This is the way to showcase your products. Using nothing but “instruments” available from ThinkGeek, L. Hadron and the Colliders perform a cover of The Who’s Baba O’Riley. Products used are the Bliptronic 5000, Guitar Shirt, Drumkit Shirt, Stylophone, and Otamatone Electronic Instrument.

My favorite part is near the end, with the guy wearing the guitar shirt.

(via Wil Wheaton)

1. How many arms do the Moties have?
2. In Philip Jose Farmer’s The Lovers, the natives of the planet Ozagen appear to be human but are really what?
3. What is the significance of the town of Bellingham, WA, in Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall?
4. What story title did Joan Vinge borrow from Hans Christian Andersen?
5. What is the name of Boba Fett’s ship?
6. In Carl Sagan’s novel, what project finally makes “Contact?
7. You probably know the name of Dr. Who’s ship. What does it mean?
8. Crysknives are made from the teeth of these enormous beasts.
9. In Jack Chalker’s Four Lords of the Diamond series, what is the occupation of the protagonist?
10. What work consists of three sections entitled “Fiat Lux,” “Fiat Homo,” and “Fiat Voluntus Tua?”

(Answers below the fold)

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This would be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.

(via Epic Win)

As the author says, about ten people will get this strip.

(If you’re not one of the ten, this might help.)

(via BoingBoing)

The 80 Beats blog at Discover Magazine has a photo gallery of some of the best images taken by Spirit over the past six years. It’s inspiring.

Incidentally, for those who found xkcd’s Spirit cartoon depressing (I know I did!), somebody re-captioned it. I like this version much better. Because I am a pollyanna.

Once we make first contact, this kind of thing will happen regularly.

Click over to Abstruse Goose to see the entire strip.

(I like the mouseover text disclaimer.)

1. We never learn the Mule’s name, but he took this title during his reign.
2. What is a falan?
3. Ripaway-bra queen Sybil Danning starred in this sci-fi remake of The Magnificent Seven.
4. What is the name of The Star Beast in Robert A. Heinlein’s young adult novel of the same name?
5. One of the most-parodied lines in Star Trek, in which episode did Dr. “I’m a doctor not a casserole” McCoy first utter the phrase, “He’s dead, Jim?”
6. In this story the South has won the Civil War, and Ward Moore’s fine historical sense led him to describe some perhaps unexpected consequences: In a backlash against the prewar antislavery movement the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, becomes a terrorist outfit like the Klan. Name the novel.
7. This U.S. comic strip character was first conceived by John Flint Dille for the National Newspaper Syndicate, Inc., and was written by Philip Francis Nowlan, based on his novel Armageddon 2419 AD. Who is he?
8. For how long each day could “The Gemini Man” stay invisible?
9. The rulers of this planet (which is also the title of the novel) have a monopoly on the creation of Azi, the artificial human beings who have featured so prominently in such earlier Cherryh novels as Downbelow Station and Forty Thousand In Gehenna and they also have the rarely used ability to clone human beings. Name the novel!
10. Which Twilight Zone episode was a winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962?

(Answers below the fold)

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Christina writes book reviews for STACKED. She somehow managed to grow to adulthood without ever seeing an episode of Star Trek. Thus, when she decided to review Wil Wheaton’s Memories of the Future: Volume 1 she also decided to watch each TNG episode covered in the book before reading the corresponding chapter.

Now that she’s waiting around for Volume 2 to be published, she’s gone back to the very beginning and is watching the original series. She’s copied her original “Amnesia of the Future” reviews from STACKED over to a new site, and is now posting her thoughts on red shirts, the 1960s version of feminism, and SPACE PUPPIES!! (the two exclamation points are required). Also she has a wicked crush on Spock.

It’s a lot of fun to see the familiar old episodes through fresh eyes. I can’t wait until she encounters Season Three (Spock’s Brain, I’m looking at you).

On this date in 1978 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup bulletin board system. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in the past three decades.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Every time you swim in the ocean and you hit a warm patch? Aquaman pee.
– sween

IMPORTANT: The Universe contains material that may be objectionable to children under 17. [Cancel] [[OK]]
– hotdogsladies

Hey, ancient Egyptians! I’m eating popcorn that I cooked inside a bag in under a minute. Fuck your pyramids.
– kolchak

A 14-yr-old killed his parents because he didn’t want to take out the trash. What did he think he’d do with the bodies?
– BorowitzReport

They should re-release ‘The Lost Boys’ with the title ’24: Twilight.’ Cha-ching!
– badbanana

A superscript is a script that was rocketed to Earth as an infant from its doomed homeworld.
– FakeAPStylebook

So there I am, feasting on brains, and this dude calls me the z-word. And I’m like, “It’s un-dead American, asshole!” Yeesh.
– RexHuppke