Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

This weekend marked the opening of Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s take on the 1978 original movie Inglorious Bastards. Yes he changed the spelling. The movie centers around a group of American Jewish soldiers led by non-Jewish, part-Apache Southerner Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt puffing out his jaw to look like Marlon Brando, yeah right. “The Basterds” are famous throughout the Third Reich for scalping and/or bludgeoning Nazis. Of course, it never happened: It’s an unabashed wet dream of vengeance, as they hunt Nazi scalps in German occupied France.

The movie is divided into five chapters.
Chapter One: Once Upon a Time … Nazi Occupied France
Chapter Two: Inglorious Basterds
Chapter Three: German Night in Paris
Chapter Four: Operation Kino
Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face

This is the ultimate revenge movie set within a myth of its own. If you like QT’s other movies: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill 1 and 2, and his last, Death Proof, then you will enjoy his latest. QT’s inner mind works overtime as his genre mixing and history bending skills are at their best. I enjoyed the long drawn out scenes where each character speaks volumes without saying a word. This is very reminiscent of Hitchcock, where the scene builds and builds, with each turn of the screw, up to its eventual climax.

The interrogation scene at the French farm is a much-needed emotional release following the overture, which grounds Inglourious Basterds in the real world—at least through the lens of cinema. To the beat of Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western music, a French farmer watches a jeep filled with Nazis travel the road to his house as he chops wood with his daughter. Close-ups of his anxious face alternating with long shots of the vehicle coming nearer and nearer, his eyes meeting those of his three terrified daughters—the sequence comparing favorably to both Leone and Hitchcock. What follows is an unnervingly polite interrogation over a kitchen table by Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz.

As the camera begins to circle and Landa moves in for the kill and this good farmer edges ever closer to betraying the family he has bravely hidden, each dramatic beat is brings us closer to the final climax. This is what I enjoy most about the movie. Long scenes that are expertly developed and have dialogue dripping with sub-text that adds just the right amount of seasoning to the main plot point of the scene. We know something is going to happen, but every time we venture a guess, the plot turns and we frantically realize we were wrong. Keeping the audience guessing on the edge of their seats is what GREAT WRITING is all about. Of course, The Atomic Writer strives to achieve this very effect in all he writes, but let’s get back to this discussion. Leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation, as they bite their nails immersed in concentration, waiting for the shoe to fall, is what QT does best. I won’t go into the other excellent scenes like this, I’ll leave for you, my readers, to visual enjoy…

And we must not forget Mike Myers, as the British General who outlines operation Kino. I almost lost it, and fell off my seat, during the first close up of Mike Myers trying to play it straight. I kept thinking he was going to bust into an Austin Powers skit at any moment.

Here’s a snippet of the script:

This movie is well worth seeing whether you are a QT fan or not. Hey, if The Atomic Writer likes it, then you will too.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Pulsars are the most energetic objects known in the universe. They can accelerate photons close to the speed of light. And if you know a little science, or have been reading The Atomic Writer, you know close to the speed of light means close to the speed of altering the fabric of space and time. Could pulsars, the remnants of once powerful stars, be gateways into other universes, other dimensions, or even portals of time travel?

The FERMI Gamma ray telescope recently launched by NASA, has in only 5 months discovered 16 new pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes. Most of the 1,800 cataloged pulsars were found through their periodic radio emissions. Astronomers believe these pulses are caused by narrow, lighthouse-like radio beams emanating from the pulsar’s magnetic poles.

The Vela Pulsar spins 11 times a second. It is the brightest most consistent source of gamma rays in the sky.

This movie shows one cycle of pulsed gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. The movie includes data from August 4 to Sept. 15, 2008. The bluer color in the latter part of the pulse indicates the presence of gamma rays with energies exceeding a billion electron volts. For comparison, visible light has energies between two and three electron volts. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

A pulsar’s radio beams only represent a fraction of its power. The gamma rays they emit represent far more. Somehow the pulsar is able to accelerate particles to near the speed of light along magnetic field lines. These particles emit gamma rays as they arc along these magnetic lines.

Eventually pulsars will lose energy and slow down. The radio and gamma emissions will drop below detectable levels unless a new source of energy is found. Some pulsars live near younger energy spewing stars and the pulsar is able to siphon off this energy, in the form of highly charged particles, and this fuels the pulsar to keep it spinning faster and faster.

If we take this one step further and speculate a bit: what if a pulsar, fueled by a neighboring star, spins fast enough to accelerate particles at the speed of light. Not close to but at or above the speed of light. Could this be enough energy to open a wormhole? To tear open the fabric of space to allow travel into the 5th dimension, where theoretically time travel could occur.

Could the power of this pulsar be harnessed and used as a source of energy? Could an advanced intelligence place a spinning pulsar next to a star and then travel across the universe and place another pulsar in a similar arrangement? We would have two high speed wormhole portals? Enter into one, and arrive almost instantaneously in the other? Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it.

Take a gander at the latest all sky map of the newly found FERMI pulsars.

Sorry for spilling out over the side, but the thumbnail image just didn’t look right. You, my dedicated readers, deserve the full sized image.

FERMI has already discovered many GRB’s or gamma ray bursts, up in the sky, but now has confirmed the existence of 16 new pulsars never before detected. How many more are out there waiting to be discovered? Up until FERMI, radio astronomer’s were only able to see a pulsar if one of its poles happened to cross Earth’s line of sight. FERMI detects the highly charged photons they emit but in some cases only detects a few per minute. Yes, only a few tiny photons per minute. But with such a sensitive instrument what discoveries may lie ahead?

Perhaps FERMI will detect light (photons) from another world, another dimension, or the light of days past. Perhaps it will peer into another large area telescope from an intelligent race of people who search the heavens for evidence of others like themselves. No one wants to be alone. We all struggle to maintain a sense of belonging to a greater cause, a larger humanity; even if it is only a faint spot of light flickering at the end of the tunnel we call life.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer