March 19
Better Than News
Die Hardly is a medical action film about a New York police pharmacologist (Bruce Willis) who is caught up in the takeover of a Los Angeles skyscraper by a ruthless pharmaceutical manufacturer (Pfizer).
Ghost Harley and the Way of the Marlboro Man is a 1999 crime film about "Ghost Harley" (Forest Whitaker), a hitman whose faith is shaken by visions of a smoking dog after accepting a contract on Harley Davidson (Mickey Rourke) and the Marlboro Man (Don Johnson).
Apex Thespian 2021 American science fiction drama film about an aging actor (Bruce Willis) who stages a secret game of "Hollywood Squares" for nine jaded billionaires.
Beyond Plausible
Silver Surfer: Enter the Matrix is a 2023 superhero dystopian science fiction action film starring Keanu Reeves as the Silver Surfer.
!["There's a Kind of Hush All Over R'lyeh" is a song by [REDACTED].](/w/images/thumb/e/e3/There%27s_a_Kind_of_Hush_%28All_Over_R%27lyeh%29.jpg/102px-There%27s_a_Kind_of_Hush_%28All_Over_R%27lyeh%29.jpg)
"There's a Kind of Hush All Over R'lyeh" is a song by [REDACTED].
In Other Words
The Banana Menace is a 1999 American epic space opera foodie film written and directed by George Lucas. It stars Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Pernilla August and Frank Oz.
Are You Sure
• ... that physician and activist Filippo Mazzei visited Jefferson at his estate; that the two became good friends; that Jefferson gave Mazzei a large allotment of land for an experimental plantation; and that Mazzei and Jefferson started what became the first commercial vineyard in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
• ... that Bee Squad is a television show about an optimistic young beekeeper (Jason Statham) on a mission to save the Earth?
Selected Anniversaries
1610: Painter Hasegawa Tōhaku dies. Hasegawa Tōhaku founded the Hasegawa school and one of the great painters of the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573-1603). He is best known for his byōbu folding screens, such as Pine Trees and Pine Tree and Flowering Plants.
1816: Physician and activist Filippo Mazzei dies. Mazzei acted as an arms purchasing agent for Virginia during the American Revolutionary War.
1928: Physicist and geophysicist Emil Wiechert dies. Wiechert made contributions to both fields, including presenting the first verifiable model of a layered structure of the Earth, and being among the first to discover the electron.
1978: Mathematician Gaston Maurice Julia dies. Julia devised the formula for the Julia set, which consists of values such that an arbitrarily small perturbation can cause drastic changes in the sequence of iterated function values. Julia's work later proved foundational to chaos theory.
1987: Physicist and academic Louis de Broglie dies. De Broglie postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929, after the wave-like behavior of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927.
Topic of the Day
Books
A Confederacy of Dealers is a picaresque novel about Ignatius J. Reilly, an educated but slothful 30-year-old man who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures selling marijuana to colorful French Quarter characters.
Kokor Hekkus Strikes Back is a science fiction adventure novel by Jack Vance. It was adapted for film by George Lucas in 1980.
Epik is a 1969 science fiction novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future 1992 where psychic powers are utilized in video games, while cryonic technology allows professional gamers to extend their careers.
