Phlebotinum

This weekend at my boyfriend's house, I was made aware of a little wiki called TV Tropes. And by "little" I mean HUGE. A "trope" is basically a story or plot convention (but not a cliche) that the site's contributors have identified in various pieces of literature, films, video games, and other creative story genres. The tropes they discuss definitely appeal to my bizarro-meter. "What Kind of Lame Power is Heart Anyway," anybody?

My boyfriend says he can spend hours and hours on this site, and given the vast array of cool-sounding links that greet you in the body of every entry (think Wikipedia, only kind of more interesting), I don't blame him.

One of my new favorite words: phlebotinum. This refers to any device, substance, or power that the author relies on to make things work and to avoid a logical explanation as to how that just happened. I feel like there must be some sort of stimulus or Obama joke in there, but I'll let you come up with the specifics.