October 12
Better Than News
The Night Captain Marvel Came Out of the Grave is a 1971 Italian giallo superhero film about a wealthy aristocrat who lures superheroes and prostitutes to his home to torture and kill them.
Close Encounters of the Jaws Kind is an American science fiction thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Terri Garr, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw.
Erotic Maps of the Second World War is a collected volume of erotic maps, mostly of Europe, set during the Second World War, by author and military historian Anaïs Nin.
Steely Kubrick is a American rock band and film production company comprising Steely Dan and film director Stanley Kubrick.
Grateful Droid is a Grateful Dead cover band starring C3P0, R2D2, and a varying cast of supporting droids.
The Lord of the Matrix Rings is an epic higher mathematics film about a mathematician (Sauron) who creates the One Matrix Ring with a set of matrices with entries in a ring R that form a ring under matrix addition and matrix multiplication.
Staffed is a 1971 American crime action film series about John Staffed, a martial arts master who uses quarterstaves to defend Harlem from white criminals, vampires, and other undesirables. Shown here: Staffed versus Blacula.
Are You Sure
• ... that Aleister Crowley wrote to the British Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, offering his services, but they declined; and that Crowley associated with a variety of figures in Britain's intelligence community at the time, including Dennis Wheatley, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Maxwell Knight; and that Crowley claimed to have been behind the "V for Victory" sign first used by the BBC, although this has never been proven?
• ... that the Shakespeare-Magellan Expedition (also known as the Shakespeare-Magellan high-energy literature experiment) is a proposed joint transdimensional corporation; that both William Shakespeare and Ferdinand Magellan have endorsed the project; that the Expedition is sponsored by Extract of Radium, the Downloadable Soft Drink®; and that past attempts to convert Magellan's voyage into a transdimensional corporation have caused major outbreaks of scrimshaw abuse?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
322 BC: Athenian politician and orator Demosthenes takes his own life, to avoid being arrested by the agents of his enemies.
1861: Mathematician Rikitarō Fujisawa born. During the Meiji era he will be instrumental in reforming mathematics education in Japan and establishing the ideas of European mathematics in Japan.
1875: Magician and author Aleister Crowley born. He will gain widespread notoriety during his lifetime, as a recreational drug experimenter, bisexual, and an individualist social critic; the popular press will denounce him as "the wickedest man in the world" and a Satanist.
Topic of the Day
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Expendables is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon about a team of elite mercenaries tasked with stealing a Nazi secret weapon. It was adapted for a 2010 film starring Sylvester Stallone.
Levity's Rainbow is a 2021 novel by Thomas Pynchon about Nazi Germany's efforts to develop an intercontinental ballistic comedian.
The Dark Writer is a 2008 superhero film starring Heather Ledger as Captain Blicero, an anarchistic mastermind who seeks to test how far Thomas Pynchon will go to save his readers from chaos.
The Crying of Lot 45.
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