December 21

Better Than News

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  Sleigh Free or Die Hard is a 2007 American action thriller Christmas filmab out NYPD Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis), who must to stop a cyber-terrorist (Timothy Olyphant) from starting a "fire sale" cyber attack which would disable key elements of Santa's present delivery system.

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  James Bond and the Giant Peach is a children's fantasy spy thriller novel by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.

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  Titanic 2: The Way of Water is a romantic science fiction drama film by James Cameron about a human couple who crash-land on an alien planet (Pandora).

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  Bloodmoney Nights is a science fiction historical drama novel by Philip K. Dick.

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  Mister Rogers' Op-Center is an American half-hour educational children's television series that was created and hosted by Fred Rogers.

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  The Muppets: 1453 is a 2021 historical drama Muppets film about the 1453 capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire.

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  The Candidate: Endgame is an American political science fiction drama film about leftist lawyer Bill McKay (Robert Redford), who is recruited by Hydra to run for World Security Council Secretary seat against admired Republican Thanos (Josh Brolin).

Beyond Plausible

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  Constantine 2: Hell Froze Over is a science fiction superhero horror film starring Keanu Reeves and Harrison Ford.

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  Alien: Wassup? is a 1979 science fiction substance abuse horror film starring John Hurt as a recovering alcoholic who falls off the wagon with catastrophic consequences for himself and his shipmates.

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  Andromeda Strain 2: Silent Straining is an American environmental-themed documentary film documenting the efforts of orbital biowarfare researcher Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) to contain the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism.

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  Asstrancle is a Gothic astrology romance novel by an anonymous author.

In Other Words

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  Where's Pepper? is a 1970 American black comedy film about the troubled relationship between a chef (George Segal) and his senile mother (Ruth Gordon), who keeps interfering with his seasonings.

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  "Surfin' Boomerang" is a 1964 song about a surfer who throws and catches boomerangs while surfing, who finally throws too many, too far and too fast, and meets a tragic end in the briny depths.

Are You Sure

• ... that logician and philosopher Jan Łukasiewicz was a pioneer of post-Aristotelian logic, and that his innovative thinking about the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle helped establish modern logic?

•... that I Snow What You Did Last Shiver is a 1997 American action-adventure film about four young friends who must survive winter hardship one year after covering up a car accident in which a man froze to death?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1807: Mathematician Joseph Fourier announced to the French Academy of Science that an arbitrary function could be expanded as an infinite series of sines and cosines (now known as the Fourier series).

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  1878: Mathematician and philosopher Jan Łukasiewicz born. He will think innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle.

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  1913: Arthur Wynne's "word-cross", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

Topic of the Day

Arthur Conan Doyle

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  The Glossed World is a 1912 novel by British graphic designer Arthur Conan Doyle about an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where prehistoric textures still survive.

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  The Adventure of the Powerful Pill is one of the alleged "lost adventures" of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes becomes habituated to Adderall.