Crying In The Handicapped Bathroom

Honest to God, I hadn't seen the movie The Squid and the Whale when I posted that picture last time, and I didn't, for some reason, even think I wanted to go see it, but Emma wanted to go on Monday night, so I tagged along, and it was really, really great. All of the actors are fantastic, particularly the two kids. Not that my parents got divorced or anything, nor is my dad quite as pompous as Jeff Daniels' character, but as Emma pointed out, there's a lot to identify with in there. I was a weird little kid, too, not unlike the younger brother character, though somewhat less perverse. I guess the one problem with the movie is that, like Wes Anderson, who I think was producer on this one, this Baumbach guy doesn't really make any effort to explain (or doesn't understand) what motivates any of his female characters. They're like some kind of religious mystery. I don't know. I don't get it, either, though, so...

I bought the new Strokes album yesterday (along with a repurchase of Dawn of the Dickies, which I'd lost, and Rancid's Life Won't Wait -- which is supposed to be their smartest and best album, but is, predictably, kind of unlistenable, or at least about 0% catchy), and it's actually pretty good. It's certainly got more good material than the second one. I was getting annoyed the other day about how pathetic the "new rock" sound was the last time I checked in on it, but I don't know why I like The Strokes but hate, say, The Postal Service and The Killers and every other sort of folky-sounding piece of limp garbage. Maybe it's the "neat" production. Or that the guy's name is Julian. So far my favorite songs are "Heart In A Cage," "On The Other Side," and "Vision Of Division."

Every year this science "zine" called Edge publishes an article called The Question, in which they ask a bunch of famous scientists and sciencey-types a sort of thought-question. This is a great way to kill literally an hour or two of your work-day because there are a lot of responses and they are pretty long. Last year the question was "What do you believe that you cannot prove?" This year it's "What is your most dangerous idea?" I feel like a lot of the people who answered didn't really understand it, because most of them described an idea that they hoped wasn't true but probably was, like that global warming is pretty much unstoppable at this point. I was surprised to see that a lot of the responses were like... materialist explanations for consciousness, and the idea that "this is all there is" -- I thought that shit was pretty well-accepted at this point, particularly among scientists. Here are some of the ones I thought were interesting:

Jeremy Bernstein:

The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is.

Scott Sampson:

The purpose of life is to disperse energy.

Haim Harari:

Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).

I'm finally getting back to doing some writing, after, gee... about four years, roughly. Isn't it funny how time can just pass like that?