Next week, mankind will take another small step-giant leap as the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider goes online.  This device promises to answer some questions about the universe that Stephen Hawking couldn’t by using “7 TeV proton beams harnessed by electromagnets to collide within a 27 km (17 mi) circular tunnel.” 

No idea what that means, but it will evidently tell us the difference between matter and antimatter (spoiler alert!: Lauren Conrad made of matter, Heidi Montag made of antimatter), and why things weigh what they do (spoiler alert!: carbs).

Antimatter on carbs.

Detractors seem to think this step-leap is not exactly a progressive one, but is one that is leading toward our increasingly inevitable doom.  These are the same people that think Pepsi is the Devil, still unironically call deep-fried strips of potatoes “Freedom Fries,” think Bill O’Reilly is funny (also unironically), and vote for third-party candidates. 

The head of the project has received calls from these people who offer unsolicited death threats, warn against the creation of black holes, beg him to stop the project and to “please tell me that my children are safe.”

Well, guess what lady – your children are not safe, not at all.  However, the Large Hadron Thingamabobber is the least of their worries, and yours.  I’d say the world will end in about a week.  This calculation is based on a complicated formula using variables from these recent transgressions against the time-space fiber:

1) Dick Cheney laughs.  Every time Dick Cheney laughs one of three things has just happen:  a) an oil rig drilled into what used to be a national wildlife reserve, b) a jump-roping 8-year-old was just “accidently” splashed when a passing unmarked black SUV sped up to hit that muddy puddle, or c) a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-I-mean-anti-Bridge to Nowhere republican governor from Alaska has just made a joke about putting lipstick on dogs.

Cheney told reporters in Rome on Monday that he “loved” Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention. “He laughed when he recounted her line about the difference between hockey moms and pit bulls being a coat of lipstick.”

2) Natural disasters.  I’m not talking hurricanes.  They mean nothing.  Green polar bears will attack because Governor Sarah Palin is on the campaign trail and doesn’t have enough time to fly around the Arctic Circle , shooting the monsters of the hit ABC show Lost from the remote safety of a helicopter before leaving them to rot in the global warming they so insidiously created.

(Photo: AP)

The Polar Bear Plot (PBP), long known among natives of Alaska and illiterates in the Yukon Territory, involves the usually white bears using the money they made from endorsement deals with Coca-Cola to buy a commanding share of British Petroleum stock in order to lobby for increased drilling that will feed a corrosive human habit set on a track to destroy the planet.  The polar bears will adapt, changing their camouflage fur from white to green, with a rapidity that humans cannot match.  They will hide around the rainforests of the soon balmy poles, attacking vacationers at will.

Trust no one.

3) Politicians repeat themselves until we’re dead.  You know when you say something really witty and everyone laughs?  You know when you say it a second time, it’s not quite as witty, it doesn’t get quite as many laughs?  You know when you say it a third time in front of the same audience you’ve had the first two times and everyone groans and starts tying nooses to the support beams in their dining rooms, lest they hear the line again?

I just watched that alcoholic woman from Will and Grace at a press conference at which she introduced her running mate, Sen. John McCain.  McCain took the podium with the now familiar, I’m “happy to be introduced by Governor Palin today, but I can’t wait to introducer her to Washington, D.C.   I can’t wait.”  Ha. Ha. Ha.

But he can’t.  Because we’re all going to die.

4) Football woes.  We were all devastated when the University of Michigan football team lost their first game of the season to Utah .  That’s just the beginning.

Tom Brady – the man who was drafted from Michigan by the New England Patriots in the sixth round of the 2000 draft and went on to make four Pro Bowls, win three Super Bowls, twice be selected as Super Bowl MVP, impregnate Bridget Moynahan, try to impregnate Gisele Bündchen, and be crowned Supreme King of the World – has just completely fucked half a million fantasy football teams throughout the nation by sustaining an injury to his left knee that will keep him out for a season.  (Say hi to Drew Bledsoe, Tom.)

Meanwhile, former football great and Brentwood shrub-jumper O.J. Simpson could be out for, um, life as things got moving on his robbery trial in Las Vegas today.  The eternally unlucky Simpson is of course accused of robbing memorabilia dealers a year ago.  He says he didn’t rob them.  He was just trying to use a weapon to get back things that used to belong to him and now rightfully, legally belong to the dealers.

If you ever see a sign for O.J. Simpson’s garage sale, keep driving.

5) Billy Mays is no longer just for OxiClean.  He also sells life insurance.  Obviously Hillary Clinton missed a huge opportunity.

The end might be near, but black holes caused by colliding protons are nothing to worry about.  As I can see it, there is only one way to stop the Apocalypse before Friday:  OxiClean the shit out of the evil green Polar Bears.

“Like any storyteller,” writes John Irving in The Hotel New Hampshire, “I had the power to end the story, and I could have.  But I didn’t destroy Freud’s letter; I gave it to Father, while the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket was still upon him.  I handed over Freud’s letter – like any storyteller, knowing (more or less) where we would all be going.”

You know how this is going to end, too.  You don’t know details; you don’t know for example what word will be last (you might!).  But you know the rhythm.  You know the tone.  You know the approximate length.  You know that it will probably end with a period because, shit, it’s just not my style to end with a question or exclamation.  Happily, that knowledge, that rule, doesn’t just apply to this essay (or blog post, rather; let’s call it what it is).  It applies to each activity throughout your whole life.

If you were ever an athlete you understand the feeling of knowing how something will turn out. If you were not an athlete, the best way I can explain it, paradoxically, is that it feels like you’re not there; I don’t mean like an out-of-body experience, because you’re very much in your body.  I mean it feels like you’re not thinking, like a meditative wind, strong as a hurricane but without even a whisper, has completely cleared the myriad rubble from your field of vision, leaving you with nothing but horizon.

I imagine this is the same feeling a person gets in war, in the middle of a fire fight.  But I only imagine.  I’ve not been in a fire fight.  “After a fire fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble,” wrote Tim O’Brien of his experience in Vietnam.

As George Orwell said, “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.”  What we learn from sport we know forever.

A recent study (and I assume ongoing, since the study has yielded no results thus far) at Purdue University is attempting to prove the phenomenon that perception is altered by performance – or performance by perception.  In the study of golfers, “results showed that only the players who were playing well perceived the hole as being bigger than it really is.”

As the lead researcher, Jessica Witt, readily admits, she doesn’t know if perception affects performance or the other way around.  "If I were to speculate,” she said, “I would say it's probably both ways. If you see a bigger hole you are going to be more confident, and that may actually make you putt better.”

Strangely, she had the idea for the experiment when she consistently heard successful golfers, after particularly good rounds, say that the hole looked the size of “a bucket or basketball hoop.”  This is strange because, well, that’s the experiment.  It’s done.  You don’t need six grants to figure out if it’s true.  You need $14.95, a MasterCard, and a touchtone phone to purchase the Michael Jordan Airtime DVD in which he’ll tell you that during Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals against the Portland Trailblazers, “The rim seemed like a big old huge bucket, and I can’t miss it.”

(You can start to watch this from 1:20 to get my point.
But, really, the whole thing is good.)

Witt, whom the article notes is a world-class athlete, concludes, “It's possible that by using this information we can develop various ways to improve performance, based on what we know about perception.”  The problem is that this is not possible because, well…it’s like Maverick said in Top Gun: “You don’t have time to think up there.  If you think, you’re dead.”

The best her research could conclude is that practicing helps perception, which helps performance.  That’s essentially why we practice, why we do things over and over and over again, changing something small until we get the desired result again, and again.  We do it so that when we’re in the game, we don’t think about it.  We see the hole and know it’s just going to go in – if you think about perceiving it as bigger or smaller, you’re fucked. 

Conclusion: Athlete’s need to practice.  Great study.  Ph.D. for you.

Okay, that was a bit truculent.  There are still a couple justifiable ends to this study.  The first is that since Witt confirmed that perception does actually affect performance, athletes will start dropping acid before events.  While the other baseball team may look like evil sunny-side-up fried eggs, the acid also pleasantly makes the pitch slow and the ball inflate – homeruns come like raspberry jam.  But don’t touch second base because it’ll eat you.

And the other useful conclusion is that we can apply this to real life.  The next Wall StreetJournal/NBC poll should ask: “Which presidential candidate do you think sees a bigger hole?”  No one asks questions in metaphor anymore; and I think that Witt shows that’s how we need to conduct our national polls.

Rorschach Ink Blot tests: Does this look more like Barack Obama or John McCain?

Ok.  Very interesting.  Now what about this one?

I see.  And this one?

Good.  Now word association.  When I say a word, you say a candidate’s name:

Money.
Brave.
Poker.
Iraq.
Beer.
Drunk.
Slut.

One final question.  If both candidates were putting on the 18th green at Augusta, who would see a bigger hole?

If a candidate sees a bigger hole, according to Witt’s indefatigable research, he’s more likely to sink the putt.  (In 1992, there’s no doubt Bill Clinton saw a hole the size of…well, it was big.)  And if I know who America thinks is more likely to sink the proverbial putt, like any storyteller, I’ll know (more or less) where we are all going.

When we voted for student class representative in fourth grade, I knew how to make David A. win.  I also knew I didn’t stand a chance in the election myself.  Not because I couldn’t take down David A., but because, pursuant to the rules that governed Westelm Elementary School student council, no student could be a classroom representative two consecutive trimesters in a school year.   This was one if three bylaws, the other two being: each class must elect ONE (1) boy and ONE (1) girl; and student council would meet once a month and do absolutely nothing memorable.

I could have been Vladimir Putin’s mentor.  I wanted David A. in there, so I began a smear campaign against his only rival Jon S. What I did was there was another boy, Peter B. whom no one liked.  (Yes, I know, very sad.  Get over it.  I’m telling a story here.)  I began a simple campaign that Peter B. was going to vote for Jon S. I might have even convinced Peter B. to vote for Jon S.  Anyway, fourth graders being what they were in those days, no one wanted to be associated with Peter B.  Election Day came and saw David A. winning over 70% of the vote.  Only other person to dominate an election like that is Putin (seriously, Putin got 71.3% of the popular vote in 2004; insane).

The lesson there is that you can’t just say what you want and expect it to happen.  You can’t simply put something out into the universe and expect it to mysteriously materialize in front of your fucking eyes.  That kind of thinking is asinine.  Unless they were trying to make millions upon millions of dollars off of suckers like Peter B. (the poor poor bastard), I don’t know who in their right mind would advise such a practice.

Since fourth grade I’ve known that coercion and circumvention pave the path to victory.  So has Vladimir Putin.  So has Karl Rove.  And this is who else knows that (ahem) secret: Ludacris.

Yesterday the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (different Jon S.) ran a clever piece (that went four minutes too long) called “Rappers or Republicans.”  In the piece, one of the Daily Show correspondents quizzed Jon Stewart on whether a described person was a rapper or a republican.  They didn’t use Ludacris because Luda is both a rapper and a republican.  Trick question, not fair.

I didn’t know that until this week when Luda released a song that slammed Sen. Hillary Clinton – “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.” Then the song took a long bow to Sen. John McCain’s intestines with the rhythmic lilt: “Paint the White House black and I'm sure that's got 'em terrified / McCain don't belong in ANY chair unless he's paralyzed / Yeah I said it cause Bush is mentally handicapped / Ball up all of his speeches and I throw em like candy wrap.”

Charming.  Needless to say (I hope), the Obama campaign condemned the song faster than a Detroit tenement.

Initially, I thought Luda was going to vote for Obama, especially after Obama gave him a shout out in Rolling Stone.  “I know Jay-Z. I know Ludacris. I know Russell Simmons,” Obama said to the magazine. “I know a bunch of these guys. They are great talents and great businessmen, which is something that doesn't get emphasized enough."

However, it turns out that even though Barack Obama admires Ludacris as a talent and as a businessman, Luda is sticking to his scruples; he’s going to vote for John McCain.  It’s obvious he wants Barack Obama to lose.

If we assume Obama is right, that Ludacris is a “great” businessman, Luda must therefore know that the one way to enrage white voters, many of whom live in the middle of America (a part of the country that, last I checked, controls over 70% of the electoral vote) is to indirectly hail racist invective at that part of the population.  In this ingenious way, he will push a few currently undecided white votes the way of John McCain.

There’s a risk here.  Luda actions could cause black people to vote for Obama.  However, therein lies the brilliance of this prolific rapper.  The risk is cautiously calculated; he was probably assuming that most black voters were going Democrat anyway.

a) Ludacris is a smart dude.  b) Ludacris is black.  Given either of those premises, it’s strange to know that he’s voting for John McCain. 

Oh…wait, unless he’s not voting for McCain, and premise “a)” is invalid, and Ludacris is a fucking idiot who is needlessly and selfishly shining his own publicity while undermining a carefully administered campaign by one of the greatest politicians, leaders, organizers and public speakers of the past twenty years.  Then the equation makes sense again.  He's just dumb.  If he was in my fourth grade class, we’d be fighting on the playground right now.

My high school theater (that’s right) teacher used to tell a story about Barbra Streisand.  It wasn’t about the mystery of the missing “a” in her name; this isn’t an Encyclopedia Brown story.  It was about one of her first auditions.  The teacher said a young Streisand, nose still the center of her being at that time, walked on stage to audition for a musical.  She stood in the middle of the empty stage in a full length fur coat, looking out and the deflated theater.  She took a breath and said, “I like it here.  I think I’ll stay,” threw off the coat and began to sing.

Some of the details of the story might be invented – the fur coat might have been a wool wrap, the words she chose might have been others – at this point, in fact, the story might not be true at all.  On the other hand, every word could be true.

That’s pretty much all I know about Streisand besides once hearing from Godknowswhere that during the televised airing of one of her films (The Prince of Tides, I think) she personally called the head of the television network to complain about the piercing volume of the commercials.  That’s pretty cool.  Regardless, I’ve never seen a Streisand film (save Meet the Fockers, and, really, does that count?) because, honestly, I used to have very little interest in musicals and, just as honestly I suppose, I simply do not like looking at her.

Listening to her is another issue.  Today, politico.com posted an interview with Ms. Streisand.  Immediately, this floats the old infuriation, why should I care what celebrities have to say about politics; why should they, collectively or individually, have a voice in politics at all?

The reason they shouldn’t have a voice is because they cough up hairball platitudes: “There is too much at stake right now to elect another George W. Bush to the White House,” Streisand said of John McCain.  But she also directly answers the celebrity question by saying that (some) celebrities are Americans, “I see myself first and foremost as a citizen of this country. And I am outspoken about the issues I care about like healthcare, global warming, the war in , energy independence, education, poverty and so on.”

And so on.  So...basically everything.  Thanks for playing.

Ms. Streisand showed an impressive grasp on the Presidential election and politics in general. (Democrats, she noted, “need to reach a 60-seat majority in the Senate. There are 35 Senate races, of which 5 are open challenges.”)  But it really doesn’t matter because the interview was conducted over email, which is fucked (something I wouldn’t expect from the heroine in our opening story).  She could know nothing or she could not even be writing.  It’s a cop out of an interview and I know this because it’s the way The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown does interviews – he knows his research is such shit that he would vomit nerves trying to back it up on camera or in person.

I doubt Ms. Streisand would puke and the email doesn’t change the fact that she is American and has a right to voice “her opinion.”  It also doesn’t change the fact that absolutely no good – apart from a few more hits on the website – came from this interview.  It didn’t mean anything.

Wait.  That’s wrong.  The interview did toss a light on something: Barbra Streisand is a liar.  Hold on, I’m going to explain why.

Celebrity is an interesting phenomenon.  If you are the celebrity, it takes you from the basic humanity of not even being able to get your family to listen to you, to a red carpet where everyone is screaming your name, getting your opinions, demanding your attention.  The most interesting of celebrities is the neophyte celebrity.  I’ve seen this happen to talk show hosts, in particular.  A person gets a sudden platform from which people actually listen to her and the celebrity feel as though it’s her duty to enlighten the masses.

Ms. Streisand is the furthest thing from a neophyte, but that still how she feels.  Why else would she grant an interview to politico.com?  (We already covered why they asked for one.)  Ms. Streisand feels as though it’s her duty, not her right as an American, her duty to publically endorse Barack Obama and use her status to convince many others to do the same.  That’s something she didn’t say.  And it’s a lie of omission.

She would have been better to answer, “I voice my political opinion because I care and because people listen to me.”  It would have been arrogant but it would have been true and it wouldn’t have been hiding behind, “[P]eople have the constitutional right to voice their opinion and speak their mind without punishment or penalty.”

Sometimes I have urges to do things out of spite, simply because someone says I shouldn’t or I wouldn’t or whatever.   I’ll probably die like Mary McFly would have at the hand of Mad Dog Tannen in Back to the Future III, but that’s OK because I’ll get to travel through time. 

I’m inspired by Barack Obama.  I think his thought process is fluid.  I think his public speaking is incendiary.  I think that he surrounds himself with knowledgeable counsel and, if he doesn’t understand an issue, he makes an effort to learn it.  But like I said, I like to do things out of spite.  So, on November 4, if you’re standing close enough to me at the polling station in West Hollywood when the exit pollster asks me why I voted for John McCain, you’ll be able to see me drop my full length fur coat to the floor and you’ll be able to hear me say, “Because Barbra Streisand is a liar.”

This is what happened last night.  I poured my scotch, I lay on the couch, I opened Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (it is…eh, pas mal), I drank my scotch while reading the book, I finished my scotch and the book, and realized that Dios Mio! it is medianoche!; I thought that I was a pendeja because mañana my amigos would return from Thailand and I had not yet started to clean, nada; I ran to bed and had a sueño that I was thinking half in Spanish because of the book; I woke up, realized I was thinking half in Spanish, reminded myself that I couldn’t speak Spanish, nada; I promptly fell fast asleep in English.

Before Eric Tavulares went to sleep last Friday, he watched half of the 1994 Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers.  He probably thought he was Woody Harrelson (or whatever Harrelson’s character was called) and that his girlfriend, 18-year-old Lauren Aljubouri, lying next to him was Juliette Lewis.  During the night, “something caused [Tavulares] to switch mentally and he rolled over on Lauren Aljubouri and he began strangling her.”

When the police arrived, Tavulares opened the door and said, “I did it.  I can’t believe it.  I did it.”  He then walked into the kitchen where he reiterated, “I killed her.”  One officer walked into the bedroom where he found the 18-year-old lying without a pulse.  “There was bruising around her eyes and…her lips were blue,” read the police report.

“I just never dreamed this could happen to my daughter and that he would ever hurt her like this in a million years,” said Lauren’s mother, Debbie Aljubouri during a phone interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  Eric, meanwhile, told police that he had watched Natural Born Killers “10 or 20 times.”

First of all, that’s a pretty wide range.   Secondly, that might be the first clue.  But how much does this entertainment, essentially our environment, affect us?  It’s a long, tired debate that goes back beyond Lynn Cheney and Tipper Gore and censorship and “Parental Advisory” stickers.  But, in Tavulares’ case, it’s not just a matter of suggestion; if he watched Natural Born Killers 20 times, it’s a matter of voluntary brainwashing.

I guarantee that if I placed two teenagers in a room and made them watch a movie (I’m not saying NBK in particular but any movie) that romanticized or promoted violence continuously for a week one of them would be dead at the end of the week or both would have suffered serious wounds.  Hell, if I made them watch Romeo and Juliet over and over, maybe they’d have killed themselves.

My point is borne out of my fear.  Tavulares seems to be blaming his crime, at least in part, on a film that obviously encourages mass murdering sprees as sexily as possible.  My fear is that I’m going to see more Lynn Cheneys and Tipper Gores out on the sidewalks of Universal Studios tomorrow.  My fear is that letters are already being posted to the FCC.  My fear is that someone thinks this sort of crime is somehow, in some way the responsibility of artists.

It’s an old, tired debate and one that should end.  Tavulares' crime may be a result of watching a film, but that doesn’t mean the film shouldn't have been made.  It means he shouldn’t watch it 20 fucking times.  I can play Mario Kart for 48 hours straight and it doesn’t mean I’m going to get in my car and start running people off the road, jumping over bridges or flinging red turtle shells at people.  Tavulares case, like I said, was voluntary brainwashing.

Beer companies don’t get sued when a person drinks an 18-pack at home and proceeds to crunch their SUV into the front of a McDonald’s.  Neither should artists or studios or distributors get sued when assholes like Tavulares fuck up.  Thanks to the First Amendment, they don’t.

The constitution is saving a real gem of a guy in New York right now, as well.  His name is Apollo Braun and he is selling t-shirts that say, “Obama is my slave.”

According to Livesteez.com, one woman is suing Braun after she “bought a $69 shirt from Apollo Braun's Manhattan boutique that bore the words, ‘Obama is my slave.’ When she wore the shirt on Tuesday, four teenage girls accosted her – shoving her, pulling out her earphones, and spitting in her face.”

This idiot is suing that idiot Braun because she was assaulted.  She paid $69 for a t-shirt that has fuzzy letters ironed on to it—letters that were arranged in the most offensive way possible.  She proceeded to walk through Union Square wearing this shirt.  Union Square.  ANY OTHER PART OF THE CITY AND SHE’D BE DEAD RIGHT NOW.  And she's suing?  Ugh.  Where’s Eric Tavulares when we need him?

Don’t send Tavulares to prison just yet.  Let’s use him to our advantage.  Let’s plop him down in front of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis one more time and then send him down to Apollo Braun’s t-shirt shop with a chainsaw and smile.  (That Apollo’s last name is Braun and he compares Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler—in fact he sells shirts that read “Obama=Hitler”—is mildly amusing to me, and I thought it worth mentioning.)

Eva Braun with her husband, Adolf Hitler (before they committed suicide).

Our environments affect our actions and beliefs.  Big fucking surprise.  I started thinking in Spanish last night.  I don’t even speak Spanish!  I was making up words in my head that sounded Spanish.  This means only one thing: I’m going to get fat eating nothing but chimichangas for a week. 

I’d get my lawyers on the line, if I were you, Junot Díaz.  You made me fat...or you will have very soon.  You put my health at risk.  The lawsuit is in the mail.