Thursday News In Review

We're going to keep it light and easy this week as something has gone horribly wrong with my left ear. The ear canal swelled shut last night. I almost didn't do one of these News in Review posts today because of it but there's only so much laying around and remarking that your ear hurts that you can do before you have to just get on with things. Especially when you're home alone anyway.


Crackpot End of the World News:

And what a week it's been in crackpot end of the world theories! This week, physicists Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya published suggesting that the reason the Large Hadron Collider didn't work was that the Universe or God or the Higgs Boson particle travelling through time wouldn't let the device work. Because we can't be allowed to know something like that. Not even kidding. I guess we must be careful not to sail too far into the depths of knowledge or we might fall of the edge of the science.
In all fairness, I should probably add that the theory seems to have been roundly guffawed and scoffed at.
Also this week, the first device to create a black hole for light only was created at Purdue University. The device, a tabletop black hole, mimics black holes and may be able to harvest solar energy in a very new and different way. So far time travellers have not shown up to stop that device.


Recanting News:

The Vatican announced that they are about to hold an exhibition of artifacts from the life of Galileo in celebration of the 400th anniversary of some portion of Galileo's life or other. Of course you'll remember that the Catholic church branded Galileo as a heretic in his own lifetime for proving that the Earth travels around the sun, building upon the theories of Copernicus and ultimately proving it with his instruments. In further embarrassment, it took until 1992 for Pope J2P2 to proclaim that the church had been in error.


Classical Music News:

Gustavo Dudamel, the classical music rock star and partial reason why the west coast of America seems to rule classical music at the moment, is accepting the the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protege Prize. This is big news for me who has Dudamel at the top of my "what famous living person would you like to meet" winning a prize named in honor of a man who is my first choice of "what historical figure would you most like to have dinner with if there were brought back from the dead in a new or repaired body." One must be specific in those hypotheticals.
Dudamel, you will remember, is the brand new music director of the LA Philharmonic and one of the great contemporary hopes for making classical music cool without whoring it.


Late Burial News:

Also this week in taking a long time to right historical wrongs, Edgar Allan Poe will be given a proper funeral this weekend. About 160 years ago the funeral of Poe lasted 3 minutes, no one showed up and the pastor didn't think it was worthwhile to even give a sermon. This weekend, Baltimore will host a ceremony with hundreds in attendance to honor the great American author.


Wow, sorry kids. That's really all I can work up this week. I'm going to go ice my ear and take some Tylenol.
Also this week in news I didn't get to, a kid wasn't found in a balloon, Rush Limbaugh didn't buy into the St. Louis Rams, Italy claims it didn't give money to the Taliban, and music group A-Ha are finally breaking up after 25 years. There you go. You can look them up for yourself. Next week we should return to our normal News in Review provided I'm no longer in crippling pain.