Still Love Luke

From I09.com:

Star Wars: Episode VII

Definitive Joker voice actor Mark Hamill — who also apparently has some connection to Star Wars — says that nobody, including Harrison Ford, has actually signed on to appear in J.J. Abrams's Star Wars movie:

"They're talking to us. George [Lucas] wanted to know whether we'd be interested. He did say that if we didn't want to do it, they wouldn't cast another actor in our parts – they would write us out. … I can tell you right away that we haven't signed any contracts. We're in the stage where they want us to go in and meet with Michael Arndt, who is the writer, and Kathleen Kennedy, who is going to run Lucasfilm. Both have had meetings set that were postponed — on their end, not mine. They're more busy than I am."

He also says he thinks it's likely the new Star Wars movie will focus on the next generation of the Skywalker clan — something that's been rumored a few times, but still shouldn't be considered official:

"I'm assuming, because I haven't talked to the writers, that these movies would be about our offspring — like my character would be sort of in the Obi-Wan range [as] an influential character. … When I found out [while making the original trilogy] that ultimate good news/bad news joke – the good news is there's a real attractive, hot girl in the universe; the bad news is she's your sister – I thought, 'Well, I'm going to wind up like Sir Alec [Guinness]. I'm going to be a lonely old hermit living out in some kind of desert igloo with a couple of robots.'"

Finally, he discusses his hopes for the new movie's tone and feel, which includes a return to the original trilogy's use of practical effects:

"I said to George that I wanted to go back to the way it was, in the sense that ours was much more carefree and lighthearted and humorous – in my opinion, anyway. And another thing I'd want to make sure of is are we going to have the whole gang back? Is Carrie and Harrison and Billy Dee and Tony Daniels, everybody that's around from the original [returning]? I want to make sure that everybody's on board here, rather than just one...

I hope they find the right balance of CGI with practical effects. I love props, I love models, miniatures, matte paintings — I'm sort of old school. I think if you go too far in the direction of CGI it winds up looking like just a giant a video game, and that's unfortunate. … If they listen to me at all, it'll be, 'Lighten up and go retro with the way it looks.'"

Um... cool?

From I09.com:


An ‘alternative universe’ will eventually destroy ours, says Higgs researcher

Remember that Higgs-like particle that scientists finally managed to pin down last year at the Large Hadron Collider? Well, it's proving to be a harbinger of bad news. According to Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the mass of the Higgs boson indicates that "the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."

Lykken made his statements at the recently concluded AAAS meeting in Boston, and has been subsequently reported by BBC, LiveScience, and others.

The problem, says Lykken, is the potential for vacuum instability — a phenomenon that could spawn an all-consuming alternate universe within our own. But the doomsday scenario is dependant on some precise numbers related to the Higgs. Speaking to the BBC, he said: "It turns out there's a calculation you can do in our Standard Model of particle physics, once you know the mass of the Higgs boson."

After last year's Higgs discovery, he performed a calculation that indicated the potential for a quantum fluctuation — an event that would create a lower-energy state bubble that expands at the speed of light and "sweep everything before it." He predicts that it won't happen for many tens of billions of years — an era that will mark the end-stage of the Universe anyway.

"A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative' universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," Lykken said.

Clara Moskowitz elaborates:

"And finding the Higgs, if it's truly been found, not only confirms the theory about how particles get mass, but it allows scientists to make new calculations that weren't possible before the particle's properties were known.

For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton. If that particle really is the Higgs, its mass turns out to be just about what's needed to make the universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would cause it to end catastrophically in the far future.

That's because the Higgs field is thought to be everywhere, so it affects the vacuum of empty space-time in the universe.

"The mass of the Higgs is related to how stable the vacuum is," explained Christopher Hill, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It's right along the critical line. That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there's some physics that's causing that. That's something new, which we didn't know before."

Looking ahead, particle physicists will need to nail down the precise mass of Higgs. If it's even just a few percentile points off the current estimate, Lykken's hypothesis can be thrown out the window.

Pineapple Casserole

Okay, I'm going to break my streak of 100 things meme posts being about nutrition. This is the opposite of nutrition.

This one is...well... sinful.

I'm not even sure what made me think of this the other day. I haven't had it in decades. I just had the craving and a vague memory of what was in it, making google my friend.

Unsurprisingly, from what I could find, it appears to be a Southern thing. Certainly, I grew up with it in the South. Did anyone else have anything like it when growing up? We all live within our culture so it's hard to know whether something is as ubiquitous as it seems while growing up. (It being such an odd, fat-laden combo makes me think it's probably mostly Southern, so I'm curious. Anyone else have anything like it?)

I found it on a couple of sites. The more amusing write-up came from ezrapoundcake.com with:

I made another Southern spring classic, a so-wrong-it’s-right Baked Pineapple Casserole.


It’s the sort of golden mystery dish you might find bubbling away on a Southern granny’s Easter table, since pineapple goes so well with ham.

To appreciate this casserole, you have to refrain from passing judgment on its ingredients: crushed pineapple, sugar, Ritz cracker crumbs, butter and cheddar cheese. You have to accept the logic that pineapple, crackers and cheese are perfectly fine together.

Because they are.

Anyway, I splurge on my diet on weekends (you have to sometimes, right?), and since I have a craving I'm planning to make this (while attempting to reduce and/or eliminate the added sugar. Pineapple is already sweet, right?) and then discover whether I still like it. (I loved it as a kid.)

Old Fashioned Pineapple-Cheddar-Ritz Casserole (as found on DeepSouthDish.com)

• 10 oz pineapple chunks, juices reserved
• 1/8 cup of granulated sugar
• 2 tsp cornstarch
• 3/4cp cups of grated cheddar cheese
• 1/4 stick cold butter, sliced thin
• 1 sleeves of crushed Ritz crackers

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 1-quart casserole dish, or spray with non-stick spray; set aside. Drain the pineapple juice into a saucepan; set aside the pineapple. Combine the sugar and cornstarch and add to the juice. Heat over medium high, stirring regularly, until sugar dissolves and forms a syrup. Stir in the pineapple then transfer to the baking dish add 1/2 of the pineapple and syrup mixture, top that with 1/2 of the crushed Ritz crackers, and thinly slice 1/2 of the butter over the top. Sprinkle the cheese; repeat crackers and butter. Baked uncovered at 350 degreesF for about 15-20 minutes or until golden brown and bubbly.

How Not to Watch Vampire Diaries.

Hey look at all of those long leaf pines...

Waaaaait a minute. Aren't they supposed to be in Nova Scotia for this? Long leaf pines don't grow that far north...

(I garden okay ;)