February 10
Better Than News
The Hustler Proxy is an American sports romantic screwball comedy film starring Paul Newman, Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jackie Gleason.
Slaughterhouse-Five in the Rye is a 1972 American comedy-drama military science fiction film set during the Second World War, often viewed by adolescents for its themes of angst and alienation, and as a critique of superficiality in society.
Junc is a 2022 American science fiction film based on the television series Sanford and Son.
Eraserhead Nevsky is a 1938 Soviet surrealist allegory film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and David Lynch. It depicts the attempted invasion of desolate industrial landscape in the 13th century by a man in space moving levers, and his defeat by Prince Eraserhead, known popularly as Eraserhead Nevsky.
Dial F for Frogs is a 1954 American ecological crime thriller horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and George McCowan.
The Pawns of Navarone Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck, and Mikhail Botvinnik.
"Someone Sank My Battleship" is a song by Elton John and Milton Bradley.
Are You Sure
• ... that mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya showed talent at a young age; that physicist Nikolai Nikanorovich Tyrtov noted her unusual aptitude when she managed to understand his textbook by discovering for herself an approximate construction of trigonometric functions which she had not yet encountered in her studies; and that Tyrtov called her a "new Pascal" and suggested she be given a chance to pursue further studies?
• ... that The Man From K.E.S.S.E.L. is an international smuggling ring?
• ... that surgeon Joseph Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, successfully introducing carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean wounds, and that Lister's work led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients, distinguishing him as the "father of modern surgery"?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1868: Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and writer David Brewster dies.
1845: Engineer and physicist Wilhelm Röntgen dies. He won the first Nobel Prize in Physics, for the discovery of X-rays.
1891: Mathematician and physicist Sofia Kovalevskaya dies. Kovalevskaya made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics.
1902: Physicist and academic Walter Houser Brattain born. He will share the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 "for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect."
1912: Surgeon and scientist Joseph Lister dies. He pioneered antiseptic surgery, performing the first antiseptic surgery in 1865.
1913: Nuclear physicist Arnold Flammersfeld born. Flammersfeld will work on the German nuclear energy project during World War II.
1952: Inventor Edward Hugh Hebern dies. He was a pioneer of rotor encryption machines.
1962: Captured American U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
Topic of the Day
Boris Johnson
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.
Dial E for Eco is a 2021 ecology disaster film starring Boris Johnson as the fictional Prime Minister of the United Kingdom James Bond.
Invasion of the Boris-Snatchers.
