I’m kind of obsessed with William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of which have ample fantasy elements that haven’t been fully explored. The Weird Sisters in Macbeth—what’s the backstory? Are they The Fates? Why are they interested in Macbeth? Then there are the demons to which Lady Macbeth…

There’s always Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series...

“Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!”
Seriously, I have to wonder about the thought process that went into this decision: “Hey, remember how in Man of Steel, Lois knew Clark was SuperHope all along? And remember how that made for a much better take on Superman that everyone universally loved? Why don’t we do that, and…

I get that they’re trying to make the character interesting by playing around with things like “super flare” and flight. And maybe, just maybe, someone will buy a comic or two for that reason—or because they like the way Superman looks in the New 52 or the New New 52 or whatever it is that requires him to leave behind…

“The special, please,” he said, in their strange way,
With accents falling here and there all wrong.
The waitress wrote it down and turned away,
But whispered to us, “Hope he won’t stay long.”
She had to serve him—that the law made clear.
The liberal court had really botched that up!
Though no one really wanted his kind…

I’m not a non-fiction guy typically, but I heard her talking about her book on NPR and I had to get it.

This book has some amazing stories...and in the hands of the right director, the disparate tales could be remarkable.

Always my favorite...

A number of responders have made the point that Shakespeare wasn’t the true “originator” of many of the works he’s credited with, since they were often adaptations of previous works or tales. But in the same sense that we credit the Bard with popularizing so many words, it was what he did with the tales he adapted…

I was with you all the way until “also-overrated Watchmen.” We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.

The sounds would stay with her until she died:
The buzzing first, to say something was wrong,
Then aft, a whining, lasting far too long
Before the first explosion. How she’d tried
To level off and raise the nose, applied
The tricks she’d learned, but like a song
Stuck in her head, the ground rose up along
Her windowpanes,…

It could also be a recognition that many advancements in technology and communication throughout history are immediately sexualized: writing, printing, photography, film, TV, the internet have all been pornographized(?)...and in most cases, the fantasies depicted, at least at the outset, are male heterosexual…

I’m going to respond to the first part of your question and ignore the second part. One could argue that, symbolically, she still suffers violence in that a part of her is taken away. But taking a leaf from a tree need not be permanent, for a tree can endure. The closest analogy, I would think, would be in cutting a…

Understandable. The story could have been vastly improved if, say, Apollo had been turned into a tree instead. But I do like the fact that Daphne does not have to surrender herself to him. Far too many stories in the mythological world subject women to sexual assault. In this story, at least, she is free from that.

I’ve always liked “laurel,” signifying achievement, especially in an athletic context. The ancient Greeks handed out laurels at athletic competition (and they were given along with gold medals at the 2004 Olympics in Athens), but that tradition traces back to mythology. Young and beautiful Daphne, a wood nymph, caught…

If you slice the cylinder lengthwise, you get a rectangle of height 4 and length 12. Since the string goes four times around symmetrically, we can divide the rectangle into four equal sections with height 4 and length 3, with the string forming the hypotenuse of 5 each time. Then, 4X5=20. Right?

Here's a similar story, but with a different geeky twist: it combined the talents of Marvel Universe Live! performers and engineering students at Rice University (my alma mater) to teach kids how to assemble their own super-hero themed prosthetics: Rice bioengineers use 3D printing to give kids a hand

I see what you did there.
(You see what I did there?)

Thanks so much! Made my day!

True. I'm not sure why "Anti-family" was an objection, but I don't think marriage is the reason. Maybe it teaches rebellion? I really don't know.