Do we really fear that our children will become racists by reading/seeing adventures that take place in fictional worlds with racial monocultures/stereotypes? Or is this merely more hand-wringing by those overcome by white guilt?

After the enthusiasm for Physical Culture faded, the common reaction to the movement and to the prospect of potential superhumanity, available to all, was insecurity, depression over the inability to achieve it, and envy toward those who had.

The sad truth is that fewer and fewer people read these days. There is a small resurgence in youth reading thanks to the trending of YA literature lately, but that could easily wither and fade like all trends. I suspect that most new authors won't obtain a substantial readership via self-publishing until their work is…

I think at this point, all that self-publishing electronically does is get a new author's material out to the public. That still won't translate into financial success very often though. Of course, you can't make money off of a book that no one has access to, right? So self-epublishing is better than nothing at all.…

I think everyone is forgetting the biggest case of "burying the lead" this season: Jeremy is potentially on the verge of becoming the next Evil Alaric. And Elena didn't have the good sense to warn him and advise him not to wear the ring any longer! Oy veh.

Thank you for the lesson in remedial optics. Has nobody ever used (or understood) a zoom lens on a camera before?

I loved Pushing Daisies a lot (I even own the champagne bottle that was used as a prop in the series finale), but it was clearly not going to last long. As brilliant as it was, it was never going to appeal to a mass audience. It was just too quirky and unconventional for that. It was a show that had to survive on very…

Then let's work towards eliminating the corruption. That is, after all, the real problem you are railing against now. The problem isn't the fact that communities are given mechanisms for shaping their institutions. That is a Good Thing. And entirely necessary. I don't really want to live in a country where that is not…

Communities rightfully see it as their duty to use the available political apparatus to shape public institutions. It is why our educational systems are political by nature. The head of education in the U.S. is a politically appointed cabinet member. Every board of education in every city and state is a political…

Don't we also, then, have to rename the Higgs field? Before you know it, we'll be faced with having to rename a bunch of other stuff just for consistency's sake and general fairness to easily bruised egos. No more fermions or skyrmions, and no more Einsteinium! It's a slippery slope, I tell ya.

You have to get books approved because you're talking about a public school system paid for by public funds (i.e., taxes), which makes them subject to "community standards". Public schools serve the public, and more specifically, the local constituency and whatever bizarre prejudices they may have. That's why the…

I'm so sorry.

I presume Canadians sleep better at night knowing that their ever-vigilant customs agents are keeping dangerous materials like "that pervy Japanese stuff" out of their country. One can only imagine how busy customs agents must be at Vancouver airport...

Pixar Tony Stark is clearly annoyed with himself for designing and fabricating a helmet his huge-ass noggin can't even fit into. If I made such colossal errors in ergonomic scale, I'd resort to heavy drinking too.

Yeah, I'm kinda thinking they got the physiques of Wondergirl and Supergirl a bit backwards perhaps. If anyone is going to be, um, robust, it should be the Amazon...

Nice faux-competition; the "race" either came down to who had the better driver or whichever car the segment producers wanted to win. But my heart will always belong to the 1966 George Barris design.

To convince me, results are going to have to be more than just a few percentage points better than simple random selection. I can smell the difference between garlic and onions at least 90% of the time. I can tell the difference between red and green nearly 100% of the time. I can tell the difference between a flute…

I think "Washington" would have noticed a Nazi moon base long before sending a manned lunar excursion module to land within a few kilometers of it. I love the pulpy idea behind this movie, but it is idiotic things like this that make me a h8tr before the dang thing even opens in theaters.

Yeah, but unfortunately the social principle of "community standards", at least in the U.S., has allowed words like pornography to take on whatever definition each community feels it needs in order to demonize the content they object to. That is why every town, city, county, and state has potentially different laws…

And then there's astrology. All of these tests strike me as just elaborate variants of determining one's "sign".