It's a starless night, and in my driveway are two sedans -- that's odd, we'd replaced that one, and here's a copy of it. I shovel away snow and ice to reach them, and find that the passenger-side rear window has been left slightly open, admitting a lumpy waterfall of ice. I force open the frozen driver's door and start the car. Oops, the brakes aren't working. I roll down the driveway and across the street, just missing a passing car, and skid onto the opposite lawn. There's a sticky note explaining that the brakes work only in "overdrive" gear, and I struggle back to my house.

Getting out, I spot a helicopter (with an oversized fanjet for forward thrust) in distress. Is it coming my way? Should I call 911? Yes, it is coming this way -- but it seems to be under control -- and it lands safely in the next yard over. Maybe I should take a photo (citizen news, on the scene!), but it's much too dark for my camphone. Hey, my friends are seated in my front yard, watching the four ambulances and emergency vehicles that have already responded to the landing. The pilot is fine, and his fellow pilots have also landed.

LATER

I exit into a shopping mall common space, a huge square chamber with a domed ceiling. All six surfaces are coated in a dull silver metal. The floor is canted at a strange angle, and there's a huge red hemisphere embedded in its center, emitting a sullen glow. I enter a department store.

Where's the underwear in this crowded place? The store map is of no use. At the corner of two pathways I find a device like a ping pong-ball on a post. You grip and it answers questions, but insists on a lengthy explanatory preface. On the post are control points, small holes with electric eyes. I leave and find the underwear myself; it's mixed into the other clothing (pants and shirts), organized by brand. Hanging on racks, instead of packed in plastic? Plaid flannel? How odd.

Samantha Carter of SG-1 has been captured (or resurrected) by aliens, and copied to different tiers of their civilization. This copy must now prove her worth as a cultural interpreter. She decides to show movies and serve pizza and popcorn, but how to explain them? If she has to design popcorn from scratch -- well, it's distinguished by an unusually tough endosperm, which contains steam when the kernel is heated and allows pressure to build to the bursting point. Oh, the aliens have the complete human infosphere? There are too many hot-air poppers to choose from! Just pick any Jiffy-Pop model between 1980 and 1990.

I'm in the rustic office of the President of the United States and -- hey, what's he doing in Avatar: The Last Airbender? A young woman stands behind him, dressed in a blue robe. That's a Water Tribe color, but I take a close look at her sleeve cuff -- a sawtooth pattern of alternating green and light blue triangles, bordered in yellow. That's more like Fire Nation fashion.

My D&D-style raiding party leaps and skims across a flat yellow prairie landscape, scattered with widely-spaced red-brick buildings -- huge ones, factories and warehouses. They collapse in terrible, majestic silence: walls topple, narrow chimneys implode, loose bricks avalanche. Agile and fleet-footed, I spring through their interiors, dodging converging sections. The occasional giant robot, like an empty suit of glossy blue armor, lunges at us, its slow-mo motion futile as it, too, shatters into segments against the ground.

We find a couple of black pickup trucks, and pile in. Through a pair of doors and -- oh no, we're trapped! The road ends on a ledge an icy blue chamber (well-lit, though), and the only way out is to climb down (there's a rough-edged pool of turgid black water) and back up, through a claustrophobically narrow staircase; too narrow for my rucksack. We back off. Hey, maybe we can blast our way through the doors. We do so, and the soot reveals footprints around the chamber (not ours, since we RETCON hadn't gone that way, but those of a previous party).

POTUS inspired by the use of real nations in "Gundam 00." Spelunking, and feeling that we must "bring out everything we bring in," inspired by an episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise" that my TiVo found but which I refused to watch in its entirety.

The Muppets are staging an opera which involves several copies of Count Von Count, in ceremonial white robes with long trains. The seats are also Muppets. Meanwhile, down the street, Vincent Ventresca (The Invisible Man (2000); Dollhouse (2009)) leads a gang of Wild West desperadoes. Hey, it's an oversized tabletop model train set. How do we adjust the rain junctions so the train can be pulled to the siding?

I'm on a rounded cliff-top overlooking a city, surrounded by the denuded trunks of trees and standing amid brown leaf-litter. Along with Buffy Summers and Angel, I stand against a second copy of Buffy, this one psychotically agitated. Look, up in the sky, it's the Enterprise-D! We call "four to beam up" but only the Buffy copy vanishes. Is there something wrong with our energy signature?

Or possibly that's the Enterprise-A, as it changes shape while passing behind an obstruction. Now its secondary hull is squarish and equipped with two laterally banks of hexagonally-packed weapons tubes. Look, an extra-blocky Klingon warship! The two leviathans of space trade broadsides. Flaming, falling wreckage! We duck inside a conveniently-placed Federation science station. A section of hull crashes through the ceiling. Quick, find some fire extinguishers in the many supply cabinets lining the orange walls! Or perhaps respirators, for the human survivors spilling from the wreckage. Maybe there's a tricorder? That's make a great souvenir.

The three of us determine that we must come from a universe where Trek-style "life energy" doesn't exist, and that's why the transporter couldn't lock onto us. Buffy gestures to a double-ended metal spaghetti ladle we'd unearthed from a cabinet, and taking it, whacks us over our heads. "If you're unconscious," she explains, pounding away, "maybe the transporter will work."

FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, Fringe Division, is investigating the Wonderland section of Disneyworld when the entire attraction collapses for storage. In a sequence of overcomplicated transformations (fold-accordion-lever-twist), the buildings and landscaping retract into a set of railcars, carrying her with them. She finds herself in a narrow yet well-lit labyrinth of shoebox-sized stacked cubes, each resembling a petit fors cake with white icing and red and blue piped lettering.

Down three stairs and around a corner, Dunham finds a copy of herself, catatonic and balding. Around another corner she espies a huddle of Wonderland characters, all of who skedaddle at the sight of her, except for a manga-styled girl with a sword. The sword's hilt is wrapped in duct tape, badly -- it varies wildly in thickness from one inch to the next.

The girl takes Dunham in a buggy-limo to the supervisor of the packed exhibit. This is a water molecule, consisting of a red oxygen atom and two white hydrogen atoms, plus some other spheres and a set of Ben Franklin spectacles. Dunham examines the supervisor skeptically through a pane of high-mag glass. Surprise! It's reverse-mag glass, and the molecule-supervisor isn't tiny, he's huge; the size of a beach ball. But he resides in a floating glass box, which he shares with a ferret. The ferret's agitated gyrations cause the box to shrink, reducing the supervisor to the size of a marble.

The supervisor explains how Dunham can unlock her personal trauma by participating in a motor-race across the lunar surface. She's issued a full set of lunar attire, underwear to jumpsuit, all of which is made of baggy orange rubber with too many buckles. The first race (in LEGO-built vehicles) is across the cold side of the moon. The second is across the boiling-hot side, but the course (laid out with a paint roller by my father through the rooms of my house) varies from wide to single-lane narrow, and will require the competitors to cooperate.

In an ineffably strange world with different physical laws (in the style of Egan or Baxter; hereafter called math-world), a small party of protagonists find themselves extruded into a new universe, forced to subsist for an inhumanly long time (possibly on a micro-time-scale of "ticks"). They leave a trail of communications relays to the old universe. The mother-relay is stocked sufficiently to extrude 255, or "one sheet," of black hole-equipped devices.

And now I, as a visitor, am leaving this foreign place, considering with regret a map of the exotic math-city. Arriving at the port on the edge of forever, my new friend begs me to take his son on the ship for the adventure. I struggle to tell him that I'll be gone a long time -- an impossibly long time (in the manner of time dilation and incompatible time-scales). But I've already established five replacement foreign correspondents throughout the city, to reveal its exotic culture to the other world. Alright, I promise that certain districts will remain ever sacrosanct, otherwise I'll kill myself.

Bat-bees attack a bear with venom. I search documents to explain its physiology.

The Third Doctor is travelling backwards in time in fits and starts, each time losing an article of clothing -- his cape, shoes, purple smoking jacket. This worries two companions in succession (Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith), but mostly they're angry, possibly because they're in WWII Germany and they're dealing with an oversized version of K-9 stuffed with brown kraft paper and built to run on narrow-gauge rails.

In a wretched below-grade alley of cyberpunk and villainy, shopfronts are vanishing and being forgotten. As a man with garish hair remonstrates, a girl prepares to escape, stuffing plush animals in a suitcase; she belatedly wonders if underwear would be more prudent.

I consider the linked cylinders comprising the tail of a math-mouse. It bores its math-mousehole into a set of geometric solids using a drill that alternates indecisively between cylinder and cone. Math-people consider how to evict and squash it. I use stringy rubber cement to demonstrate how the magnetic fields emitted by a handheld horseshoe magnet are visible in math-world.

Software engineers demonstrate a two-dimensional sorting algorithm that juggles brightly-colored plastic toy houses on a grid of pistons, like Monopoly pieces on a checkerboard, but I'm not confident they've solved the base case. I examine a schematic of the multichannel TV transmitter for a lunr module, and discuss how the theory of diagrams dictates where the labels should go. I find a prototype mass-extruder in my oversized mailbox while Eli from "Stargate Universe" looks on.

Undercover Jedi land their tramp freighter on a hovering cloud-station, which projects a giant yellow holographic phone alongside the ship. We're to deliver a stale, exploding cake. But we've been scooped by someone with a new cake! A faucet won't turn off. Young Paul Atreides of Dune distracts the cloud-station commander by flattering him that his habits are those of Fremen -- or of lapsed Fremen, and even those have majesty and honor. A great endeavor is like walking the bled, one step at a time. A third man, watching from a balcony above, sees this for the ploy that it is.

I find myself in a staircase at work, stunned by the pale monotony of the walls, and encounter my grand-boss, then a woman in a blue kimono (certainly not conventional office attire). Zoidberg, a cook, blanks in the FDIC quarterly charge-offs dataset. No, we only manage the pantry -- I double-checked the duty roster, and we don't run the kitchen. An outdoor banquet.

Blue birds (not bluebirds) sneak in through my window.

Pern, many decades after Landing, when the high tech is degrading and the husbanded spares are finally depleted. The journals of a colonist who laments this, and that even bound paper journals will soon be impossible. The precious finite supply of ground glass lenses, essential for scratch-and-sniff exercises in astronomy class, with the scent of buttered popcorn, never to be tasted on this planet. A robot, built during the early days of the colony as an educational tool, its mobility units replaced with whatever ill-fitting casters could be found, its mind and batteries fading, finally relegated to the broom closet.

After a Trek-like mission through a Stargate, alien hamsters arrive on a college campus. They're the size of human children, and as their hosts we try to determine what they eat. We visit a neutrino lab, a large rectangular building with a catwalk surmounting the sunken pit with the complex workings.

I'm on a class trip to CERN (or maybe Fermilab), and the group is tramping down stairs from the center of the lobby (or the reference desk of a large library) to the underground facility. One of my classmates gets nervous, and reveals her superpowers (in the manner of the unwilling cyborg child-soldier from the anime Saikano) by leaping six flights straight up and clambering over the rail.

The halls are cool, dim and hushed, as in an aquarium. Our first step is an illustrative cutaway of the accelerator tunnel. I examine the concentric piping, and ask about the liquid helium coolant. Down a dark-paneled hall lined with glass-fronted offices, we squish beneath a flexible green donut-shape hanging from the ceiling. Now we're in the aquatic botany department (this lab is clearly a Eureka-style multidisciplinary facility). Is this a T-ray scanner? There are many power plugs near the floor.

Around the next corner there's a gift shop, a large bookstore (with a cardboard display of Anne McCaffrey's latest volume), and a furniture store stuffed with armchairs, ottomans and big-bellied bureaus with inlay deco. Don't buy groceries here, I tell my female relatives who emerge from a store, arms laden, having done exactly that -- you'll just need to carry them home! Ooh, wristwatches with finger-stroke interfaces.

We're suddenly called to evacuate, and crowd up the stairs. Wait, I forgot my jacket! I sprint back down, to the coat closet, then back up the stairs -- ouch, my calves, how they burn!

The TARDIS arrives in a dense forest, where the first Doctor makes sure we companions have our "E"-shaped keys. We find machetes to cop our way through, but we have the wrong shoes for this work. We find a tree-lined lane, cleared by some unknown agency, the ground not at all flat. Ian Chesterton goes the other way, in search of a siren and smoke.

The lane leads into a series of red-carpeted halls joined at strange angles. Tall glass walls suround us. A snazzy restaurant fills one side-niche, and we're served pancake-sized pizelle cookies, which I surreptitiously scan with my tricorder. For dinner, we're provided with jacket and tie.

Yesterday, I tossed several pounds of dead alkaline cells (AAA, AA, C, D, 9V) that had been accumulating for about ten years while I wondered how to do so. (I verify they're dead with a multimeter. And I kill flies with a howitzer.)

Alkaline dry cells manufactured since 1997 can be safely disposed in household garbage; before that, they contained a small amount of mercury. Rechargeables (NiMH, NiCd, lithium ion) can be recycled. Flat "button cells" (as found in watches, laser pointers, color-changing LED pens, and flat Bose® remotes) often contain heavy metals like silver or zinc. EHSO provides a comparison table and some tasty technical details and numbers.

The easiest way to recycle (or at least ensure disposal in the appropriate landfill) is to use an RBRC-approved drop-off point, such as a consumer electronics store. The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation was established in 1994 to handle this task in the U.S. and Canada.

But non-rechargeable lithium (not -ion, not -polymer) cells, like the CR-V3 models used for digital cameras? RBRC doesn't accept them, and I still haven't discovered what to do with those. They don't take button cells either, but those don't consume much space in a house.

(Most of the power-storage devices in your households are, technically, cells. A battery contains multiple cells, in the same sense a "missile battery" contains missiles, plural; the one under your car's hood is such a device. Whenever an LED device gangs button cells in series to obtain sufficient voltage, I suppose you could call the group a battery, too.)

Some years ago, I bought a Nextpen™-brand Stylus Twin™ dual-function writing implement (©2000). Twist the heavy metal barrel (matte black) one way to extend a ballpoint pen; the other for a PDA-suitable stylus. In fact, I bought three copies, because they were in the clearance bin, and I could keep one in each of my jackets and bags.

Now here's the mysterious bit: each pen was packaged with a case -- a foam rubber block, 6.5x2x0.75 inches, with snap closure lid (the snaps are by Sun King) and a pen-shaped recess. Why would Nextpen even bother? A dual-function implement of this ilk is meant to be carried, and it's hardly fancy enough to deserve a gift case. (Now, what could an imaginative person do with these? Foam rubber takes acrylic paint well; I could redecorate them.)

From the sales package, it appears the company was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but there's no URL (odd for 2000) and I can't locate them online. (What's the mean lifetime for a small manufacturer these days? Probably less than nine years.)

Robbie the Robot is piloting his buggy from spacecraft C-57D to the home of Morbius on planet Altair IV. It's located deep underwater, and the three human passengers (including myself) are protected by an invisible force-dome. A shape becomes visible through the foggy silt: a square, tapered tower. As we approach, other buildings resolve from the blue gloom: an entire city.

Inside, one of the junior officers nearly swoons when he finds a bottomless black shaft to one side of a short connecting passage between two rooms. There's a waist-high parapet, but it doesn't convey much of a sense of safety.

Through the windows of the unfurnished grey concrete room at the far side of the passage, we see what looks suspiciously like a 1950s American city with three-story brick buildings. Then a double-decker bus with a shiny green metal surface and a face on the front drives past.

There's a narrow chamber connecting this room with a similar one in the next corner of the building. I notice a design in the floor, in yellow lines -- it seems to be a map of a laboratory, consisting of several rooms and a hanger. Is this chamber an elevator? Thick blast doors close on both sides of me, sealing the chamber. "I'm in no rush; I can wait," I think, expecting the automation to open them again, or for someone to notice my absence. After a few moments I change my mind and start clawing at the hatch. I force the panels open and squeeze through, where I meet the ship's engineer. We have to repeat the procedure for the next several rooms.

We finally reach Morbius's kitchen nook, where he, his daughter, and the captain are eating breakfast. Robby stands by in the next room. I mention my find, but Morbius denies the presence of a laboratory. "Still," I press on, "Given the wealth of this society, I suppose anybody could have as much space as they needed for any hobby. Imagine the studio of an artist who sculpted full-size dinosaurs."

"Electric torches of 9000 degrees," agreed Morbius.

"Huge vats for mixing clay," I continue. "But enough of that. Here I am, begin a poor guest, ignoring breakfast. Did Robby make these? Wow, these rolls aren't stale, even after sitting for a hour."

Dream inspired after skimming a book that chronicles the history of robots in fact and fiction. The appearance of Robby in this 1956 movie inspired a range of toy imitations.

The doors to the Mines of Moria light up, then open and suck in our party. The interior is well-lit and furnished to disguise its subterranean location. There are numerous rooms filled with dusty Elven antiques: furniture, art, clothing. Gandalf hands me a scarf, commenting that Elves needed such things more than humans, since we're so "robust."

I find a picture book featuring Donald Duck, with a copyright of "1330." Whose 1330? It definitely predates the conventional understanding of Disney history. Does this mean the Elves had trans-temporal signalling? As highly ethical creatures, I presume they negotiated a proper licensing fee.

Moving through the grey stone halls, the party separates at a junction. Flagstones crumble at the slightest step. Goblins attack from a one direction, and I shoot them with my multi-handgun, selecting an APHE (armor-piercing high explosive) round from its multi-magazine. In the exit hall, I turn and fire at the floor just ahead of the oncoming horde. I've selected a buckyball lubricant: as a superfluid, the few cc's in the round will rapidly spread across tens of square meters. The first rank will fall, which should cause a pile-up in those following.

Another goblin, in white armor, lunges at me with a sword. Flustered by his rapid strokes, I parry with my own. We're evenly matched, with equal reaches. But as my blade swings past his unguarded neck, I trigger its shape-memory, and it's suddenly a hand-breadth longer and fatal.

I step over to one of the dead goblins and plunge a probe into its flesh, taking a biopsy to evaluate its biochemistry. Aha -- conventionally mammalian. A standard conotoxin will work fine. I can use wasp-hive shell, aiming above the attackers. The individual submunitions will search for exposed skin -- especially around the orifices, given the thickness of goblin hide -- and inject their toxin payloads. Once we're safely outside the mines, I can use my ammo-breeder to replenish my ammo stores. Any hydrocarbon source will do, but some iron would enhance the heft of the rounds.

Can you be morally responsible for what happens in your own dreams?

This is a question that probably doesn't occur to inexperienced dreamers, i.e., people unaccustomed to, or untrained in, remembering their own dreams, or especially inducing a lucid dream-state -- one where you (whatever "you" means during the fractionated mentality of sleep) have some control over the events.

So, let's say you see a pretty girl (a "character," to apply the terms of waking fiction to the mental theater) and you decide to do something that would be socially unacceptable in waking life -- but she looks at you disapprovingly. Is this merely a response by your own censor-subsystem, or is there something more fundamental happening? What if you encounter a room full of disagreeable characters, and you find yourself shouting "You're figments of my imagination, now go away!" Are these characters due any degree of respect? Can this become thoughtcrime? (Crime is a social construct.) Or is "mental hygiene" the right term?

Can a single brain actually run/generate alternative personalities? Certain mental disorders would imply so. How about multiple concurrent personalities? Does a transient personality count as a person with rights? We're accustomed to thinking of a single body, and especially the brain and mind, as being unitary and inviolate -- social concerns arise only with physical externalized action. ("My coworker might be having dirty thoughts about me, but I've never even seen him glance my way, so on what grounds can I object?") Is the luxury of an isolated skull as absolute as we thought, if you actually have a society sharing the space?

Are there certain activities that are verboten to even think about, even if they're never externalized?

(In science fiction there's telepathy, where skulls aren't so isolated, and "externalized" doesn't equate with "physical-bodily.")

I keep thinking "I need to take a long-distance vacation this spring," followed by "why now? why long-distance?" It's causing quite a tempest in my brain as I try to optimize or, conversely, simplify.

* I have three carryover vacation days I must use by the end of April. (Of course I could always stay home, or visit New York by train, but -- it's vacation! You have to go somewhere! Right?)

* After all, it's my patriotic duty as someone with a secure paycheck to Support The Economy. (What, doesn't $2,000 in auto service count?)

* Certain weekends are unavailable for my purposes.

* If I'm ever going to go to these particular places (Disneyworld, Las Vegas, Hawaii), I might as well do so while they're offering deals.

* And since they're in warmer climes, I don't want to travel during the summer.

* But I don't want to go during their busy season, which for Disney includes "spring break" (however that's defined) and Easter.

* And after a few other trips, I'm really tired of trying to optimize air travel for price, time and connections.

* What I really want to do is travel to Japan again (I'm still having the occasional dream that says "You rushed through too quickly"), except that: (a) the best airfare deals are now, (b) I don't want to go when it's hot, (c) the second "Rebuild of Evangelion" movie doesn't premiere until 26 June, when airfares aren't so advantageous and it might be hot.

* And every time I think of Hawaii, I cascade to "I'm halfway to Japan, and there are probably flights to Osaka instead of Tokyo," but then follow with "I have no idea where touristy things are in Hawaii." That's not a problem when I'm in a city and everything's within walking-scouting distance.

* Also, I can't bear the thought of leaving the job for several days at a time, not when I have so many half-finished projects in progress.

I'm visiting family in one of the Great Plains states this weekend, and my flight passed through Memphis (Tennessee) International, MEM. During a prolonged layover, my party wandered the terminals and observed the following art:

* Three cases of items loaned from the Belz Museum of Asian & Judaic Art, including Jewish celebratory pieces in sterling silver with gold and lapis, a Chinese jadeite cabbage (the name is homophonous with "good luck" -- this may explain the giant eggplant at that Shinto shrine in Suma), and items carved from mammoth ivory (retrieved from the Siberian permafrost -- Chinese culture is old, but not that old).

* An extensive series of large-format paintings by local high school students on the subject of "Memphis, Music Capital." The best were made into postcards.

* Poster-sized photographs of Tennessee's natural wonders (mountains, escarpments, trees on mountains, waterfalls over escarpments, and so forth).

* A set of 32 planks in different woods, supplied by the Lumbermen's Club of Memphis (no website).

When engaging a travel agent to make arrangements, do not ever accept a 45-minute layover. Any of the following may happen: Weather delays. Schedule changes that reduce the layover. Deplaning delays. Members of your party who cannot move quickly, even if you request wheelchair assistance from the airline. Infelicitous placement of the two gates. According to the airline, 30 minutes is a perfectly adequate transfer time, but the gate personnel at MEM agree that it's wildly optimistic.

In scale, MEM's almost the size of MSP, but it was strangely devoid of activity between 9:30 and 12:30 (Central Time). I think I saw more TSA personnel than passengers. Foot traffic rose after lunch; perhaps the weekday schedule is pulsatile.

I've been spending the week learning empathy with the deaf. It might be an unconscious protective pre-adaptation against the shrill noise of many small (medium and large) children at Philcon 2008 Children's Program, but earlier this week my chronically-overproduced earwax finally slumped into a position to completely block my ear canals, reducing auditory acuity to near-nil.

Ongoing efforts to dislodge the masses (earwax-softening oil, warm water irrigation and aspiration, cotton-tipped swabs) have removed an astonishing amount of wax, but my tympana are still immobilized. (To be quantitative on "astonishing:" one ear yielded, not just a crust or strand, but a clump a full cubic millimeter in size. The next day, the other ear yielded twice as much. I didn't realize my ear canals were that big.)

Tuesday: snow flurries. Wednesday: nodules of frozen rain on car windshields in the morning. Thursday: heavier snow flurries. Friday: out-and-out snow, with over an inch accumulated by 7:00 a.m., rather more than the "heavy flurries" in the forecast. This bodes badly for Philcon (or maybe not, since it's sixty miles away). It certainly bodes badly for packing the car.

I recently starting sleeping with a pillow tucked beneath my knees, which is the quick/easy/cheap replacement for an S-shaped mattress.. It has greatly reduced the aches I discover upon waking, now that my feet don't pronate and I don't curl into a zig-zag. I'm still afflicted with dreams that it's 3:00 a.m. and I'm already in the office answering client-support chats, or hypnagogic hallucinations that the ceiling fan is a lurking giant starfish.

I joined Charity Navigator today so I could pick which of the many humanitarian and environmental causes chasing my dough would give me the most bang for my buck (and possibly simplify my corporate gift-matching, but that doesn't seem to be a feature), and discovered something interesting: American Indian Relief Council, Council of Indian Nations and Sioux Nation Challenge aren't independent, but rather projects of National Relief Charities. (Native American Heritage Association, however, is separate.) Does this mean my donations go into a single fund, or are the projects rather like choosing "I'd like my alumni donation to go to the library/athletics/student life"?

Something similar happens with publishers, who produce "imprints" to finely slice their branding. For example, Tom Doherty Associates has Forge, Orb, and Tor, although I can't quite figure out what each one specializes in (SF/F, fantasy, backlist, etc.). Also, publishers may be divisions of larger publishers, which is probably due to M&A, but complicates the populating of the "publisher" field in a personal-reading database.

In a recent episode of FOX's Fringe, an unwitting woman was used as a microwave emitter to kill a diner full of bystanders. The episode conflated ionizing and microwave radiation. And an earlier ep confused electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields. Can't Abrams, Kurtzman and Orci afford a science advisor to avoid these gaffes?

* The "weaponized" people have been injected with micro-capsules of strontium-90 to treat an aggressive cancer, Bellini's lymphoma. First problem: radioisotopes do not emit microwaves. Second problem: microwaves do not treat cancer.

* There were residual radiation levels in the corpses, three times higher in the woman's body than the other victims. Except that microwave radiation doesn't persist. Radioisotopes in splattered blood do, but that's not what the characters said.

* Why did her head explode? It wouldn't have contained a higher concentration of blood-borne radiocapsules, but maybe her skull acted as a pressure vessel. Why couldn't Dr. Bishop have said so?

* When the woman started emitting microwaves at lethal levels, all the other fluids in the room (soup, soft drinks) should've been visibly boiling too.

* The episode neglected to give us any reason, even a hint, for why drug company INtREPUS would want to weaponize people, or why those with Bellini's lymphoma were prime subjects.