Dan Liebke’s Astonishing Tales

So I received my monthly copy of Puppy Prestidigitator. And once again, I am disappointed. There’s the interlocking rings. Yawn. Various old school card tricks. Sigh. The cups and balls. Roll of eyes. I’ve seen all this stuff before. Personally, I think the old dogs are getting a bum rap. It seems to me as if nobody [...]

If I was charged (say, by the US Government or the cast of Two and a Half Men) with the mission of creating the world’s finest research institute, I would insist on renaming the town in which the institute was based. I mean, sure, gather leading thinkers and scientists. That goes without saying. Give them unlimited access to research materials [...]

It’s Christmas Eve! Well, not quite. But it’s surely close enough for the kids at Smallville to bring us this week’s episode - an entertaining and fantastic piece of whimsy and delight, with powerful options being proffered and life-altering choices being made.
Note: in the preceding paragraph please replace ‘entertaining’,’fantastic’, ‘whimsy’, ‘delight’ and ‘powerful’ with whatever [...]

There are some face-offs in the Smallville-Superboy Smackdown! that are going to go right down to the wire. The results of these confrontations will almost certainly depend solely on my mood at the time, so inseparable will be the combatants.
The stoush between the various versions of young Master Luthor will not be one such tight tussle. The Smallville version of [...]

I have no beef with most Christmas carols. I guess you could describe me as yuletidishly easygoing, if that was your verbal whim. But I do draw the line at Oh Come, All Ye Faithful. It starts off fine: “Oh come all ye faithful”. Fair enough - faith seems to be a fundamental prerequisite for most religious gatherings. Doubters, think twice. “Joyful”. [...]

The biggest difference between Smallville Clark and Superboy Clark is that Superboy Clark is already taking this whole ’secret identity’ thing deadly seriously. Far more seriously than Smallville Clark, who busies himself each episode running around at superspeed, doing superheroics willy-nilly to such an extent that anybody paying a modicum of attention (ie nobody in the regular cast) could work out [...]

For many years a number of things have troubled me about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. And when I say ‘number’, I mean, of course, the number one (1) (long renowned as ‘the loneliest number that you’ll ever see’). This one thing that troubles me? The mantra that converts that numbskull Prince Adam to that (more shirtless) [...]