JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

It’s not easy to have a rational discussion of new technologies these days. Half the time the conversation may be boiled down into the question, “Where can I get it and how much will it cost?” Inevitably debate arises over whose thing is bigger. Or smaller. Or faster, more convenient to use, or just cooler.

Here is a gadget that is bigger, faster, more complicated, and infinitely cooler than nearly anything. You can’t buy it unless you have eight billion dollars and your basement can accommodate a 27-kilometer circular tunnel. It is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the humongous atom-smasher at the Cern laboratory in Geneva. The LHC was built to try and answer the question: What is the universe made of, and how did it begin?

The Biggest Gadget Ever, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Movie reviews

Babylon A.D. Remember Vin Diesel’s two minutes of hotness which peaked with XXX and The Fast and The Furious? Those days are gone (I watched The Chronicles of Riddick, but for Karl Urban), and Babylon A.D. won’t bring them back. The first half of the film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (who has disowned the finished product) isn’t bad, but as it barrels along, shredding your eardrums with very loud rap music and explosions (and Gerard Depardieu in ridiculous make-up—completely unnecessary for a guy who didn’t really need prosthetics to play Cyrano De Bergerac), it gets more and more pointless. The ending is particularly “Ehh?” After all that trouble, death and destruction (and my battered eardrums), that’s it?

Diesel’s next project: The Fast and The Furious: Admission of Has-Beenhood.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Attack of the Pan’s Labyrinth Creatures, but without the complexity of Pan’s Labyrinth. Nice to look at, but it’s one note held for two overlong hours. Some of it is just daffy. For instance, it tries to bring in an environmental angle with that forest creature. It’s the last of its kind, declares the pale blond prince (Not Legolas). Then he throws it into the sewer. Ehh? Guillermo Del Toro better make good on The Hobbit, or there’s an army of Tolkien fans who will tear him apart.

Max Payne. I have no idea what this is, I’ve only seen the trailer, but the voice-over reminded me that a major part of Mark Wahlberg’s considerable charms is his voice. He sounds like a polite maniac (pronounced man-yak).

Grass has a major issue with For The First Time, the KC Concepcion vehicle. In the movie, all of KC’s friends are ex-girlfriends of the Richard Gutierrez character.  One after another they get involved with him, and they’re already friends at the time. Dating your friend’s ex: not kosher. Even if she gives you clearance, it’s uncomfortable. Fine, there are some extraordinary circumstances, but in most cases it’s just scuzzy.

“That Mr. Sendak fears that his work is inadequate, that he is racked with insecurity and anxiety, is no surprise. For more than 50 years that has been the hallmark of his art. The extermination of most of his relatives and millions of other Jews by the Nazis; the intrusive, unemployed immigrants who survived and crowded his parents’ small apartment; his sickly childhood; his mother’s dark moods; his own ever-present depression — all lurk below the surface of his work, frequently breaking through in meticulously drawn, fantastical ways.

“He is not, as children’s book writers are often supposed, an everyman’s grandpapa. His hatreds are fierce and grand, as if produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He hates his uncle (who made a cruel comment about him when he was a boy); he hates anything to do with God or religion, and Judaism in particular (“We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?”); he hates Salman Rushdie (for writing an excoriating review of one of his books); he hates syrupy animation, which is why he is thrilled with (Spike) Jonze’s coming film of his book “Where the Wild Things Are,” despite rumors of studio discontent. . .”

Maurice Sendak’s Concerns, Beyond Where The Wild Things Are.

Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain
The Onion, September 5, 2008
DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

“I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits,” said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse…

Note idiotic ads that have been drawn to this post.

 

“Here, out of context and placed end to end (a method not unfamiliar to his attackers), are some of Machiavelli’s most salient and satanic points: “A prince, particularly a new prince, cannot afford to cultivate attributes for which men are considered good. In order to maintain the state, a prince will often be compelled to work against what is merciful, loyal, humane, upright, and scrupulous”; “A wise ruler cannot and should not keep his word when it would be to his disadvantage”; “Men must be either flattered or eliminated, because a man will readily avenge a slight grievance, but not one that is truly severe”; “A man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.” And, the distilled spirit of this dark brew: “How one lives and how one ought to live are so far apart that he who spurns what is actually done for what ought to be done will achieve ruin rather than his own preservation.”…

The Florentine by Claudia Roth Pierpoint in the New Yorker.

No surprise that Tom Rob Smith’s Stalin-era thriller didn’t make it to the Booker Prize shortlist: judges always sneer at genre fiction, especially if it’s fun to read. Shocking that Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, probably the best-reviewed book of the season, was left out. The bookies are reeling from the exclusion of Netherland, and of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. I’m not complaining.

John Crace has chewed up the six shortlisted novels and spat them out into Digested Reads.

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh: “Deeti chewed on a mouthful of roti as she ground the poppies. “I must be in the book that ticks the historical, multi-layered, multicultural shortlist box,” she said. “In which case,” her husband replied, “I had better hurry up and die so that you can show off your research about the Opium Wars and sail away from Calcutta on board the Ibis with a cast of colourful characters who will use wilfully obscure and caricatured language that the judges will fall over themselves to call a tour de force of comic invention.” “You’re right,” Deeti agreed. “And the best thing is I don’t even need an ending as it’s only the first in a trilogy.””

The other contenders here.