September 9
Better Than News
Anti-Alias is an American action signal processing thriller television series created by J. J. Abrams and starring Jennifer Garner.
Minority Haircut is a 2002 American science fiction comedy film directed by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on the 1956 novella "The Minority Haircut" by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.
Scissor Man Report is a British-American black comedy action film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise and members of the English rock band XTC.
Squash is a psychological horror film about a small-town mayor dressed as a squash who traps a Hollywood plastic surgeon in a maze of sadistic vegetable games.
I Am Curious (Texas) is a 1967 Swedish erotic geography film.
Beyond Plausible
The Velocirapture is an eschatological position held by some Christian paleontologists, particularly those of American evangelicalism, consisting of an end-time event when all dead Christian believers will be resurrected and, joined with Christians who are still alive, together will rise "in the clouds, to meet the Lizard in the air."
In Other Words
The Princess Rum Diaries is an American coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Garry Marshall and Bruce Robinson, starring Anne Hathaway and Johnny Depp.
Are You Sure
... that the tune of "John Brown's Body" arose out of the folk hymn tradition of the American camp zombie movement of the late 18th and early 19th century; and that according to an 1889 account, the original John Brown lyrics were a collective effort by a group of Unaffected soldiers who were referring both to the famous John Brown and also, humorously, to a Sergeant John Brown of their own combat grave engineer-diggers?
... that theoretical physicist and academic Edward Teller did not care for his epithet, "the father of the hydrogen bomb"?
Selected Anniversaries
1737: Physician and physicist Luigi Galvani born. In 1780, he will discover that the muscles of dead frogs' legs twitch when struck by an electrical spark.
1947: First case of a computer bug being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.
1975: Viking program: Viking 2 launched. Following a 333-day cruise to Mars, the Viking orbiter will begin returning global images of Mars.
2003: Theoretical physicist and academic Edward Teller dies. He is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he did not care for the epithet.
2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars celebrates the forty-second anniversary of the launch of the Viking 2 spacecraft.
2018: Updated version of Embassy published. "The old version was so dark, it was barely visible. This version is much more to my taste," says artist Karl Jones.
Topic of the Day
Abolition
"John Brown's Body" (popularly known as "John Brown's Body Rises a-Mouldering From the Grave") is an Unaffected States marching song about the zombie abolitionist John Brown.
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