Science Friction, by Dennis O’Neil
The following will be about a column I didn’t write and it’s Vinnie Bartilucci’s fault. But that’s okay. I forgive him.
What Mr. Batilucci did was beat me to recommending Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku. This Mr. B. did in a comment on last week’s column which, some may remember, described how awkward I felt being a published science fiction writer who was abysmally ignorant of science and how one of my earliest attempts at remedy of this ignorance was reading One…Two…Three…Infinity, by George Gamow.
My plan was to save recommending Dr. Kaku’s much more recent book – it’s on current best-seller lists, in fact – for this week.
Said recommendation would have come at the end of a blather that would have mentioned yet another elderly book, The Two Cultures, by a remarkable man who was both a scientist and novelist named C.P. Snow. According to the endlessly useful Wikipedia, “its thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the “two cultures” of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.” I encountered Mr. Snow’s slim volume in college, probably when I should have been reading something some teacher had assigned, and it must have impressed me. (I mean, here we are, all these years later, and I still remember it.) The unwritten column would have culminated in the reiteration of something I mentioned some months ago, advice from my first comic book boss, Stan Lee. Stan said, in effect, that it’s a waste of space to “explain” comic book “science” because readers will accept what we tell them.
Most digital art websites always remind me how little I know about Photoshop. For example, even if I spent the next full week with my nose in a copy of Photoshop for Dummies, I couldn’t begin to create anything like Pixeloo’s 
Born in Waymore, Nebraska, Randolph William “Ralph” Dibny grew up admiring escape artists and contortionists. He desperately wished he could emulate their agility and flexibility.
After the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it would seem there’s little actor Simon Pegg could do to further endear himself to fans.
In about 355 BC, Aristotle laid down the ground rules of theater in Poetics, with the notable rule that “opsis,” or spectacle, is the least important element, and should never come before plot, character or theme. Nowadays, the summer movie season is all about spectacle. The bigger the better, with Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingodm of the Crystal Skull just the latest to bring excitement to the silver screen.
The Burrs were vacationing in India despite Mrs. Burr’s advanced pregnancy. Her condition attracted the attention of the Cobra Cult because the timing coincided with a prophecy about a man who would lead them into the Kali Yuga, the fourth age of the world. He would be one of a pair of Siamese twins, and Mrs. Burr was carrying such a pair.
