Courtesy of captainlucy we have "Baby porcupine with the hiccups eating some banana": Courtesy of coalescent we have The Muppets sing Carmen: (How sad is it that Julie beat me to tracking down which opera that was from, and we only got it because it's mentioned in Magnolia .)

Poll answers update. Usually I don't bother to pass these things on but I know you people are all poll crazy :) The (no answers) thing is going to be fixed in the next code release. In the meantime, right click on the no answers link and open it in a new tab or window to actually see the answers. Now everyone who is wrongheaded about Neal Stephenson will be revealed...

#48 Skellig by David Almond A yong boy finds an angel in his garage. Slightly overdoes the William Blake references but otherwise perfectly and tenderly balances the fantastic and the prosaic. Possibly only Northerners should be allowed to write fables. #49 Old Man's War by John Scalzi Incredibly tedious Heinlein parody-cum-homage. I've not read Starship Troopers so I'm not sure how much of...

Happy birthday coalescent !

As I turned toward my work, my calendar ambushed me--jumped right up in my grill and said, "Hey, wait a minute--you've got some spanking to do!" I'll say I do. Today it's a two-hander with the Sparkly Paddles of Birthday Wonderfulness--one for ladymooonray and one for coalescent . Happy Birthday Happy Birthday Hope your respective days are full of awesome and fabulous, and the coming...

Happy birthday to coalescent . Have a good'n!

Happy birthday to ladymoonray , coalescent , and zoo_music_girl , but most of all, happy birthday to Colin !

Not quite sure what to make of this one. THE GOOD It's a mostly well-executed tale of a road not taken, peppered with allusions to just about every major event in modern Who history and spiced up by the SF device of Rose's interventions and the Evil Space Beetle. For an RTD script it's surprisingly low key, the music isn't terrible, and generally speaking Catherine Tate does a reasonable job of...

I'm heading out, so can't do a proper reaction just now, but.. That? Was fucking awesome. If coalescent does his "best RTD episode" poll again, THIS WINS. And it didn't have any Doctor in, hardly. How weird. I am actually speechless. Er...typeless? Whatever.

A while ago I mentioned I was reviewing Lost Boys by James Miller for Strange Horizons. The review is forthcoming but as an advance preview here is one of the paragraphs that got cut: At this point let's stop for a moment to look at two over-inflated comparisons Little, Brown are trying to draw with their new author: JG Ballard and Rupert Thomson. We can safely dismiss Ballard. Ballard has now reached...