I worked for a while in the Colorado hogbacks. During my stupid-long commute into nowhere, elk standing in the road and staring me down were a common occurrence. I sure as shit wasn’t going to challenge them in my fifteen-year-old Honda Accord, nor was I going to get out of it. There was an occasional bison, too,…

There is a female director whose first SF film out of the gate was weird and creative. There aren’t a lot of young women who get hired to write and direct horror movies, but she got a deal to make one way more high-profile.

Thank you. I watched the video thinking, “I have no idea what anyone is saying, but that is a beautiful cascade of hair.”

Man, I am such a nerd that my idea of “celebrity” includes a lot of writers in genre fiction. I got to escort Terry Pratchett! I took Peter Straub and his wife out to lunch! Connie Willis gave me a hug! And I was beside myself with excitement - they’re celebrties to me, okay?

His attorneys filed multiple appeals for a relocation; the judge’s decision was that the bombing was so well known across the country that it wouldn’t matter if the trial were relocated, so he denied them.

I have a friend who grew up on mostly eating the livestock and crops on the family farm. His sister had a favorite calf, which she named, and it was ultimately killed and showed up on the dinner table.

Because I watch the show for free on Hulu, I’m always a week behind. I haven’t seen this episode.

When I think of Letterman, I always think of the short story by David Foster Wallace, “My Appearance,” which is from the vantage point of an actress appearing on Letterman in the late 80s. The take is that Letterman’s ethos is about attacking sincerity; that he exists as the anti-Carson, who won’t play along with you…

While the idea of an “entropic” pregnancy is pretty hilarious, it should be an “ectopic” pregnancy. If that’s a typo, it should be cleaned up; if that’s what the tech actually said, then that’s what she said, but it could be more clearly marked that it was a massive fail on her part.

I remember the story about a hidden tribe of white, royal Africans from when H. Rider Haggard wrote it in 1885 and it was called King Solomon’s Mines.

I really liked Honeymoon, Janiak’s debut as a director, which she also has a writing credit for - it’s super weird and pretty fucked up. Just imagine Ygritte from Game of Thrones getting progressively crazier over the course of a movie, and you’ll have an idea of it. It didn’t have a to-me satisfying conclusion, but…

I had a friend at university who treated tanning beds the way I treated hot showers: a relaxing treat to performed daily and at length. I always thought that was so goddamned terrifying.

My vote is Benigno Aquino, current president of the Philippines. He enacted sex education and contraception access in an attempt to improve the health and finances of Filipinos, despite being threatened with excommunication.

My father is a minister of a mainline Protestant religion; he and my mother took a package trip to Israel a few years ago, before he retired. What they saw there in terms of the everyday degredation of Palestinians by representatives of the Israeli government was so appalling to both of them that they have, ever…

Heh. In my state, they don’t give a rip. I buy wine and beer from high school cashiers at my corner grocery store all the time. I would totally be someone who wandered obliviously into a teenage-run checkout lane and threw a bottle of vodka on the belt.

I eat an ungodly amount of fish and shellfish. An old roommate of mine used to call me “Squid Chunks,” because she could not stop laughing the first time I brought home a tin of squid chunks canned in ink, and the jet-black stir fry that resulted. I probably have a mercury load like nobody’s business.

My brother is an engineer whose unusual career path often involves him doing reports on homes that have been wholly or partially destroyed because of appliance malfunction.

I was absolutely appalled at the sentencing he received for talking about his sexual fantasies. (The sentence he got for misusing police resources was, of course, richly deserved.)

Heh. I was totally bald for so long that my mother desperately dressed me in the girliest baby clothes she could find because she was tired of people staring at me, lost for pronouns and settling on, “Oh, um . . . the baby is . . . cute?”

“But Rector Smith, isn’t it at least as disrespectful of women for the university to refuse to provide insurance covering oral contraceptives for all female employees, regardless of their faith or reason for taking them?”