It's been suggested by Poe's biographers that either (a) their marriage was never consummated, or (b) that the couple did not sleep together until Virginia was 16 (although Poe was by then 30, so we're still in seriously-creepy territory).

Even that would be preferable to someone deciding to use part of their anatomy to cosplay the Sarlacc pit ...

Call it the Cassandra Effect, after the princess of Troy who was cursed by Apollo to see the future but never be believed. Cassandra, and Trojan priest Laocoon, both warned against bringing the Wooden Horse within the city gates, and were ignored.

Gollum [gollum2004.com]

"The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it." ["The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams]

I think that figure may be an overestimate. You could make some significant cost savings by trimming features that aren't needed. Stuff like ray-shielding on the thermal exhaust ports. You're never gonna need that, right?

"Blake's Seven"

I'm not really against "Everyone dies at the end" in principle, but I never found the end of that '70s/80s show that you refer to satisfying. It felt like an afterthought, as if they'd tacked it on when they discovered that they weren't going to get money for another series. I think that (SPOILER ALERT) the…

Nope, 'metal'. Used in this way, it means something like the gutsiest, most hard-assed, most balls-to-the-wall ... in short, the most 'metal' (as in 'heavy metal'). The Onion AV Club once headlined an article "Slayer guitarist backs out of shows for incredibly metal reason" (the reason being that he was battling with…

Martin Luther was particularly fart-obsessed. He reportedly claimed once to have dismissed the Devil "mit einem Furz" ('with a fart') when his Satanic Majesty paid a courtesy call.

The only reason Turing didn't publish the answers to _everything_ is that he figured he should let future generations of scientists have _something_ to do. But he couldn't resist sharing what he knew about tigers.

The same is true of sharks, which also have 'denticles', scales that have the same structure as vertebrate teeth.

Being in a kind of nitpicky mood, I did some approximate calculations, based on the apparent height of that thing they're jumping off. By eye, I'd say that it's at least 250 ft (80m) above the water. Martian gravity is around 0.4G, for an acceleration of about 4m/s2. So unless I've got the math totally wrong, Captain…

I've always had trouble with John Carter leaping around all over the place: Burroughs himself seems eventually to have figured out that it was neither probable nor heroically dignified, and quietly dropped it from later stories.

Done. Unfortunately, it comes with the metabolism of a tortoise too. But so long as you're not in a hurry, that's cool.

"They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale ..."

I was being somewhat flippant and yes, "Altered Carbon" isn't torture porn in the sense of "Saw" or "Hostel" (although I did feel that there was an element of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence in the novel).

In fairness, Hollywood has a lot of experience in making torture porn. If anyone can do justice to that aspect of the novel, it's probably the US film industry. Last time I looked, they were pretty comfortable with stories that involved shooting people and blowing them up, too.

We'll just have to introduce other predators to keep the rodent population down.

If you want more examples of this kind of thing, read up on Ronald Maddison [en.wikipedia.org] Sydney Gottlieb [en.wikipedia.org] and Maralinga [en.wikipedia.org]