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Genetics has been built into the show concept for Heroes from the beginning. Mohinder’s father was tracking a genetic marker, and it’s all about humans evolving powers (in response to what selection pressure, I don’t know, but it’s comic book science). So the question of what can be inherited is built into the show’s premise. And the potential for powers is clearly inheritable, though it’s not clear how.

We only have two examples of characters for whom both parents have powers—Claire and Micah—and both of them have powers themselves. In each case, the child’s powers are unrelated to either parent’s, though one can certainly see the advantage invulnerability might provide for someone living with a pyrokinetic.

We also have three cases of full siblings where neither parent appears to have powers: Continue reading →

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Incredible Cafe

With a name like that, it had better be!

Updates

I’ve since learned that there’s a local chain called Fantastic Cafe, which is almost certainly where they got this name. A few doors down there’s a Mediterranean restaurant run by the same family called Chicken Maison, which brings to mind another local Mediterranean chain called Chicken Dijon.

In 2011, Incredible Cafe became Four Brothers Burger Grill as Five Guys Burgers gained popularity. A few years later, with the explosion of chicken fast food, it became Top Tenders. I’m not sure it’s still run by the same people as Chicken Maison, but I wouldn’t be surprised!

As of October 2024, Chicken Dijon and Top Tenders are still around, Fantastic Cafe has expanded a bit, and Chicken Maison has expanded even more. Both Maison and Dijon were among our go-to spots for a while, though the kid prefers Dijon these days.

And we still haven’t gotten around to trying Poulet du Jour, another family-owned Mediterranean fast food spot in the area, which seems to have been around at least as long as Maison, if not as long as Dijon.

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For all the griping and complaining about the way DC Comics managed the Flash relaunch, I’m beginning to think maybe Wonder Woman fared even worse. At least Flash has stayed monthly, and has never been delayed by more than a week (unless you count the shipping mishap in December that prevented the book from reaching the west coast).

Wonder WomanWonder Woman launched with a 5-part story, “Who is Wonder Woman?” involving both Diana, Amazon Princess of Themyscira and Donna Troy. Flash launched with a 6-part story, “Lightning in a Bottle,” setting up Bart Allen to take over as the Flash. Flash is already up to #8. Wonder Woman has gone bimonthly, and is only up to #4. And it’s so far behind, DC has scheduled a fill-in story for #5. The conclusion “will be rescheduled at a future date.” Naturally, the book collecting the story has been delayed as well.

So here we are, nearly a year out from One Year Later, and one of DC’s flagship characters is still mucking about with a semi-origin story. It’s kind of sad, because I picked up #1 out of curiosity, and thought they did an admirable job of simplifying Donna Troy’s backstory for new readers. It’s complicated—but it doesn’t have to be, if you can focus on just what’s necessary.

On the plus side, Wonder Woman fans knew where Diana was by the end of issue #1, unlike us Flash fans who had to wait until #6 to get a hint of Wally West’s fate, and it’s been clear from Justice League of America and other books, that Diana would be coming back, so they probably haven’t had to deal with the great schism that’s divided Flash fans over the past year.

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Surfin’ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion.

There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The setting doesn’t exist anymore in current versions of Safari (1.3 or later), so changing it has no effect.

The author of the shareware tool in question responded, saying that he honestly had no idea that the setting had been removed, and offering a refund to anyone who wanted their money back. And there are a couple of other optimizations it can make.

There are some things that the human mind just isn’t good at measuring objectively, and perception of time depends very much on circumstance. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “A watched pot never boils” have been known for ages.

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Continue reading →