Good night everybody!

I'll go ahead and take this opportunity to recount a surreal moment from my own life. One morning, my clock radio, tuned to the local classic-rock station, went off halfway through Donovan's "Atlantis." It sounded familiar to this Futurama fan, though it took my brain (which had been awake for mere seconds at this…

For the most part, Looney Tunes references worked as jokes for people who hadn't seen the source material. With Family Guy, the reference is the joke, full stop.

I'm sure Katzenstein and I aren't the only ones who said "hey, it's that guy from the cartoons!" upon seeing a Peter Lorre movie for the first time.

Everybody started shooting me the first time I tried, and Jock still rejected the beer that I fire-extinguishered in the men's room where nobody could hear. I don't think it works, sadly.

You'll get a beer caked in fire suppressant and like it.

I can't decide whether this makes me feel more or less old.

Bruce was the freaking king of hiding dark, mature subtext under a ray of deceptive sunshine. I'm surprised at the number of intelligent people I meet who think "Born in the USA" is exactly what Ronald Reagan thought it was. But on the issue at hand…

Han was bragging about the Falcon's speed. Speed = distance / time.

If the puppy keeps licking the cat at that rate, the cat's bound to dissolve like candy eventually. We all got what we wanted!

One urgent afternoon in the cargo hold of a delivery van, I filled a one-quart styrofoam cup to the brim, and I ran out of cup before I ran out of pee. On the one hand, 30 fl oz is anatomically possible, though it takes your kidneys a while to produce that much— Barb should have felt the need well in advance. If her…

"Frag out."
"Copy that."

I can hang with substituting turkey— I actually order them that way a lot, what with my irrational hatred of the beef industry.

I had a reuben made with tempeh once. It was all right.

To hear you say that makes my life complete.

I got a couple of DMT Dia-Sharp diamond-coated sharpening stones the other day. I've used a classic grey carborundum oilstone for years with success, but as traditional stones are wont to do, it wore down into a dish shape that made it hard to maintain a constant angle between the stone and the blade. Diamond-coated…

Cahokia, a Mound Builder city near present-day Saint Louis, was once the hub of a trade empire spanning most of eastern North America and into Mexico. At its height, it was one of the world's biggest cities, possibly having more people than Paris did at the time. In spite of the remarkable engineering that went into…

But did it catch fire on at least 11 separate occasions over more than a century?

The course was laid out in advance. I wrote my own tests and quizzes, but the pedigree assignment was a set part of the course. I didn't have an alternate assignment available.

It was about pedigrees. They were supposed to trace a simple dominant/recessive trait (attached earlobes, etc.) through three generations of family members and determine everyone's genotype as best they could. I told them they were free to make stuff up to fill in the blanks— I wasn't about to hire a PI to track…