Blog in Exile: Random News & Links for 6/14

Fantasy Book Critic has a son, Zane Asher Thompson, who is the cutest thing in the whole wide world. (My sons used to be the cutest things in the whole wide world, but they're too big for that now.) Happy birthday, Zane!

Boing Boing broke the news (as far as I've seen) that Sci Fiction, the online magazine edited by Ellen Datlow under the Sci Fi Channel's umbrella (active up to about two years ago, when it stopped buying new stories or making updates) will all be coming down on Friday. So if you want to read something there, you'd better do it today...

Nothing to do with SF, but...the city of Seattle may ban microwave popcorn, due to a rash of building evacuations caused by burnt popcorn. Pardon me while I point and laugh; the rest of us generally manage to make popcorn without evacuating major municipal buildings, so I have to wonder if there's something about Seattle (or perhaps its government) that attracts people unable to correctly operate a microwave. [via the Amazon blog]

Via John Ricards, the best headline of the week: "Rogue Ninja Captured in Italy." (The story itself is pretty entertaining, too.)

Tomorrow is the deadline for John Scalzi's third occasional "Top 50 SF/F Personal Blogs List" -- if you have a connection to SF/F (and reading one of my lists is probably enough to qualify), and you have a blog with a Technorati ranking better than 50,000, go make a comment to that effect in his comment thread.

There's a discussion about "Sexism and Science" on the Asimov's discussion boards that's...well, I can't begin to describe it. But you might want to reset your watch to 1885 before reading. [first seen via James Nicoll]