"If he can do that, then he can write, scrawl, punch a keyboard to give Tuco the info he wanted to tell"—assuming he can read.

"wallowing in it"—that's what people do. Like Hank alluding to 9/11—people have an abiding need to be at the center of the narrative, and are quick to revise it so that they can be. This is why every community was convinced they had the next big terrorist attack site (and before that the top Soviet missile target) in…

"Cool guys don't look at explosions"

'The Golden Compass' was a very successful book and part of a series that I think predates Harry Potter. As a bookseller it was one of those things you went to when the parents would tell you their kids love Harry Potter but have read them all—and you went into robo-bookseller mode and said "If you liked Harry Potter,…

But see, Donkey—that's not I'm talking about. I think that we have been conditioned by popular media and advertising to believe that our natural state should be happiness, or even elation, and that if we are routinely feeling anything less, we are inadequate. If what you feel is truly pathological, and intereferes…

The song was called 'Let Me Go'. Heaven 17, the band, was what happened when elements in the erstwhile experimental synth outfit The Human League wanted to get poppier. I suppose Heaven 17 was a bit more political and a bit more ironically poppy (with songs like 'Let's all Make a Bomb"), but I can't remember which…

Pelagius FTW.

That's really super, supergirl…

Also—they tried to parlay it into a TV series after the movie came out, but that went nowhere.

No, it's an adaptation of 'The Destroyer' series of men's adventure novels. It's been around forever and is still going strong I believe. They're not great fiction, and I'm sure they are derivative of all kinds of things, but they are also kind of an institution.

He also is in large part responsible for the wave of directors that made the 70's so good—A lot of them cut their teeth making Corman pictures.

'The Gate' had it's 'Gremlins' inspired sequence of humonculi, and it's really well done—part puppet, part stop-motion, all nightmare—but that's not the whole of it. It's a good preteen Horror movie.

Why was there not a lawsuit about 'Mac & Me'?

Heathcliff was definitely first (1973), but Garfield was not a rip off of Heathcliff anyway, he was a ripoff of this iconic Kliban creation from late seventies greeting cards and tote bags:

Presumably a vampire's cognitive and emotional development stops at the moment of undeath. That seems to be the case in 'Let the Right One In' and 'Near Dark' anyway.

When I was in high school in Massachusetts there was always a group of four that dressed up as Alex's droogs for Halloween. I tried to inaugurate the tradition when I moved back to Ohio, but nobody there knew what the hell I was talking about (and I wasn't using Nadsat neither).

Not to get "linguistnerd", but "horrorshow" is also not that different from typical slang inversions like "sick", "wicked", or just plain "bad" (or as Run DMC put it: "not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good!" ::cues the turntables::). Even the everyday word "terrific" has its roots in "terror".

Alex, as an apparent sociopath, is an extreme example—and we do chemically castrate criminals—but if we decide as a society that we can jerry rig our biochemistry to lead lives of considerably less conflict, at what point do we give up our own human nature? And if conflict is the impetus of Art (and Alex's Ludwig…

I keep telling myself that some day I'm going to let the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses in when they come knocking, and really have at them in a respectful but challenging theological debate—but they always come when I'm cooking.

I remember when that last chapter was first published in the US there was some discussion of it's structural purpose—something like the three Acts of the book having seven chapters each (which may or may not be true) and the last chapter being 21 because that's the age of majority (which it wasn't in Britain anyway),…