that was transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January
1959. It was the third and last of the BBC's Quatermass serials, all
written by Nigel Kneale. In Knightsbridge, London, a strange skull and
an alien spacecraft are discovered; Professor Bernard Quatermass and his
newly appointed military superior at the British Experimental Rocket
Group, Colonel Breen, join the investigation. The ship and its contents
have a powerful and malign influence over many of those who come in
contact with it, including Quatermass. He discovers that aliens,
probably from Mars, had long ago engineered a human genetic legacy
responsible for much of the war and strife in the world. The serial has
been cited as an influence on Stephen King and the film director John
Carpenter. It featured in the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes
compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000, which described it as
"completely gripping". The character reappeared in a 1979 ITV production
called Quatermass.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_and_the_Pit>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1816:
The Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, rival fur-
trading companies, engaged in a violent confrontation in present-day
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Seven_Oaks>
1850:
Louise of the Netherlands married Crown Prince Karl of Sweden-
Norway.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_of_the_Netherlands>
1939:
Former American baseball player Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, now commonly known in the United States
as "Lou Gehrig's Disease".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gehrig>
1970:
The Patent Cooperation Treaty, an international law treaty, was
signed, providing a unified procedure for filing patent applications to
protect inventions.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty>
2006:
The ceremonial "first stone" of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,
a facility established to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds from
locations worldwide in an underground cavern in Spitsbergen, Norway, was
laid.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
dad dancing:
The making of embarrassing flamboyant dance moves to pop music by
middle-aged men.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dad_dancing>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
The unhappy legacies of authoritarianism can be removed only if
the concept of absolute power as the basis of government is replaced by
the concept of confidence as the mainspring of political authority: the
confidence of the people in their right and ability to decide the
destiny of their nation, mutual confidence between the people and their
leaders and, most important of all, confidence in the principles of
justice, liberty and human rights.
--Aung San Suu Kyi
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi>
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