The Good News About Mel Gibson
by Frank Rich
The New York Times
July 16, 2010
For Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy”s couldn”t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations “” at once a worthy rival to Hollywood”s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson”s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy”s good character.
The Gibson tapes “” in plain English and not requiring the subtitles of some of the star”s recent spectacles “” are a particularly American form of schadenfreude. There”s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson”s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there “” just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan “” were it not for Gibson”s unique back story.
Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn”t take those changes for granted. We should take stock “” and celebrate. They are good news.
Read the rest of this Op-Ed piece here.
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? “A bit of baguette,” says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
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R. Crumb, a pioneer of underground comics, got his start drawing illustrations for greeting cards.
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