Maddenin' Mutants!

Brendan of Digital Sextant fame has asked us to set sail on another blogging meme, so let's see if I can figure out what he and pharyngula are doing (keeping in mind that I'm the kind of person who starts assembling the piece of furniture, then looks at the instructions).

Here's what pharyngula declared in the original posting:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

These were phar's initial statements/questions:

My parent is: NONE.

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.

2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is…

Cold Mountain.

3. The best sexy song in rock is…

Gloria, by Patti Smith.

Here's Brendan's mutation, which I will build on:


1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

2. The best sexy song in rock is…

“Sex Bomb” by Tom Jones

3. The best mockumentary movie in comedy is…

This is Spinal Tap

And, at last, here's my mutation:

My parent is: The Digital Sextant (by way of pharyngula)

1. The best sexy song in rock is...
"Kiss," by Prince and the Revolution

2. The best mockumentary movie in comedy is...
24-Hour Party People

3. The best fantasy melodrama in television is...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer

OK, hopefully I did that correctly (I'd hate to feel like a Sentinel, after all). I shall tag Salon de Frankie, Jonathan Lapper, and that charming little comics blogger, Bully.