December 5, 2006

NASA Plans Permanent Base on Moon

NASA announced Monday its plan to build a lunar outpost by 2024 to achieve a sustained, human presence on the moon. The plan, which encourages participation by other nations, is designed to prepare for future human exploration of Mars. Man last set foot on the moon in 1972, when the last Apollo mission landed.

abdicate

DEFINITION: (verb) To relinquish (power or responsibility) formally. SYNONYMS: renounce. USAGE: The King abdicated the throne when he married a divorcee.

Fritz Lang

Lang was a giant of the German Expressionist movement and made two extraordinary early films, Metropolis and M. These films helped form the basis for the science fiction, suspense, horror, and film noir genres popular in Hollywood from the 1930s on. Lang's use of lighting and set design to expand upon a film's dark narrative has become a staple of these genres. Joseph Goebbels's appointment book contains an entry that partly corroborates what myth about Lang?

Sergei Eisenstein’s Debuts

Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was a seminal film in cinematic history and was based on the real-life uprising aboard the Potemkin that occurred in 1905. Eisenstein deliberately wrote it as a revolutionary propaganda film and used it to test his theories of "montage," a form of movie collage consisting of a series of short shots which are edited into a coherent sequence. In the 1950s, it was named the greatest film of all time at what event?

Honore de Balzac

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Daily Planet

The Daily Planet is a fictional newspaper that appears in Superman stories published by DC comics. Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, works at The Daily Planet alongside fellow journalist Lois Lane and photographer Jimmy Olsen. The paper supposedly began publication in 1775, with George Washington writing a guest editorial for the first daily edition. What villain owned the paper years before Clark Kent started working there?