Anyone who's a fan of "What's Up?" by Four Non-Blondes really needs to listen to the He-Man cover:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KzcE9-5cpU

I laugh myself silly every time I watch this!

I like this idea (I would have loved to have had something like this for the science classes I struggled with in high school), but do all books like this have to use the stereotypical nauseatingly cute manga artwork? I do like some manga, like the works of Osamu Tezuka and Katsuhiro Otomo and some other people, but I find a lot of manga character design to be rather cloying.

After reading "The Strain" by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, I can't help but find solar eclipses a little creepy (the novel argues at some length that it should actually be called an "occultation").

It's funny, just a day or two ago, I was wondering if the prisoners in the Philippines were going to do any kind of Michael Jackson tribute, and now I found out that they have.

As for the people making negative comments about Michael Jackson, I wish that they would read an article that Stephen King wrote a few years ago in which he argued that, while Michael Jackson definitely had poor judgment about certain things, he should be considered innocent until proven guilty and that simply being weird is not a crime.

Project much, Vonskippy?

An interesting side note: Hosono's grandson, Haruomi Hosono, is one of the three core members of the Japanese electropop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of my favorites (The best-known member of the group is Oscar-winning film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto).

I have a hard time taking seriously any list written by someone who thinks that Takashi Miike (A Japanese director) made Oldboy (A Korean film).

I vote "idiot."

I wish that more people would become familiar with the concept of Pareidolia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradolia

Looks more like "Goo" to me.

The other day, I was wondering if Star Trek becomes more prominent when the general political climate is more liberal and if Star Wars becomes more prominent when the political climate is more conservative. Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons why this theory may not hold up under close scrutiny, but I find it interesting to think about.

Is there any chance that this will put an end to all of the pseudoscientific conspiracy theory stuff about vaccines causing autism? Of course, it probably won't put an end to all of it, but I think the people that are pushing the idea of vaccines causing autism will be pushed a little farther to the margins of the discussion about the causes of autism. I'm a little alarmed by the number of people who seem to take those ideas seriously.

I've actually encountered a few snakes not much bigger than that (I live in West Texas).

Is this a win or a fail? I'm not sure.

Yeah, not a great article. Far from being universally regarded as a "bad" movie, doesn't Starship Troopers actually have a pretty sizeable cult following? (Also, I think that I would argue that its minimal resemblance to the Heinlein novel is a credit, not a debit.) I enjoyed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow quite a bit. I didn't know that that was considered a "bad" movie.

I'm not going to argue that it's any kind of neglected masterpiece or anything, but I've never understood all of the hatred toward Waterworld. I can't really see myself ever sitting down and watching the whole thing again, but it's a perfectly acceptable big, dopey action movie. I would probably watch it on an airplane if I had nothing else to do.