I always liked Eric Frank Russell's stories, in which space scouts name planets things like 'Eterna', 'Pulok' and 'Binty', much to the consternation of the bureaucrats back home (those three examples are from Russell's witty short story "The Waitabits").

She doesn't say which end, but I think we can guess.

Neal Stephenson: "Ex-cel-lent ... my work here is done."

"Seriously, Zxxyyzzxqgrl-42, do you think we'll ever get tired of building wacky solar systems just to mess with the heads of primitives who've only recently figured out to detect exoplanets?"

"I can explain everything. I didn't wet the bed, I was trying to extinguish the cat. The cat? Oh, it was on fire when I came into the room. Honestly. Apparently there's been a wave of spontaneous feline combustion events lately. Nothing to do with me whatsoever."

I've only watched the first episode, but even that left me scratching my head. For a start, I'm still struggling with the fact that - if I remember correctly - they started off somewhere in the Indian Ocean and next thing you know they're on what appears to be an island in the Caribbean. OK, it never says it's in the…

Here's a helpful artist's impression of Tao Tao demonstrating his new skills.

Did they consult the builders of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris? The architects built a super-modern design, all steel and glass, with towers at each corner to house the 'stacks' ... and then someone pointed out that direct sunlight isn't actually very good for rare books. They ended up having to retrofit it with…

"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

"The cloaca! Excrete through it! Use it for happy sexy fun times! And now, with Cloaca 2.0, you can breathe through it as well! New improved cloaca is the only organ you really need. Replaces no less than four body parts found on so-called 'higher' animals. Isn't it time that you had a cloaca?"

I see your mouth-urinating Chinese turtle, and I raise you an Australian turtle that breathes through its asshole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzroy_River_turtle

I did ... but the Simulators didn't like the way it was going, so they restarted the Simulation again.

In fact, they've already restarted the simulation several times, because it wasn't converging the way they wanted. The latest such incident was just 30 seconds ago ... but of course we have no way of telling that, because we're given fresh memories at each restart.

Now I'm hungry for phonton soup.

US navy ship, nuclear war, partly-mutinous crew, cute female officer, small group of Navy SEALS aboard ... wait, isn't this called "Last Resort"? I'm pretty sure I just watched this last week.

This was, of course, from the period when the Wonder Woman comics were drawn by noted Surrealist artists Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp. This is one of the more accessible panels. Later in the same story, Wonder Woman defeats the Nazis by transforming herself into a 1/18th scale replica of the Taj Mahal, delivering a…

One of my teachers in high school drove a Robin Reliant. He said he once got it up to 47mph ... downhill, with a following wind.

It's something that may get missed out in newspaper articles, but all the longer pieces I've read, including books, recognize the contribution of the Poles. If I remember correctly, the Poles also passed on a mechanical device that their cryptographers had built to crack Enigma; part of the work of Turing's team at…

The key phrase is "no other rocket currently flying". The Saturn V was also designed to cope with engine failure. Apollo 6 and 13 were both successfully orbited, despite engine failures. So NASA does have some experience in this area.

In hindsight, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. My parents had always had a soft spot for the undesirables, the animals that no one else would want. Growing up, I remember a succession of pets that looked as if they had been salvaged from some feline or canine refuse heap, from Growltiger - one-eyed, lop-eared,…