Gold leaf goes back to before Japan existed. Indeed, it goes back to ancient Egypt. Like a lot of Japanese crafts, there seems to be a lot of ritual attached.

Oh, I disagree: the list isn’t a joke but it is, like all of top-ten lists, quite subjective. I’d certainly come up with a different list than would you, Ms Leckie, or our gracious host. If I weren’t joking, and starting sf with Frankenstein, I’m not sure who would be included. If I were joking, I’d probably include…

Right now, I think that the average quality of published female sf writers is better than that of male ones, mostly because of the historical difficulty of women getting published in sf. If groups like the sad & rabid puppies get their way, they will guarantee that this continues to be the case, by continuing to…

There are probably 100 or so sf* books from which a sensible person could pick a top-ten list. I don’t think that there are any more than four or five that should be on everybody’s list.

Running into Puck during a midsummer’s night?

Do recall that the Vatican is about 100 acres, completely surrounded by Rome, and that the Germans during WW2 had shown a perfect willingness to kill people they didn’t like. One of the thing weak neutrals do is try very hard not to annoy big, powerful, amoral belligerents. Thomas Jefferson walked that path.

Hell, would you really want to tangle with a security guy who’s tough enough to wear that sort of outfit to work?

Lame superpower? Giving somebody else a real, full-blown migraine. If you’ve never had one, I’m told it’s right up there with passing kidney stones for pain and childbirth. I’ve not had the former, and am male, so get to miss the latter (pain meds, please! oh, and many of them don’t work on migraines...)

Mur Lafferty had a superhero (iirc, the book was “Playing for Keeps”) whose power was that nothing that was hers could be stolen. Pretty lame until you find that that includes all the oxygen in the room and you need to breathe, or that if you try to injure her, that counts as trying to steal her health.

Do remember that the Big Bang theory was proposed by a priest; it was done by Georges LeMaitre, who was a mathematical physicist and a priest.

The horse manure was actually an object of commerce: it was collected and sold to farms, where it was used to fertilize fields. The resulting produce was sold in the city.