Interesting that two of the Best Novel nominees are sequels of last year's nominees. Does that happen very often?

I think making cauliflower sculptures of these tragic moments is in poor taste.

Really? High schoolers? I've tutored a lot of high school English students over the last few years, and I haven't seen any questions about Moby Dick. (There's a lot of Great Gatsby and Huck Finn, as you'd expect.) I'd concede that college students are assigned the text, but foisting Moby Dick on high school students…

> But it was no Moby Dick.

Because people have read What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank and because the State Board of Education keep waffling between creationism and evolution. Is this fair? No, of course not. On the other hand, the four changes to the board's position on evolution in the last 15 years (because of electoral changes…

While at Dinosaur Kingdom, you can visit the actual natural bridge the town was named for ... or you can go to Foamhenge, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge made of styrofoam.

As much as I wish he would, A. Lee Martinez hasn't done any sequels. He makes it a point to mention that on his blog frequently.

And all of Butcher's novels, as far as I know, are series novels. Saberhagen wrote a number of series: Berserker, the Dracula sequence, Book of Swords / Lost Swords, etc.

Yes, I understood Charlie Jane's joke. I just thought it was funny that the actual VP at the time had a name that was also a Dick joke.

"as E.B. Tiller says, the night air does wonders for your Johnson. But enough about the Vice President."

The irony of Chris Claremont complaining about a mind-control story is almost palpable. The man has seemingly dedicated his career to writing mind control stories — or maybe the same one, over and over — as if he felt the need to demonstrate, over and over, that there are good mind control stories. "That is not how…

Legend of Drizzt? If you're going to use a D&D property, I would have thought Dragonlance, with its Towers of Sorcery, would be a better choice. Or at least call it the Forgotten Realms, not after the fanboy magnet drow and his Welsh panther.

> "The truth is, X-Force has always been on the fringe of the X-Men. That's no small feat ..."

I always thought a part of his early appeal was that he wasn't Bret Blevins, the artist he replaced on New Mutants. I tired of Blevins's work well before he left — he managed to make the team look like anorexic tweens rather than superheroes. Liefeld, whatever you said about him, made the characters look they'd eaten…

I liked that episode too, although obviously it's no classic. I always figured the reason Data chose craps is because it's one of few (only?) casino games in which the bettors control the random number generation — in card games and roulette, the representative of the house is the one dealing or spinning the wheel. Of…

Callum Keith Rennie makes everything he's in worse; the only thing that excited me about Battlestar was the possibility of watching him die multiple times, and the moment I knew I would have to watch all of Supernatural was the second episode, because Rennie gets eaten by a wendigo.

Hey, you know what will really drive interest in an event? Decimals in the issue numbers! Whole numbers are so passe.

No one ever mentions the truly weird bit of the scene with the Khitain chieftains: a WASPy voice at the very beginning (2:24) saying, "My fear is my sons will never understand me."

No Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber? I guess Robert E. Howard took all of the early sword-and-sorcery votes ... but I'm really disappointed The Dying Earth, either as a book or series, didn't make it.

A shark on whiskey is mighty risky.