JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

My sister and I keep a list of our favorite Demented Dictators. For years the top spot has been occupied by North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il for his Elvis pompadour, platform shoes, Nehru jacket, sunglasses, bad poetry, cognac-guzzling, and generally loony behavior, such as having his favorite movie director kidnapped and forcing him to make the North Korean version of Godzilla. He’s a film buff, you know.

American intelligence officials announced today that North Korea’s Dear Leader is seriously ill. They believe he’s had a stroke.  If they’re right, expect a mad scramble for power in his country, which happens to have a nuclear arsenal.

According to Boing Boing, Kim Jong-Il is a “fan” of South Park creators Parker and Stone. There’s a redeeming quality. He “appeared” in their animated movie Team America, where he had a musical solo: “Ronery, I’m so ronery. . .”

Saffy on the door, originally uploaded by 160507.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) allows cats in four of its undergraduate dorms. What a great idea. I’ve been meaning to enroll Saffy in a good physics program. For starters she considers Schrodinger’s Cat prejudicial to her species, and believes it should be reworded into Schrodinger’s Person. With felines in the dorms funky odors will be an issue, but I’m sure MIT students can come up with a solution.

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on today. Will it help physicists figure out how the universe began, or will it create a black hole and eradicate the earth? The first Global Catastrophic Risks Conference assessed the threat from the particle accelerator, as well as asteroid collisions, gamma ray bursts from supernovas, man-made nanobots replicating out of control, and everything connected to Google “waking up” and taking over the world. According to James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, “The argument that I found convincing was that the nature of the risks of the Hadron Collider creating a catastrophe was on the same level at which you’re driving down the road and having your car spontaneously turn into a horse through simple quantum fluctuation.” (That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds, snakes and aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.)

 

In July, Russian police arrested 37 members of the Vory v Zakone or “Thieves-in-law”. “A mobster caste forged in the Soviet gulags, the Vory v Zakone maintains a hallowed place in Russia’s criminal lore, akin to that of the Cosa Nostra in Italy…The Vory was born of Stalin’s prison camps and grew into a group of criminal barons who kept order in the gulags and governed the dark gaps in Soviet life beyond the reach of the KGB. While the Communist Party had a steadfast grip on government and society, the Vory had something of a monopoly on crime. With its own code of ethics, hierarchy and even language, the Vory formed a society in opposition to rigid Soviet conformity, surviving on theft and black market dealing when not in prison.”

Today the Vory has spread across the globe and become a pop culture fixture, turning up in movies like The Dark Knight. A KGB expert on organized crime said that the most accurate depiction of Vory that he has ever seen is David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The Chirayliq blog notes that Viggo Mortensen’s performance as Nikolai the mobster sets a new high standard for non-Russians playing Russians.  Well many of us think Viggo sets a high standard for the male of the species. Eastern Promises is brilliant. The naked fight scene is compelling, yes, but the rest of the film is excellent, too.

By the way, if Vory see non-Vory sporting their tattoos, they would be honor-bound to cut them out because the wearer has not earned them. That should teach the trendy. 

Roger Federer has just won his fifth consecutive US Open title (and 13th slam), beating Andy Murray 6-2, 7-5, 6-2.  I love New York. Something has returned to Roger’s game: the regal disdain. Good night, I’m going to sleep. 

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The Brits are very hard on Andy Murray. He’s a more exciting player than their beloved Tim Henman, but they haven’t quite taken to him. They make fun of his hair, his clothes, his hygiene for crying out loud. What’ll they mock next, his teeth? Live-blogging the semis, a journalist noted that if it had been a fashion show, Rafa would already have won. During the final a TV presenter noted that Murray’s socks and shoes were dirty, unlike Federer’s. What the frak? News coverage actually noted how neat and clean-shaven Roger—an endorser of razors!—was next to scruffy Andy.

But The Fed is a neat freak. His clothes always fit perfectly. At Wimbledon, he hangs his jacket on the back of a chair to prevent creases. I am convinced that his difficulties at the French Open have to do with the fact that the red clay gets on his shoes and socks. The Fed does not like to get dirty. (In contrast Rafa Nadal doesn’t mind getting dirty, but he has some tics that border on obsessive-compulsive behavior. The way he lines up his water bottles so the labels are all facing one direction. The way he always goes to the ballboy with the towel between points. The way he adjusts his wedgie before he serves. Hey, it works for him.)

Lucky Number 13 in Emotional Weather Report, Friday in the Star. (My column now appears Fridays and Sundays. Sundays it’s in the technology section.) 

It’s bad enough that you eventually turn into your mom or dad; now Hungarian researchers say you also marry them. My druid always says, Look at your boyfriend/girlfriend’s parents. If he is not self-aware, he is likely to replicate the patterns of their relationship in his own relationships.

“Freud may have been on to something with the Oedipus complex. According to psychologists, men are drawn to women who look like their mothers, while women are taken with men who resemble their fathers.

“In a study published today, psychologists measured people’s faces and compared them with their partner’s parents and strangers. They found men were more likely to pair up with women whose bone structure was similar to their own mothers, with a similar effect holding for womens’ choice of men.

“The findings offer fresh evidence for what psychologists call “sexual imprinting”, where the kinds of faces we find appealing as adults are set, if not rigidly, in early childhood.”Parental link found in attraction, in the Guardian.