If only there had been a secret, parallel program to NASA's chemical rockets with an ambitious plan to launch interplanetary and even interstellar spaceships? Oh, wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_O…

I can't hate any movie that reveals the Space Shuttle actually had a capacity to deploy space Marines, even if young space nerd me was annoyed as hell at the idea that the shuttle could light its main engines while on top of a 747.

"James Bond" isn't a man and isn't a code name. It's a set of implanted memories, scientifically designed in the early 1960s to make the most tough, ruthless, psychologically hardy secret agent possible. One after another, naive British volunteers have gone into the James Bond program, their old memories erased and…

Blockades, collective punishment of civilians, mass starvation used as a strategy— all of these were pretty routine across Africa and Asia (the tactics used to suppress the Boxer rebellion were pretty horrific, for example.) What was shocking to people at the time about the North Sea blockade (or the Boer war, for…

Yes kids, we actually did talk about boys, girls, and gender roles in play and toys back in the '70s. Stop acting so goddamned surprised and thinking this stuff was discovered last year. Gen X was the Free to be You and Me generation.

Toshiro Mifune as a Klingon captain facing off against Mr. Spock in the Philip Kaufman Planet of the Titans Star Trek movie!

I like how well Barnes worked out his alternate history, with Alexander living longer & Alexandrian Egypt slowly becoming an African civilization, to the point that later history depicted Alexander as an African.

The idea that the major ethnic/tribal/language groups of Africa would have stayed nicely within their own boundaries without the arrival of the Europeans seems rather naive.

Steve Barnes, Lion's Blood/ Zulu Heart. Although the books take place in an Africa-settled North America, Barnes did a lot of imaginative heavy lifting and world building to convincingly create an alternate timeline with a dominant, uncolonized Africa.

It always makes me sad to see ancient remains of babies and children, even though of course they'd be dead by now anyway. Something about the lives unlived. The plaster outline of the pregnant lady in the Pompeii ash still haunts me.

This is idiotic. Unprovoked police shootings of family dogs are a huge issue nationwide, as about ten seconds on the Internet are enough to show. Or type "police shoot dog" into Youtube if you want to be depressed all day. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/…

It would have been a lot quicker to have just written "I dislike fantasy and its tropes."

I'm sorry, you've got a problem with a little girl being raised by Terminators?

As I mentioned in another comment, the reference in Chapter 3 to Dracula being betrayed to the Turks by his own brother is way too specific for him to be talking about anyone except Vlad Tepes.

I call bullshit on this story. If Stoker wasn't thinking of Vlad Tepes, why did he have him not only be a historical fighter against the Turks, but refer to being betrayed by his own Ottoman-sympathizing brother? "Woe was it that his own unworthy brother,when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the…

Here in Los Angeles, there was a regional sporting goods chain named Chick's that was actually bought out by Dick's. The jokes pretty much wrote themselves.

This is an incredibly juvenile, reductionist view of the Dracula story.

That's something the show did a lot— undermine its own characters for the sake of a cheap gag or joke.

I love the first five seasons of Buffy, but never understood how this episode was hailed as the pinnacle of the series, when it felt like a cloying, obvious grab for awards love. I'd put "Lie to Me," "Becoming," and especially "Hush," way, way ahead of it.

Calling it now: "why can't they see giant waves from orbit" will be this year's "how can a couple hundred apes overthrow human civilization?"— a glib, preening fanboy complaint based on watching the trailer that will look staggeringly dumb once the actual film comes out.