August 20

Better Than News

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  "Precious and Few (Are the Fluids We Two Can Share)" is a song written by Stanley Kubrick and recorded by the American group Climax.

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  The New Fantastic Four is a science fiction superhero television series starring Kurtwood Smith.

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  "Asking for a Friend" is a lost song by the Rolling stones.

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  Mr. and Mrs. Lannister is a 2005 American romantic action comedy film about an aristocratic Westeros couple (Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who are surprised to learn that they are assassins belonging to competing conspiracies, and that they have been assigned to kill each other.

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  A man-portable phrenology system (MPPS) is a lightweight phrenological measurement and analysis system that does not require vehicle support to transport or operate.

Are You Sure

... that "A Gasket Gens" is an anagram of "Kegan Stages"; and that the phrase appears on a billboard in the background of the film Bill and Ted Face the Gasket during the "Sui Generis" hog-calling scene; and that Bill and Ted Face the Gasket was filmed in Kegan Stages, Montana?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1672: Mathematician and politician Johan de Witt dies in a riot. The rioters will partially eat his body.

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  1797: Physicist and priest Francesco Zantedeschi born. Zantedeschi will be among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere of red, yellow, and green light. He will also think that he detected, in 1838, a magnetic action on steel needles by ultraviolet light, anticipating later discoveries connecting light and magnetism.

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  1864: The Kinmon incident: a rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate breaks out near the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. The rebels will seek to restore the Imperial household to its position of political supremacy.

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  1911: The first cable message sent around the world from the U.S. by commercial telegraph was transmitted from New York City. It read “This message sent around the world,” left the New York Times building at 7:00 pm and was received at 7:16 pm after travelling nearly 29,000 miles through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, Phillipines, Midway, Guam, Hawaii and San Francisco.

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  1912: Thomas Edison receives U.S. patent No. 1036470 for a “Phonographic Apparatus,” and No. 1036471 for a “Storage Battery.”

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  1942: The first visible quantity of a plutonium compound, plutonium(IV) iodate, is isolated by nuclear chemists Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner.

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  1961: Physicist and academic Percy Williams Bridgman dies. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures.

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  1962: Mathematician and crime-fighter Alice Beta publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.

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  2007: Cell and developmental biologist Elizabeth Dexter “Betty” Hay dies. Hay conducted pioneering research in limb regeneration, the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in cell differentiation, and epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT).

Topic of the Day

The Simpsons

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  Attack of the Roman Numerals is a 2021 American calendrical horror film about an alien species which Roman numerals to conquer the earth.

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  Terminator vs. Lovejoy is a 1984 American science fiction comedy-religion film about a time-traveling robot (Arnold Schwarzenneger) who befriends a Presbylutheran Minister (Timothy Lovejoy Jr.).

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  Camille & Seymour is a comedy detective television series starring academic Camille Paglia and elementary school principal Seymour Skinner.

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  Hellralpher is an American television series about Ralph, a boy with a magical box that summons the Cimpsons, a group of extra-dimensional, sadomasochistic cartoon animators who cannot differentiate licensed and unlicensed intellectual properties.