"Yeah! The main character did something just like that in the showwwwwwwww....."

So Babbage went to school in Devon, presumably around the turn of the 19th century. But where was he in February, 1855?

I actually liked Vijay Amritraj in it. It's unfortunate he never got many other comic action roles.

I was just talking about General Orlov's plot. I make no excuses for the balloon, crocodile sub, or buzzsaw yo-yo.

You Only Live Twice is essentially a more elaborate reworking of Dr. No — Interfering with the US & Soviet space programs in hope of precipitating a war. The Spy Who Loved Me didn't rely on suspicion to start a war — Stromberg was going to outright launch nuclear strikes on the respective superpowers to kick the war…

Octopussy's is easily one of the more plausible Bond movie plots, in that it doesn't involve huge secret infrastructure (underground space centers or sub-swallowing supertankers or whatever) — It comes down to one crazy Soviet general exploiting a smuggling operation that he's been using more conventionally for some…

And after the half-scale Ripley mannequin, you obviously need the 5-foot long, fully-articulated Alien Queen...

Good catch. I wonder if it broke down during the occupation, or whether it was a relic to begin with that the Germans repainted for their own amusement.

While the goo supposedly isn't petroleum-based (though polyisobutylene sure sounds like a petrochemical to me), it's presumably killing birds the same way an oil slick does — matting their feathers so that they lose the trapped air that insulates them. All that talk emphasizing hypothermia as the proximate cause of…

By WWII they were pretty archaic in French service too, but there were an awful lot left being used by reserve and police formations around Europe. The Germans, having limited resources, were dedicated "recyclers". I know they used a lot of captured tanks on garrison/anti-partisan duty in France and in the Balkans,…

He wanted to prove how very much better the then-modern era was than the past. (It's tough to say why he tried so hard to prove it. Not too many people were arguing with him.)

I really haven't had that impression about the US armed forces in the 40-some years post-Vietnam. Certainly I didn't see the armed forces chomping at the bit to initiate either Gulf War. They obviously trumpet their own importance — inflating prospective enemy threats and intentions to secure greater funding and…

I really think the theme of Starship Troopers as stated here was close to the prevailing view before the Verhoeven movie, which is obviously about fascism.

The good doctor pays a bit of lip service to his "hubris" in his undertaking (which is what generations of Cliff Note readers seem to take away from the thing), but it's obvious to the reader that the creature was a good and noble thing until its creator abandoned it and called it an abomination in his sight.…

Actually, one of the reasons Custer got crushed at Little Big Horn was that the Sioux had a sizable number of lever-action rifles like the Winchester, while the army equipped its troops with the ostensibly more powerful, but much slower-loading, Springfield "Trapdoor" rifle.

That's pretty much my take, though the higher apparent speed of the fragment would imply an angle more tangential to the observer. The supposedly low speed of the main object could also be a function of the angle at which it's being viewed. It reminds me a lot of film I've seen of the "Great Daylight Fireball" of…

A quick Google image search gets me versions of Popeye wearing both a visored cap (as in both this figure and the Robin Williams movie) and a sailor's turned-up brim "gob" cap. Was there a point when he changed fashion? Maybe between the comic strip and the animated cartoons?

It's very "old Hollywood", and reminiscent of both North's Spartacus and Cleopatra, as well as various other costume epics of the day. That final organ chord in the title sequence is a kind of jarringly obvious nod to Also Sprach Zarathustra, though (I'm guessing Kubrick made it clear to North that he really, really…

The odds of life spontaneously developing in "primordial soup" might be very slim in the early years of a single planet, but less so over the combined existences of multiple planets. Just a couple that manage the feat in the early history of the universe could be the source of the "seeds" that scatter it elsewhere.

I've long been aware of and enraged by some drivers' "pass hesitation" — their habit of moving into the left lane and then either decelerating or just hanging out there instead of passing. It's especially common when passing trucks. I suppose it's rooted in some drivers' overwhelming fear of them, though I would think…