This is hilarious to me personally on two levels; first of all, I spent a summer in France as a young'un (my school district had a thing where if you took five full years of a language, you got a heavily subsidized class trip to the country of origin; some of us went to host families in France, some in Spain, Germany, etc) and actual high-end French restaurants, even in Paris where they hate everyone, aren't usually like that; they pride themselves on an intimate, welcoming atmosphere. The haughty French restaurant thing is an awful anglicized imitation of the real deal. So Le Coq Supérieure has already failed once.

And on top of that, usually the stereotypical haughty French restaurant is at least incredibly good at doing French food, which is why people put up with a maitre'd who, if he acted like that in other setting, would be murdered with a tire iron. So it fails in both concept and in execution. That's funny.

(Also, now my brain has written an entire story about how Le Coq Supérieure is owned by a delightful, dissipated elderly Frenchman who is completely in on the joke, and is using it to bilk the more idiotic members of New Avalon's corporate community who don't know any better out of their money, which he uses to fund his actual restaurant. It's down by the harbor and doesn't really have a name, per se, but the locals know that if the lights are on it means you can wander on in and he'll serve you this amazing capon dish that also doesn't really have a name but that his family has been working on for three generations. It goes well with the pinot noir he has illegally smuggled out of Earth Alliance space. There'll be a check, but it's hand-written and you can pay whenever. Don't forget to take home a loaf of bread.)

>strontium-90 - Like radium, strontium is in the same column of
>the periodic table as calcium, and can pretend to be calcium in
>the body's processes. Which means that if ingested, some of it ends
>up being integrated into the bones. Since
>⁹⁰Sr is a) not calcium and b) highly
>radioactive, this is bad on several levels.

Intriguing. If I were a supervillain, I would begin wondering if you could use that fact to do an end-run around the amazing ability of Detians to resist and expel foreign poisons.

I would, of course, also consult a biologist first. Well, she's sort of a biologist. I mean, she has these vats filled with growing things I'd really rather not look at, that's a kind of biology. And she has a third arm, you have to really know what you're doing to get one of those, right?

-Merc
Keep Rat