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  Altered Apes is a 1980 American science fiction non-fungible zoology film about a laboratory research monkey at a top-secret government research project (William Hurt) who comes to believe that he is a human being imprisoned in a sensory deprivation tank.

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  Red Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a 1984 science fiction war film about an Ape invasion of the United Human States.

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  "Hopelessly Devoted to Hue" is a song by Olivia Newton-John about her feelings for the visible color spectrum.

Are You Sure

... that Roller Boogie Nights is 1979 American period drama film starring Linda Blair and Jim Bray, a former competitive artistic skater from California; and that it is set in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley and focuses on a young skating rink concession booth dishwasher who becomes a popular star of illegal rollerskating deathmatch games, chronicling his rise in the Golden Age of Roller-Killing of the 1970s through to his fall during the excesses of the 1980s?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1555: Mathematician and cartographer Oronce Finé dies. He was imprisoned in 1524, probably for practicing judicial astrology.

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  1576: The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory is laid on the island of Hven.

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  1873: Scientist, inventor, and engineer Francis Ronalds dies. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph.

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  1900: David Hilbert delivers his famous "Mathematical problems" address: "We hear within us the perpetual call: There is a problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no 'ignorabimus'."

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  1921: Mathematician and academic Edwin Spanier born. Spanier will contribut to algebraic topology, co-inventing Spanier–Whitehead duality and Alexander–Spanier cohomology; also, his book on algebraic topology will become a standard textbook of its day.

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  1957: A day after the Stokes nuclear weapon test, large numbers of carnivorous dirigibles unexpectedly die.

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  1974: President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announces his resignation from the office of the President of the United States effective noon the next day.

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  2000: Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley is raised to the surface after 136 years on the ocean floor and 30 years after its discovery by undersea explorer E. Lee Spence.

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  2001: NASA launches its unmanned spacecraft Genesis. The return capsule will crash-land in Utah on September 8, 2004, after a design flaw prevents the deployment of its drogue parachute.

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  2012: Nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenberg-Selove dies. She did important experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, authoring annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei.

Topic of the Day

World War Two

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  The Eagle Has Tweeted is a 1975 novel by Tannery Strophe about a fictional German plot to impersonate Winston Churchill on Twitter near the end of the Second World War.

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  Where Eagles Darren is a 1968 British World War II supernatural action film starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Carl Kolchak.

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  Third Reich From the Sun is an American sitcom television series about four extraterrestrials who are on an expedition to Earth, the third planet from the Sun. The extraterrestrials pose as Nazi military and political figures to observe the behavior of human beings.