I have a clip from one of those magic food (placebo product) infomercials where a man with an Australian accent claims that John Wayne's colon weighed fifty pounds when he died. Here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/71327982/JohnWayneColon.mp3

It's funny to hear and so worth repeating, but it turns out to be hooey. I mean, fifty pounds, indeed. Elsewhere you can read that he got cancer not from a lifetime of packing his colon with steak and potatoes but from shooting a single desert movie in radioactive sand.

Potty-bot in Christopher Baldwin's webcomic Spacetrawler. It doesn't need to go to a fixed place to collect fuel; it brings the vacuum funnel to you.

It's a reference to the point of all advertising, which is: "Bored? Lonely? Why not buy something in a cardboard box?"

Now we can make accordions! And toilet seats!

Why do the world's ugliest dogs always look like Yoda?

Also traffic waves travel backward (!) on the freeway. This website has an animated graphic to help explain it: http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html

In 1999, when he was 68 years old, William Shatner got home and found his wife motionless at the bottom of the swimming pool. He jumped in and pulled her up and out and tried and tried to revive her though she was dead. Imagine his horror and exhaustion. Knowing about that time ruins any enjoyment I might have in making fun of his singing.
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/aug/11/local/me-64692
Also he once made a movie whose dialogue was entirely in Esperanto.

This is what everyone on Fox News looks like to me. Sometimes it's two or three machines in split-screen, all going at once, you know, to be all fair and balanced about it.

This is what everyone on Fox News looks like to me. Sometimes it's two or three machines in split-screen, all going at once, you know, to be all fair and balanced about it.

The ones you propose all feel friendly and fluffy, though. I nominate Primer. And Timequest (not the plodding religion-themed one but the one about the old man who invents time travel to go back and avert the JFK assassination, not for JFK's sake nor the world's but because when he was a toddler in 1963 he saw Jacqueline Kennedy on teevee after the assassination and she was so beautiful and sad and he /imprinted/ on her; it was for /her/). Navigator is also nice. And the Lost In Space movie --actually a time travel story-- is underrated and interestingly edgy. The first TimeCop movie is quite good. And The Time Traveler's Wife. And you're very right about no movie ever getting time travel right. Primer comes closest of all the ones I've seen.

This reminds me of the British spaceship comedy teevee show /Hyperdrive/, in which Eduardo York creates a living copy of himself from his own bodily secretions. And it's creepy, but the creature ends up sacrificing itself to save everyone else. As it crashes a shuttle into an oncoming ship to divert it from destroying the HMS Camden Lock, it says, "I'm doing it for you, Eduardo."

Science-fiction writer Stephen Baxter should get some notice and credit for this. I think he invented the idea of squid in space.

The all-new GumWhiz PlaqueWhacker. (With optional tongue clamp to keep sensitive tongue tissue from becoming all wound up in the works.) (Like what happened to that dog we read about last month that ran its tongue through a paper shredder.)

I remember reading a science fiction story in, I think, the 1980s, possibly the 1990s, titled /The Boy Who Walked Around The Moons Of Jupiter/. The boy --15 or 18-- in nothing but VR glasses and underwear, walks on a treadmill. At the end of the story, a reporter (the narrator) sees that the boy has pissed himself; he informs him of this, and the boy calls out to his mother to come and clean him up: "Mom! I'm wet again!"

Actually, though the tune and meter may predate the familiar song, /Yankee Doodle/ clearly comes from /yank ye doodle/; the Brits were calling the Americans wankers. And while /macaroni/ might have been slang for military decorations, it also alluded to the laughable and limp shortcomings of the collective enemy.

In turn, in the present day, Americans perhaps unfairly deride native patriots in the Middle East as ragheads.