Cultural melange.

* David Gill reviews Christopher Miller's fictionalized biography of Philip K. Dick, A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, for Boing Boing.

* Judy Han's dissertation on Korean-American Christian missionaries and U.S. imperialism is available in comic form. (Via @barbarahui.)

* A nine-word story that will take one thousand years to read. Kottke says this problem is just crying out for good old-fashioned American know-how.

* The five people still watching Heroes will be devastated when they find out Bryan Fuller's left again.

* NPR remembers Harvey Kurtzman and the heyday of Mad Magazine.

* Trending upward today: references to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome."

Saturday!

* The first of the last three Pushing Daisies is on tonight. Bryan Fuller's not satisfied, and not done with the story yet.

* Alien prequel on the way.

* More on the sci-fi future that failed from CNN.

* Related: Star Trek as religion.

* Scenes from trailers that aren't in the finished film. I suspect I would have liked Terminator Salvation a lot more if the "This isn't the future my mother warned me about" scenes had been retained.

* Wondermark has a good riff take on Terminator-style action franchises: 1, 2, 3.

* Tales of the New Frontier: a web comic set in a mythical alt-history Kennedy administration.

* 'Jesus Killed Mohammed': Christian dominionism and the U.S. military.

* Brace yourselves for Toy Story 3.

* Weekend games: Heavy Weapons, Panic Breakout, Fail-Safe, and Redstar Fall Pro.

* And this just in: Delaware still sucks.

Can Bryan "Company Man" Fuller save Heroes? Fresh from the (sigh) cancellation of Pushing Daisies, he's looking like the show's last hope.

AUSIELLO: Where did Heroes go wrong, in your opinion?

BRYAN FULLER: It became too dense and fell into certain sci-fi trappings. For instance, in the “Villains” arc, when you talk about formulas and catalysts, it takes the face off the drama. And I think the goal for everybody is to put a face back on the drama. You have to save something with a face; otherwise you don’t understand what you’re caring about. I thought the "Villains" arc started out very interestingly, and then became sort of muddy and dense and I couldn't get my hooks into the characters to understand their motivations. I also started to feel confused about what people's abilities were. One of the great things about the first season is that the metaphor for their abilities was very clear. Those metaphors seem to have gotten complicated in the past two seasons. I share that concern with everybody on the writing staff. It's not like I'm coming in and saying, "This is what you need to do to fix it!" Everybody knows what needs to be fixed and everybody is sort of rowing in that direction.