Oh, lord, I'm sick of seeing all the gnashing of teeth over this. The novella was originally published in 2008 and nobody took notice of it then.

No. Cyclops is a gigantic bad ass when well written. Unlike most of the X-Men he's been combat trained since childhood. But alas, he isn't well written very often.

Just wanted to show you the one that you really shouldn't have missed. :)

Oh, man, what a great list.

The concept that there's a heart disease gene depresses me. My father died of heart disease, after a lifetime of smoking, drinking, and eating nothing but red meat for 50 years. I don't smoke, don't drink, I eat right and I exercise...but if my father gave me a gene for heart disease, I might just be wasting my…

The tale of Acoustikitty is absolutely true. I myself, when I worked as a subcontractor for the CIA, had a boss who was part of the acoustic kitty project. He had a souvenir; a cat's skull, with fine grooves etched into the bone leading down from the ears, where the wires were concealed so they could not be felt…

We discover planets around other stars because they occlude the light from their suns, or are massive enough to make their suns wobble. There's no lighting that helps us discover objects in our outer solar system, and all the objects there are too small to affect the orbits of the larger planets or the Sun.

It sounds to me as if they proved that rat brains don't understand altitude. I would expect that fliers would understand altitude very well, and brachiators like primates would understand it somewhat.

When I was in Tennessee I bought a bag of 'Mountain Apple Green Tea' that tastes delicious. But after it's steeped the leaves look suspiciously like dandelion. Oh well, the taste is what counts.

Stopping only one bad guy is warranted in the comic books, because the bad guys are supervillains who are capable of destroying the city/planet/human race. A supervillain of that threat level requires the utilitarian flexibility of the superhero to stop. That's the backside to the Joker's argument, which is that the…

I saw a liger up close at a wildlife sanctuary, with nothing but a triple-layered chain link fence between us. You do not want to own one. It looks like a mountain with teeth, claws, and malevolent eyes.

Does it bother anyone else that the Doctor just began the genocide of the Silence? With that, and the gunfight at the end of the episode, this felt more like an episode of Torchwood than Doctor Who. The Doctor I know didn't kill things, and didn't let his companions go nuts with firearms, and tried everything he…

I always thought it was alchemical. Silver is the alchemical metal of the moon. Werewolves already suffer an alchemical reaction from moonlight that turns them into monsters. Exposure to pure moon essence in the form of elemental silver causes a fatal reaction. If moonlight causes an allergy, silver is an…

I'm with Busiek on the difficulty of making a good name and keeping it unique. I wrote the original Genocide Man short story in 2000, and I could find no other person who had ever used the name. But by the time I made it into a comic, it had popped up in a couple of obscure places.

For my money, the best was Misfits of Science. They were like the A-Team, only with superpowers they could barely control. It was the wackiest show on TV in the mid-80s.

My dogs are on my side, but they *do* try to trip me to get any food I might be carrying. For a dog the entire world is a game of keepaway, and they're not always clear about the rules.

Several heroes in the comic series Empowered got their powers from alien venereal diseases. So...drugs aren't the worst origin story, not by a long shot.

@AldoraGreel: One-piece fetish suits are a superhero tradition. Cyclops' uniform is classic.

I loved this show. You're right that it's the most comic-booky superhero show yet — and that's what we need. Heroes was bland and No Ordinary Family is ordinary whitebread. The Cape, by contrast, is full of colorful characters. The Middleman was better, but we can't have everything.

This show is terrible, but I still watch it for Morena Baccarin. Her performances are awesome — I just mute the TV whenever she's not in the scene.