"Open the pod bay doors, Hal."

If anything, the books are hinting that Jon is the bastard of Robert Baratheon and maybe Lyanna Stark. In the TV show, Ned was pretty insistent that Jon was a Stark, but that doesn't mean that he was actually the father.

I rather hoped that a lot of what was going on in the new Battlestar Galactica was going to be revealed to involve Count Iblis (or an Iblis-like character) from the original series. I thought that was where they were going in the episode when Starbuck flies her Viper into the gas giant when she said to the Leoban in…

Climatic reveals? I don't think an eclipse counts as weather.

My favorite line from Ebert's review was, "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

I agree. I liked Martha, and it was frustrating that they didn't do anything with her.

The Abyss was OK. I think Cameron might have gotten his mojo back if he'd continued making movies after that.

I would have paid real cash money (not that fake stuff they use over in England) to see Donna's head explode. Anything to make her shut up. I'll never understand why she actually has fans.

I remember that there was a lot of skepticism about Aliens before it came out because at that time Cameron was really only known for The Terminator and as one of screenwriters on Rambo, both very different stories from the original Alien.

True. In this particular example, though, I would argue that the Hoberman is excessively complex compared to the buckliball for the applications I can imagine it being used. I'm sure there are examples when a Hoberman would be the better choice.

I used to know a librarian who was a d-cup. She....

The Hoberman Expanding Sphere is a complex mechanical device with pivots, multiple parts and so on, and as such has all the limitations of a complex mechanical device. The buckliball, from what I can tell, is a single item with no moving parts. As a rule of thumb, simpler is better.

Well, it's fairly obscure.

Did anyone every play a board game called Supremacy back in the '80s? I had a copy at one time, but I never actually got around to playing it. It looked very Risk-like, but more complicated.

I don't know what you mean. That isn't cosplay. That's just what we wore back for everyday back then.

Pedantic nitpick of the day: The Shadow in the pulp magazines didn't have the power to cloud men's minds. That was an ability the Shadow had in the radio program, but other than the name and some basic concepts, the pulp Shadow and the radio Shadow were entirely different characters.

On the one hand, this is very cool. On the other hand, even if these potential worlds exist and they can support life, there's no reason to believe that they can support terrestrial life and even if they can support terrestrial life they may very well have native life on them already. That doesn't even touch on the…

Little, Big remains my favorite book. It's a 600-page poem. That being said, even after all these years and the number of times I've read it, I'm still not entirely certain I can tell you what actually happens. Maybe that's why I like it so much.

Oh, I didn't say it would all be a bad thing.

Wealth will continue to concentrate into the hands of an ever-shrinking global oligarchy, which will control a vast majority of the world's corporate assets. Governments will cease even the pretense of being "of the people, by the people, for the people," and serve as nothing more than vestigial organs to legitimize…