*cough* Farnham's Freehold *cough*

If two hundred years of law and settled court cases say "x", then "I'd say y" is mostly meaningless. It's saying what you'd prefer the law to be. I'm sure that child pornographers would prefer that the law not criminalize their hobby, saying "I'd say that as long as you don't actually harm the child, it's okay"; I'm…

It's something Tony invented, called hyperwhiskey. It stores extra ethanol in parallel dimensions. Seriously, everything about The Avengers violates the laws of physics, you're going to swallow that camel and strain at this gnat?

I met a traveller from an antique land

Not necessarily sexism; may just be inflation. Cold War thrillers like hers would have been written in a specific order, price would have gone up over time. And the whole series would have pre-dated any mass-market publication of a black tough-guy detective series.

You expected a Russian producer to know anything about American history? Seriously? Russians produce some real howlers about American history on a regular basis. Heck, some time sit down and compare the history of the transcontinental railroad in Atlas Shrugged with the real history of the transcontinental railroad.

I think it's more simple than that. See, here's the deal about world-building for a world that contains magic. If it's at all comparable to our world, you have to explain why only some people are using it, why not everybody uses it. And there are only two stock answers: either it's a rare hereditary gift, in which…

I doubt very much that a post-water and post-oil Dubai will look that clean or that sturdy. I assume that the last remaining wealthy people will use their armies of disposable poor people against each other to fight over the remainder. A post-oil, post-water Dubai will more closely resemble the worst aspects of…

Roger Rabbit is on my fairly-short list of good books that were made into better movies.

If nothing else, we're in the same territory as Levi Johnson's famous "we were practicing abstinence" comment about how he and Bristol Palin got pregnant. People who absorb "abstinence education" learn that it's bad to plan to have sex, so when they do have sex, they didn't plan. Just the same way: most cheaters don't…

That's what I've been begging for, all along. The book is a spot-on homage to Studs Terkel, the film version (which cannot possibly fit into 2 or 3 hours) should have been an equally spot-on homage to Ken Burns.

Your #55 is silly. Flatly not imaginable. And I don't expect Puerto Rican statehood to pass any time soon; as long as we keep giving them the option, Puerto Ricans are going to keep voting to have all the benefits of US citizenship without any of the costs. Until we give them a strict "in, or out, but pick one"…

Heinlein couldn't write an ending to save his life, but he still won four Hugos.

The Cow beat me to some of them, but Aristophanes dealt with that specifically in Frogs, and the epic poets before that in the Labors. Heracles is nigh-infinitely strong, and once he gets the Nemean lion skin, nigh-indestructible. But he's also famously impatient (look up the story of when he tried to learn guitar)…

As soon as I saw the headline, I wondered if St. Louis was going to come up. I've seen photographs, from when my dad was a kid, of kids walking to school wearing gas masks. But my favorite memento of that time is one particular really ugly, really scrawny tree at the St. Louis Botanical Gardens (which are beautiful,…

There are a couple of books that I love enough that I re-read them at least once every 10 years: John Brunner's /The Sheep Look Up,/ and Ayn Rand's ridiculous but (to me, at least) enjoyable /Atlas Shrugged./ And even though I don't take either of them seriously as predictions, my friends tell me that they don't want…

You have the Jetsons. I'm not being entirely flippant here: you have personal conflict, you have inter-generational stresses, you have competition for recognition. You can have conflict, you can have drama, you can have things that strive for.

I saw a long complaining essay somewhere, I think it was in the NYT or the New Yorker a few years ago, by someone complaining bitterly that Gen-X is a whiny bunch who "live in constant terror that someone might try to sell them something." I've mentioned this a bunch of times to people just slightly younger than me,…

They really should. "What? Come on, Mike, Just because I've been to Haiti a couple of times doesn't mean I know anything about zombies." "You know, Sam, I never noticed before, but you do look kind of like that guy in the Evil Dead movies." "No way. I'm much better looking."

Part of what's wrong with getting your political news from a non-political website (or, worse, a newspaper or TV) is lack of context.