So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again.

It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,” has come to a crumbling halt.

First, about a year ago, the Large Hadron Collider (not to be confused with the Medium Hadron Collider and Omnidirectional Shower Head) went phffffff when, shortly upon whiz-banging, hydrogen began to leak from its cooling thingee, ruining a good pair of chinos and an autographed picture of Carol Channing.

Now, after months of grueling repair work by the finest minds that could be found on Craigslist, the whole epic venture to determine how matter attains mass, or why matadors go to Mass, or some such thing, I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention, has gone kablooey once again.

Turns out a piece of French bread gummed up the works.

Yes. French bread.

And that’s not the weird part.

As the narrator of this CNN piece relates:

According to two physicists, the culprit could be the Higgs-Boson Particle traveling back in time to destroy itself.

I hate when that happens.

One of those physicists, a man with three names and a thick foreign accent, and not one of those mad-scientist accents either, but more like that of a maitre’d at a bad fusion restaurant, said, “It would look as if the future has an influence on what happens today or yesterday.”

Which would explain my VISA bill. But I digress.

The narrator continued:

Dr. [THREE NAMES] says it looks like the Higgs Boson Particle may be so abhorrent to nature that it rippled back in time to sabotage the machine that created it.

But why French bread, when a bag of gummi bears would have proved just as effective? Unless Higgs Boson is a diversion, and some French saboteurs from the future have deliberately screwed things up, envious of others’ potential achievement. (You know how they get …)

In any event, judge for yourself:

I know what you’re thinking: this is CNN, and so this has to be a put-on. Or just wrong. And to be honest, French people from the future I’ve spoken to deny having anything to do with this. But they would, then, wouldn’t they? And I suppose the Belgians had nothing to do with the waffle that was found in the gene splicer at MIT’s Lab 40. Saw that on CNN too.

While Mr. al-Bishi resembles my high-school homeroom teacher in more ways than one, it’s hard to translate, never mind negotiate, certain career arcs from one culture into another.

For example, when you’re a kid, someone inevitably asks you what you want to be when you grow up. And your response is usually culled from the same trite list of cultural expectations: medical transcriptionist, mystery shopper, furniture tester … professional beheader.

You see, that last item — doesn’t quite work in, say, Queens, where the sing-song phrase “It’s all fun and games until someone puts his eye out” is every overprotected child’s peculiar form of tinnitus.

Just think about birthdays:

“Here, son — your first scimitar.” “Golly gee, Dad, that’s awesome! Can I try it out on Suzy?” “Let’s not get a-head of ourselves! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”

Ah, good fun, good times …

It’s usually at this point in our program that a giant illustrated foot comes crashing down on one and all for a quick cut to the next sketch, except, as I said, in certain cultures …

So Vanity Fair has an excerpt from Growing Up Bin Laden, by the Most Wanted’s son Omar, in which the arch-terrorist is described as having a prodigious memory, a penchant for soccer, and –

You might have guessed by now that my father was not an affectionate man. He never cuddled with me or my brothers. I tried to force him to show affection, and was told that I made a pest of myself. When he was home, I remained near, pulling attention-gaining pranks as frequently as I dared. Nothing sparked his fatherly warmth. In fact, my annoying behavior encouraged him to start carrying his signature cane. As time passed, he began caning me and my brothers for the slightest infraction.

So no one is ever going to sew the name Cuddles into his jammies. Got it.

Please, please let there not be a reality show in this, as there was with Growing Up Gotti. I might have to take my signature caning stick to the moving-picture box.

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be.
– Elizabeth Tudor, while a prisoner of her sister, Queen Mary

It’s not news that the England of Elizabeth I was peppered with “intelligencers” — domestic spymasters like Sir Francis Walsingham dedicated to sussing out threats to the burgeoning nation-state and the newly forming Church of England. This was, after all, the age of the Armada invasion, the excommunication of an English sovereign by the bishop of Rome, and power struggles and back-stabbings sufficient to inform several BBC miniseries. Moreover, England was still reeling from the societal upheavals that began with the divorce and remarriages of the queen’s dear ole dad, Hank 8; the short life of her precocious and very Protestant half-brother, Ted 6; and the ecumenical spirit of her half-sister, the half-Spanish Mary, also known as “Bloody,” not intended as an endearment. So Good Queen Bess was determined to forge order out of chaos, this by stifling dissent and intercepting assassins, traitors, and religious dissidents – among whom were both adherents of the Old Faith and those demanding further “purifying” reforms of the new.

Flash-forward to the England of Elizabeth II, where video cameras espy your every intestinal spasm, local police departments tap all manner of personal communications, and you can be tracked, surveilled, and followed for, well …

Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

Some would say this is taking the “broken windows” theory of city reclamation a bit far; others would say it was way too far. Still others would insist it was hell’s bells bloody awful double-plus too far. Only those with a vested interest in the surveillance business, or for whom poor recycling habits constitute an act of global terror, would, I believe, demur. At the very least, shouldn’t the lines between quality-of-life issues and violent crime be drawn a tad broader than they are?

And it’s pointless to introduce George Orwell into the discussion, as supporters of RIPA (no, not Kelly, but the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act) seem to have read Nineteen Eighty-four as a blueprint for good government and are convinced that the proles should never have been allowed to roam the city outskirts unescorted.

OK, OK — modern England may not be Big Brother’s country quite yet. But it’s definitely Big Second Cousin Once Removed’s.

(This just in: British bobbies can no longer say “Evenin’ all” for fear of giving offense. Makes perfect sense … on the planet Spoon …)

With the statist response to the economic collapse, it has proved no great surprise that the name Ayn Rand has peppered populist responses. Who better to animate the entrepreneurial spirit and spark individualist outrage but the creator of Howard Roark and John Galt?

Now Ms. Rand has inspired fashion, too, at least according to this from the Daily Beast:

Designers Shipley & Halmos drew inspiration from Rand’s philosophy for their fall 2009 collection, which they called The Individual as an homage. They quoted The Fountainhead in their show’s invitation (“Life must be a straight line of motion from goal to further goal.”) and sent models marching down a zigzagged runway to emphasize their unwillingness to be swayed. …

Ralph Lauren declared Rand his favorite writer (along with Ernest Hemingway) in a recent interview with Vanity Fair and a host of Indian designers have avowed their admiration as well. One, Ritu Beri, told an Indian newspaper that as of September, she’d read The Fountainhead “almost 50 times.” Another, Krishnu Mehta, also counts the book as her favorite, saying it was “written brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly.” This summer, a photo assistant for Elle urged readers to pick up a copy of Rand’s Anthem, a dystopian novella written from the perspective of fictional narrator “Equality 7-2521,” a citizen in some future socialist hellscape. “It’s a short read,” she wrote, “perfect for an end-of-summer day at the beach exercising your free will.”

A “short read.” Rand would be so flattered …

I eagerly await the advent of the “Virtue of Selfishness” china-and-flatware collection (one setting), not to mention the Objectivist smart-phone app, complete with epistemologically sound diet-point calculator.

So the Los Angeles Times has performed a public service by reassuring its readers that life as we know it will not come to a literal crashing end on December 21, 2012. So ratchet down those anxiety levels: Earth is going to be here a good long time, or at least until the morning it’s announced I’ve won the lottery . . .

Is 2012 the end of the world? … Dozens of books and fake science websites are prophesying the arrival of doomsday that year, by means of a rogue planet colliding with the Earth or some other cataclysmic event. … “Two years ago, I got a question a week about it,” said NASA scientist David Morrison. … “Now I’m getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn’t want to see the end of the world so they were thinking of ending their lives.”

Morrison said he tries to reassure people that their fears are groundless, but has received so many inquiries that he has posted a list of 10 questions and answers on the website of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (www.astrosociety.org). Titled “Doomsday 2012, the Planet Nibiru and Cosmophobia,” the article breaks down the sources of the hysteria and assures people that the ancients didn’t actually know more about the cosmos than we do.

First they cast Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in the upcoming Green Hornet movie and now the world is not coming to an end. How much bad news can one man take before he simply goes mad?

And this is bad news:

1. There goes my “See Ya, Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya” party. (My wife is gonna kill me when she finds out I maxed out our MasterCard hiring a balloon-animal artist on the lam from PETA.)
2. This is yet another setback for the Maya. Like watching the Conquistadores wipe out their civilization wasn’t bad enough, now their math is wrong.
3. Al Gore can keep the global-warming doomsday scenario going indefinitely, despite evidence to the contrary. At least when you thought the world was really ending, you knew he’d have to clam up eventually.
4. Sales of nutball books on the apocalypse will skyrocket. Yes, skyrocket, as this L.A. Times piece will be read as just the kind of “anti-endist” propaganda they were anticipating.
5. I can’t find where I put the receipt for my Gore-Tex bomb shelter with recess lighting. And Target is merciless about stuff like that.
6. You can now be accused of “cosmophobia” – a supposedly irrational fear of all the terrible things that threaten our existence, like stray comets, solar flares, or another season of So You Think You Can Dance.

The only good news here is that the Left won’t be able to claim that the End of All Things was a vast right-wing conspiracy to prevent a second term for Barack Obama. But if unemployment keeps climbing, and our foreign policy continues to resemble a round of goofy golf, the president won’t have to worry about rogue planets interfering with his agenda — he’ll blow himself up quite nicely. Assuming he doesn’t get us blown up first.

Jacques Ellul wrote that the “goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” Or, as Big Daddy put it, “Didn’t you notice the powerful and noxious odor of mendacity in this room?”

Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer responsible for the ubiquitous Obama “Hope” illustration, now admits that the AP was correct when it asserted that he had used as the basis for his image a photo by Mannie Garcia, a photographer working for AP at the time the picture was snapped.

New filings to the court, [Fairey] said, “state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used . . . and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images.”

Maybe we should cut the guy some slack. Seems he got caught up in a whirlwind of instant celebrity and didn’t want to come back down to earth — especially when the only thing standing between him and a soft landing was a gaggle of lawyers.

It should also be noted that the actual owner of the copyright remains in dispute. And Fairey remains adamant that, regardless of whose work he co-opted, the “fair use issue should be the same.”

Whatever. Until all the legal eyes are dotted and tees crossed, you might want to pass the time reading “The Art of Obama Worship” for the truth of how reverence for Barack Obama has turned contemporary artists into little more than evangelists for that most fickle of gods — change.

An “artist” (apologies, but quote marks don’t come in 72-pt. type) by the name of Ottmar Hörl (yeah, like I named him) has peppered the township of Straubing in Bavaria with gnomes. You know, those plastic humanoid thingees that populate front lawns and J.R.R. Tolkien novels.

Only these are special gnomes. Unlike your typical Home Depot variety, these gnomes deliver the Nazi salute.

What, you never had these in your garden? Philistine . . .

Professor Hörl, of the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts, tested the waters this year by displaying a 16in (40cm) golden gnome in similar pose at a local art gallery. The public prosecutor was quick to act after receiving complaints, but Professor Hörl mounted a sterling defence. “In 1942 it would have been the Nazis massacring me because of this piece of art,” he said. “I am presenting the master race as garden gnomes and that falls into any sensible definition of satire.”

(Your laugh here.)

Lucas Cranach Jr. Jr. has been spared jail time. But the Telegraph article does go on to note the alarming trend of treating Hitler and his merry band of genocidal maniacs as objects of kitschy fun. Well, I guess to gnome is to hate ‘em . . .

(Get it? Gnome, as in “know ‘em”? It’s, it’s like a pun . . . oh forget it . . .)

The late actor and comedian Red Buttons had a routine he performed regularly at celebrity roasts in which he would bemoan the fact that the guest of dishonor was being recognized by his peers when great personages throughout history went through their whole life . . . and never got a dinner.

Well, somewhat in that vein, the Nobel Committee’s website has a page dedicated to the men and women who throughout the past century have been nominated for Nobel Peace Prizes but were finally found wanting.

Some at first blush would appear to have been no-brainers, at least from Oslo’s perspective: Mahatma Gandhi, for example, or even Maria Montessori.

But some nominees should definitely be filed under I’M SORRY BUT YOU MUST SPEAK LOUDER.

Adolf Hitler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by a member of the Swedish parliament, who later thought better of it when he was warned by the Austrian minister for travel that once Hitler is invited to your country, he never leaves.

Juan and Eva Peron were both nominated, as was Benito Mussolini (no doubt for teaching East Africans better living through chemistry).

Even Joseph Stalin was nominated — twice — for his efforts to bring World War II to an end, primarily by occupying Eastern Europe.

It doesn’t seem fair that Barack Obama should have been nominated after only 11 days in office — and then actually awarded the prize — when Nevile Chamberlain, the man who secured peace in our time . . . never got a dinner.

I know, I know, the Nobel Peace Prize is delivered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. But Sweden sets the tone, and the bar, and Alfred Nobel was a Swede, and what am I going to do, stop attending the Irresistibly Ibsen Festival?

No, instead, I’m taking back that damn wall unit that threatens to collapse every time a gentle fall breeze wafts through the living room. And don’t get me started about the bookcase that confounded my next-door neighbor, whose degree in engineering from MIT was worthless when it came to crossbar B11.

A world of faux furniture has lead inexorably to a world of faux honors for faux achievements.

Who’s with me?

So there really was a Soviet doomsday device. Or so says a fascinating article in this month’s Wired magazine. What’s more — it’s still in service and periodically upgraded. (I wonder if it’s open source, like Linux? Nah.) At least this is the story from one Valery Yarynich, “a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff,” who helped build it.

Much like the gizmo that was at the center of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Perimeter (aka the Dead Hand) was intended to act as the ultimate deterrent: Even if you wipe us out, we can still retaliate.

The only problem, just as in the movie, is that the Soviets forgot to tell anyone they had the thing.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military’s extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn’t fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

Wait until General Ripper hears about this. Just so long as President Obama doesn’t, because he might want to do nothing, unlike Ronald Reagan, who did something, and look where that got us with the old Soviets. (Didn’t Reagan explode the sun or something? I could have sworn I read that in the Guardian . . .)

So Muammar Qaddafi has pitched his tent in Bedford, New York, having been kicked out of New Jersey faster than a cast member of The Sopranos.

And who will be among his neighbors in this tony Westchester burb? Why Martha Stewart, who I’m sure will be DELIGHTED to look out her picture window only to catch “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Brotherly Leader and Guide of Previously Mentioned Revolution” in her peripheral vision.

I wonder what helpful hints Martha will have for Qaddafi? Perhaps how to fold the corners of his tent in a manner worthy of an Eagle Scout, or the inestimable value of lace, or perhaps she’ll proffer a few interior-design tips to rid his dwelling of that whole scimitar motif. (How 70s! 1570s!)

My guess is that once the butcher of Lockerbie and entourage actually show their faces, the genteel residents of Bedford will storm his bivvy with such feral ferocity it will make T.E. Lawrence’s descent on Aqaba look like a skiing accident.

UPDATE: It appears Qaddafi may be squatting on none other than The Donald’s property. Assuming this is true, and Trump’s people seem to be denying it, what on earth does this mean? Is there another reality show in the offing—instead of The Apprentice, can we expect a mid-season replacement called The Henchman, in which contestants vie to become a brutal dictator’s right-hand assassin, and instead of the losers fearing the dreaded “You’re fired,” they’ll be subjected to “You’re toast”?

It’s the gift that keeps on giving . . .

Among the books worth rereading right about now is Joseph Heller’s 1979 comic novel Good as Gold—not for it political vision (which is nonexistent), or even for its literary value (which is wanting), but for its fabulous mimicry of the way daft politicians don’t say what they appear to be saying while saying what they really don’t want you to know.

Heller, best known for his manic tribute to utter futility, Catch-22, here introduces us to Bruce Gold, a minor essayist of ambiguous ideas, a reluctant college professor, and an incessant adulterer who is offered (kinda) a Cabinet position in a Gerald Ford–era White House, which will enable him to quit teaching, divorce his wife, and marry the libidinous scion of a wealthy WASP anti-Semite.

An old college friend, Ralph Newsome, now on the White House staff, is keen on getting Gold just such a position after Gold’s fairly laudatory review of the president’s fairly meaningless book, My Year in the White House, wins the chief executive’s gratitude.

But what would Bruce Gold—a self-described liberal pacifist atheist and only sometimes neo-conservative—actually do in Washington? According to Newsome: Read the rest of this entry »