Debris from the Roswell balloon

The Roswell incident is a conspiracy theory that alleges that debris from a United States Army Air Forces balloon (pictured) recovered in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico, was part of a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. The debris was from the top-secret Project Mogul, which used high-altitude balloons to detect nuclear tests. Roswell Army Air Field personnel, unaware of Mogul, gathered the material and announced the recovery of a "flying disc"; the statement was retracted within a day. To obscure the source of the debris, the Army reported that it was a conventional weather balloon. In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel revealed that the weather balloon had been a cover story and speculated that the debris was extraterrestrial. This became the basis for long-lasting and increasingly complex and contradictory UFO conspiracy theories, none of which have any factual basis. The conspiracy narrative has become a common trope in fiction. The town of Roswell promotes itself as a UFO tourism destination. (Full article...)

Keanu Reeves

John Wick is a 2014 American action thriller film directed by Chad Stahelski and written by Derek Kolstad. The film stars Keanu Reeves (pictured) as John Wick, a retired hitman who seeks revenge against the men who killed his dog, a final gift from his deceased wife. It also stars Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Adrianne Palicki, Bridget Moynahan, Dean Winters, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, and Willem Dafoe. Principal photography began in October 2013, on a $20 million to $30 million budget, and concluded in December. Stahelski and Leitch focused on long, highly choreographed single takes to convey action. Following a successful marketing campaign, John Wick, which was released on October 24, 2014, became a modest success, grossing $86 million worldwide. It received applause for its style and its action sequences. John Wick is seen as having revitalized the action genre and began a successful franchise that includes four other films, a prequel television series, as well as video games and comic books. (Full article...)

Sappho (standing) as imagined by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1881

Anactoria is a woman mentioned in the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho (pictured), who wrote in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE. Sappho names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16. Another of her poems, fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", although no name appears in it. As portrayed by Sappho, Anactoria is likely to have been an aristocratic follower of hers, of marriageable age. The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Anactoria" was published in 1866 and is written from the point of view of Sappho, who expresses her lust for Anactoria in a long, sexually explicit monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. Swinburne's poem created a sensation by openly approaching then-taboo topics such as lesbianism and dystheism. Anactoria later featured in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria" by Robert Lowell. (Full article...)