…as the worst science-fiction movie sweepstakes?
I had to take a serious hiatus from blogging, or really much of anything this week. (Speaking of which, my feline Galtian Overlord is eyeing me with hunger and peculiar disdain just now.) So I’ve missed what seems to have been an eventful couple of days around here. Given that my students just finished making documentaries about the fundamental and applied neurobiology of conflict resolution, I actually have a couple of PGOs to add to CommentGate (sic). A hint: in results you can in part track down to the level of neurons firing, power disparities really, really matter. Those with power — even if it is illusory* — have an enormous difficulty grasping the experience of those without. Y’all can probably guess how that kind of thing might frame what I might say at the hurt feelings of members of the dominant group when minor matters like the history of race relations in this country cut too deep.
But, as I say, too much time deep in the bunker with those same students, trying to take hours of pretty raw footage and within the week turn them into actual stories, so I haven’t grasped even a rumor of the ambient light for days. And in that context, I have nothing right now to say about Balloon Juice bloggery; Mitt Romney’s dilemmas; OBL’s reading matter — or just about anything that requires more sophisticated cognition than the statement “pass the potatoes, please.”
Which is why this clip so filled me with joy that I just had to share it here:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/UM6ARldNPUk” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
This is from the movie The Big Bang, in which Antonio Banderas plays a private detective hunting for a thug’s dead stripper girlfriend. (Do you think that they have numbers for this kind of plot point in Hollywood, just like that old line about the jokes in the prison yard reduced to numbers?)
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Haven’t seen it yet (no real plans to…) but I learn from the invaluable Jen Luc Picard (Jennifer Oullette) over at Cocktail Party Physics of the subplot of truly delightful science wankery captured in the clip above, complete with (via the clip at the link to which J-L Picard connects) a wide-eyed invocation of “the God particle.** (Warning, good stuff at Jen Luc’s link, but also an annoying self-starting preview for the Werner Herzog doc. on cave paintings in southern France)
What I love most about that clip? The way that Banderas, attempting to look aloof and threatening, actually conveys almost as clearly as if he had spoken this one thought:
“Dear FSM, get me out of this movie.”
Open thread everyone. We’ll have plenty of time to gnaw each other’s tendons in the morning.
*See, e.g., crab bucket syndrome, as to a partial explanation why so many of our fellow citizens seem willing to vote and act against their own interests.
*Is it just me, or does Leon Lederman have some serious ‘splainin to do?
Could “The Core” Have A Rival…(Open Thread)Post + Comments (24)