Or we could just not put the backup generators at ground level, at the bottom of the plant. That always bothered me, given that by definition almost every nuclear reactor is in a potential flood zone.

You think. There's a guy who's almost that good who performs with the local burlesque troops, and women are crazy about him.

True that.

At this point, they might as well. The IMF is going to make them package it up and ship it off to Deutsche Bank, the way things are going.

I got sent that same link by another blog a couple of days ago, and the more I think about it, this pretty well closes off half of modern fantasy. If you're going to tell a story about modern ordinary characters interacting with fantasy characters, you pretty nearly have only two choices: portal fantasy and conspiracy…

Well, the Vorlons are cryptic for different reasons. There are two "Koshes" over the course of the series; it seems to be a title, not a name. According to JMS, the first one's name is Kosh Naranek (sp?), we never find out the second one's name. The first one is cryptic for a couple of reasons; he's trying to…

I want to add one more reason why I loved (and love) Babylon 5: despite the fact that the lead character is a high ranking military officer, it is hands-down the most breathtakingly, emotionally, humanistically anti-war television show since M*A*S*H. Even before the intro drops the line "our last, best chance for…

I don't think it's a paradox, I think it's an actual closed causal loop. If Jeffrey Sinclair weren't going to go back as Valen with Babylon 4, the Minbari wouldn't have survived the prior Shadow War, in which case they wouldn't have been there in Earth orbit to capture Jeffrey Sinclair and discover that he had the…

No s__t, Jack.

Yes and no, but mostly no. There is a little bit of political allegory: the swearing-in photo for Clark is a deliberate recreation of the famous photo of LBJ being sworn in. But even that's not as political as it sounds; it was just a hint, for those who hadn't guessed, that his predecessor's death was an…

The backstory of Babylon 4 and the truth about Commander Sinclair and the cause (and end) of the Earth/Minbar War are all closely related and are THE major spoiler for the mid-point of the series.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that you're supposed to root for any SPECIES in Babylon 5. Not even your own. And hold your breath until early in season 2 before committing yourself to rooting for any one character, because some characters you think are going to be villains turn out to be heroes, and vice versa,…

By the end of season 1 episode 5 is was becoming obvious to me that the key to the series was G'kar's line to Sinclair's girlfriend: "No one here is exactly who they seem." Combine that with the fact that the writers weren't just making it up as they went along (unlike, say, X-Files or Lost) and it made for some…

Gahhhhhh! They actually filmed it in that much detail and then threw it away and bolted that implausible heap of saccharine onto the end instead?

I suspect we'll see more. I think that WAS either Karachi or Islamabad burning, on the television, when that Navy SEAL broke down crying at the end. Yeah: whatever the heck went pear-shaped at the end of that mission into Pakistan, it just killed at least a couple of million people, and he knows that. I'm pretty sure…

That's pretty much where I'm at: that's an awfully plebian premise for an Abrams/Cuaron team-up. It's like getting Frank Lloyd Wright to design your doghouse.

I'm going to say 1961, when Philip Jose Farmer published Flesh and Robert A. Heinlein published Stranger in a Strange Land, and suddenly practically every science fiction novel had to have at least one weird sex scene in it.

OMG, they totally should have included a Chainmail Fantasy Supplement or Warhammer Fantasy Battles scene in the movie Time After Time, just to give H.G. something in the modern world to be GOOD at! "Do you play this game?" "Play it? I invented it."

I didn't see any hype for any of those. On the other hand, it blows my mind that Jo Walton's massively over-hyped /Among Others/ was even nominated for the Hugo, let alone won it. I don't even see how it was eligible; at best, it should have been down ballot under "Best Related Work."

It doesn't have to be "no combustion." All it has to be is "no manufacturing yet." My first reaction was, "Why doesn't steam work, why can't they take the train to Chicago?" but how many working old-fashioned steam trains do we have left in the US, and how many of those are parked on sidings connected to the main…