I most likely read this sometime between the late 1990s and 2010. I have no idea where I would have read it. It might be closer to novella length than a short story. It'd be neat to have it identified so I can find out if the author has written any other stories in this world. The milieu is a...

In the film The Book of Eli, when Eli is going through his goods for bartering, he offers up a vial of 'cat grease' from the moggy he'd killed and cooked earlier. He says it's a good sun screen. Is it?

In The Worst Witch TV series (2017), there's a creature called a hypnapillon. It's a moth, described as feeding off of people's "minds, fears, imagination," and it hypnotizes its prey with patterns on its wings, leaving them in a mindless state. This struck me as extremely similar to the slake-...

I'm rewatching ST-ENT from the beginning and I'm seeing an awful lot of 'Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga' in the opening credits. This got me thinking about Lennon and McCartney taking credit for every Beatles song ever written when in fact, there were a number of main composers who nev...

I'm trying to identify a book, or series of books I read as a child. The setting was pre-columbian Central America, the protagonists were belonged to a river based tribe (lots of big canoes etc). If memory serves, the premise of one of the books was that the beautiful wife-to-be of one of the pr...

What was the first Science Fiction TV series? Did any shows predate the 1936 series of Flash Gordon? I don't really know a sensible way to search IMDB for the answer. Google, erroneously, suggests "The first popular science-fiction program on American television was the DuMont Television Netwo...

In The Battle of the Labyrinth, The Sphinx challenges Annabeth to a game of Answer That Riddle. Her two "historical" riddles, the Three Legs riddle and the lesser known Two Sisters riddle, are both relatively tricky by modern standards, and everyone before Oedipus got eaten. Since everyone knows ...

I'm trying to remember this book I read some time around 2008. I remember it as a book with R. A. Salvatore's name on it, I'm not certain if he wrote it or co-wrote it, which is why I couldn't identify it from his bibliography. I read the paperback edition and I remember its cover having a disti...

It struck me that Kirk's choice of outfit is a peculiar one. Notwithstanding that he was actually successful in making contact with Truman, why would he think that dressing as a homeless person was an inconspicuous way to infiltrate the show? Wouldn't he stand out like a sore thumb in a town ...

In the movie Live. Die. Repeat. (a.k.a. Edge of Tomorrow) the soldier and the angel of Verdun together are searching for the enemy. Why do they wait until the net morning? Why do they not start the same day the soldier comes to meet the angel of Verdun the first time?

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, when Tony Stark We did not see this with the snap in Avengers: Infinity War, where Why is it different this time around? See 2m35s of this clip, ignore the Chitauri ship in the foreground.

I am trying to rediscover a short science fiction story/article. It was about an alien on Earth trying to escape pursuit in an ordinary automobile and of course finding the whole thing pretty much impossible, and described the alien trying the different controls and wondering what the heck they w...

The names seem peculiar. I feel like they are referencing something. "Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby" this is a Frank Sinatra song "No, Sir, I Don’t Mean Maybe" the second line from the Frank Sinatra song "I'll always remember you like a child" this is a line from the song Wild World by Cat ...

In Doctor Strange, we see that, when Strange is seeking healing, he is rejected by The Ancient One, and if Mordo had not convinced her to change her mind Strange would probably never have been trained. So, considering this evidence, The Ancient One seemed to have little to no faith that he was w...