The lovely aggregator Katie Newmark is on a roll, with posts about the historical dispute over the Orson Welles version of "War of the Worlds and a nifty catch of a Alex Tabarrok WSJ discussion on rental-car pricing. Katie's popular mom links to me, too. I was going to say her dad, the second-most famous Craig Newmark, did, too, but the cite turns out to be to Walter's discussion of the Ford Pinto rather than mine, so I still have as many Franks linking me as Newmarks.

Update: The Newmark family noses ahead thanks to a gratuitous link. And it's only slightly eerie that my mother is also a schoolteacher and my father is a former professor who looked like Craig when he was that age. But my mother doesn't blog. Yet.

Speaking of gritty science-fiction, Virginia Postrel recommends the new Battlestar Galactica, which looks halfway decent according to the LA Times story linked above. I still think it won't be the same without the metallic scanning-LED-eyed/speech-synthesized Cylons of my childhood and the Universal Studios tour. The question is whether I devote several hours of my TiVo to the first-season marathon Wednesday.

Postrel also links to the charity Any Soldier, which sounded good to me at first glance, but now feels like a bad idea, given that it's designed to get around Pentagon restrictions put in place for safety reasons.

And are you a neo-con? There were a lot of places where I wanted to check two answers, but the test won't let you.

Pearl Gluck's Divan is on the Sundance Channel Thursday morning at 10:35 Eastern; it's a pleasant, worthwhile, funny documentary by a friend that I helped finance and won't get a dime from except for the tax write-off I'll take this year. No regrets.

When I was eight or nine, one birthday or Hanukkah I got Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance," a geek's seeming paradise of systematically-compiled information about all of the episodes of the original series, plus the now-long-forgotten cartoon series.

In the days of the Internet, of course, the Concordance, with its cast lists, plot summaries, illustrations, and cross-indexed history of the show and stardates, is child's play to what's available on line regarding far more obscure shows. (Indeed, here's a link to a fanboy site complaining how errors in the Concordance messed up later reference works based on the Concordance.)

Case in point: Firefly. It's heartening to learn that the Chinese spoken in Firefly was authentic, as well as a nifty way to get around the censors. The webpage also teaches me that I learned a lot more Chinese than I realized in Los Angeles poker rooms.

These other links I'm never going to have the time to check out (I affirmatively avoid podcasts, plus I don't trust websites to avoid spoilers), but they look shiny. Here's a page with all the shooting scripts, a blog, a bulletin board, a video of a Firefly panel at last year's Comic-Con, another bulletin board, a fanboy podcast, and an entire gorram encyclopedia.