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I like the idea of the Bob Dylan biopic, where a bunch of actors each take on an aspect of Dylan rather than one person playing them throughout. Is that cheating?

It may have elements in common with Battle Royale, but Stephen King wrote The Running Man (which the book also shares plot points and themes with) waaay back in the eighties. There's also The Long Walk - tho not entirely the same, it has a certain tone and general mood which The Hunger Games evokes.

20 Core Titles which any steampunk reader should own. Having noted that, I only have sixteen of the titles featured...

Isn't negative talent still a form of talent though? From what I've seen of them, Jedward don't seem to be able to do anything. And no, what they're doing on their video ISN'T dancing. I have no idea what it is, but it isn't dancing.

From The Return Of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pile From Star Wars: Vision Of The Future by Timothy Zahn From The Watch Below by James White From The New Science Of Strong Materials by J.E. Gordon

Ummm... Where do I start? First there is the book collection, which has taken on a life of its' own. I guess comics come next, with a mass of stuff from the fifties and sixties which takes up way too much room. I've a fair collection of World annuals building as well, mostly the television annuals. There's a few thousand DVDs, which isn't technically a collection as the only thing which links them all is the format - it's a mix of genres and eras, same with the CDs. Computer games? I've still got all of the Amstrad and Speccy tapes from days of yore, with the collection encompassing PC, Jaguar, Playstation, Gamecube and Xbox releases. Most of my videos got thrown out when I switched to DVD, but I probably had 10+ thousand at one point.

If you can't get rid of Norton as easily as you should, go into the programs folder in Windows and delete the program as you would any other file. Be sure to have another antivirus loaded onto your hard drive before you do this. Run something such as Crapcleaner to fix the registry entries which deleting the program will have made obsolete, then run a decent defragger (Auslogics is good) to tidy up your hard drive.

Black Holes: The End Of The Universe by John Taylor - some highly dubious thought processes in his extrapolation of the available data, but the book's numerous tangents are well worth reading. The Fire Came By by John Baxter and Thomas Atkins - Tunguska explained. Or, at the very least, a bunch of ideas about what could have happened are thrown around. I don't know if either are still in print though.

Pop-astronomy books don't seem to have taken off in the way that the general science books have. There are a few books on black holes, theoretical space travel, and there are so many "The Physics Of..." books (ripping television show physics to pieces) that it is hard to differentiate them after a while. Your best bet for a book to your liking is probably one of titles which were released in the wake of the Stephen Hawking's simplified texts. And there's an old book which dispels myths about how black holes are the devourers of quasi-scientific myth which is kinda cool - the name doesn't come to hand, but I'll hunt through the stacks to find it.

The advert with the "That's the jeans I would have bought" line (I think it is for some kind of insurance company) remind me of the Salvador Dali films more than anything. Surrealism in action... And ever so disturbing.

A lot of scientific papers are available online - and Einstein's General Theory is only a couple of pages long, so it isn't exactly going to take a long time to slog through it. Look through some of the science websites for online material and you'll find a lot of the stuff that doesn't get published per se (not in hard copy anyways). Most of the papers are really dense and require deciphering once you get up to the 1970's, but a lot of the formative work (the basics) are really accessible to the average reader.

Thanks Talisman I'm not sure if you've encountered the concept of Kami, but the Japanese 'household gods' concept is somewhere along the same lines - though far, far too complex for my brain to handle. There's also a few monologues from Babylon 5 which expand further on the concept of the universe as a sentience unto itself. I inherently dislike conventional readings of the entire 'soul' business, as it doesn't answer some very rudimentary questions. If only people have souls, where have all the extra souls come from? There are more people alive right now than at any time in history, and (according to most religious texts) souls can't be whipped up out of thin air. [i really, really didn't mean to derail this topic into a theological debate, so people can get back to answering the OP]

Around November-time there's Banned Book Week, when (most of) the bookish places start reeling off the books which have been banned, doing reviews of illicit texts and generally cocking a snook at the censorous fools who would have us remain ignorant. There's a bundle of banned books which were specially printed for a newspaper a couple of years back. I think there was 25 or so hardback titles with the "Banned" branding thematically linking them.

This sounds vaguely like an old Freddie Francis film, but I'm not sure if it was based on a novel or not. More knowledgeable folks will probably correct me.

David Britton, Hunter S. Thompson (morally gray in many regards), and a bunch of the 1950s Soho writers fit the bill.

The "Natty" Bumppo books (James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales) may be of some interest to you also.

There have only been a few times when I've felt completely overwhelmed by a book's contents. Okay, not so much fiction, but non-fic software guides which seem to have been translated from Japanese into German then into English via Babelfish. I'll never, ever forgive the author of a certain book on C++ for making the it look so complicated when it remains one of the easiest things to pick up.

There's a quasi-religious concept (or anti-religious if you want to nitpick) which states that the universe itself is sentient - and every single atom within said universe is a part of the greater consciousness. As humanity struggles with concepts, adding each generation's thoughts, morals, suggestions and preconceived ideas into the melting pot of "culture", we are, in fact, merely adding to the universe's self-awareness. There will come a time when the universe has learned all it can from us and move on. Meaning, in short, the end of the human race as we know it. Not necessarily the end of us, just a move to another form of existence, possibly brought back into the greater consciousness of the universe itself. If this line of logic was to be followed through, then yes, books have souls - as well as pebbles, and leaves, and televisions, and even politicians.

It's entirely dependent on the source material for me. The first audiobook I bought was a four cassettes long Julie Burchill novel adaptation (the title of which is on the tip of my tongue), and I can recall lines from the audiobook over ten years later. Maybe having read it wouldn't have been as interesting, as I normally struggle to empathize with her concept of "characterization" - she really doesn't write characters who are easy to like.

People really shouldn't believe anything they read in newspapers - I've read the bad reviews which so many newspapers have given books, games, films and television shows that I like, and whenever they pull one of the typical "this is a BAD film" I shrug and take note of when it will be released on DVD. Remember - the popular consensus amongst newspapers (at the time) was that the three prequels to Star Wars were brilliant, that Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen was a step up in quality blockbuster film-making, and The Dark Knight was a terrible harm to society. I trust the views and opinions of insurance salesmen before those of newspaper critics.

Writing a book dedication isn't easy. Apparently. C'mon, how hard is it to type 'for _____' (thereby saving the necessity of picking a single name).

It isn't merely the possibility that some idiots will be influenced, there is the wider 'enjoyment factor' (that nebulous line between "I like this book" and "urggh") which is affected by casual lines of thoughtless text from days gone by. Perfectly good books (in every other regard), and which have no bearing on the race issue, have been spoiled for me by the odd line of casual racism. It pulls me out of the text, and I sit looking at the page wondering how the hell it slipped through the editors, proofreaders, typesetters and other folks who make sure that books are going to be read by as many people as possible.

The William Tell Overture will always (for the rest of time, and probably a bit after that as well) be the theme tune to The Lone Ranger. William Who? Exactly. Pop culture has destroyed classical music.

Welcome to the BCF.