Joshuah Bearman

Which Is More Upsetting?

Hammertime --:

-- or Tsim Fuckiis?

Ziegfield Girls

Don't remember where I found these, but I like them!

Chapelle Classix

Comedy Central has posted a bunch of Dave Chapelle's hip-hop related skits, a truncated archive notable not for the oldies but goodies (or for the couple stinkers), but for this weirdness:

Too soon?

A Little?

Courtesy IHG!

Ebert, in Good Form

When no interpretation is needed, simply state the facts:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys...

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, except for Starscream®, who is so ancient he has an aluminum beard.

Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror). The first American review, however, reported that it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time" (Todd Gilchrist, Cinematical). It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.

Auto-Tune The News, Late Freight Edition

I will admit: I'm still proud of the fact that I saw the Thriller in Maniller prison choreogaphy when there were only a couple thousand views. But being ahead of the intercurve isn't everything. Plus, it's hard these days. And now I've come to love it when I catch a meme that's far along, such as:

Even though it's been going for like five months now, I don't have to wait for more. I know that this first little nug was delicious and there's more waiting for me in the box! It's like TV on DVD.

RIP Swayze

My brother hit it on the nose: "What can I say? It speaks to me."

Une Voyage Dans Le Lune

I'm guess to guess that, like me, very few people have gotten far enough in the silent classic to realize that A Trip To The Moon features a battle sequence in which the parasol-toting, top hat-wearing Parisian astronauts fight off a tribe of fierce moon people!

Also note the accurate prefiguring of the real lunar missions' ocean splash downs. (In his novel, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne also happened to have made some strangely accurate predictions about man's first ascent to the Moon, such as that it would be Americans and that the vehicle would be launched form Florida. Why he would guess such a thing in 1865 is anyone's guess.)

I'm Sure I'm Behond On The Downfall Meme Going Meta

But I'm posting it anyway:

I Guess Not Animals Are Destined For CuteOverload

Witness the parasitic crustacean, Cymothoa exigua:

This nasty thing uses its claws tto dig into the tongue of the Spotted rose snapper, where it extracts blood. It's so good at this that eventually the fish's tongue atrophies from lack of blood. What does our friend C. exigua do? Replaces the fish's tongue! How? With itself!

The can use the parasite just it would its own tongue. The price of this service is more sharing. Happily for the fish, the new monster tongue switches from blood to food, thereby reducing circulatory strain. And they live happily ever after!

Weird, nifty and disgusting. Now it's up to somebody to cash in on the whole with the blog, book deal, and animated series: Cymothoa Exiguas Falling Asleep.

Via Random Thoughts, where one commented noted that the teeth on the fish look like they belong to a coffee drinking senior citizen. Photoshop? Or maybe grandpa got caught up in the mix too!

Pictures From Pakistan

The Denver Post publishes a collection of stills by Emilio Morenatti, an Italian photographer for the AP who currently covers South Asia. We hear a lot about Pakistan these days: a taliban putsch, terrorism, civil unrest, angry lawyers, madrassas, honor killings, poverty, a failed state. What I like about these pictures is that they portray these abstract ideas in situ -- on the ground, in vivid, emotional detail on the faces of real people. A single very good photo attached to one newspaper story can be effective, but taking in a couple dozen of those pictures says something about the whole that the parts can't:

View the rest here.

Preserved for Posterity

And the ensuing back-end wiki-battle.

Mexico May Be Having a Tough Year

With the Grand Guignol that is the drug-fueled civil war gripping the country. The LA Times, trying to summon the glory of its former self as a top notch international paper, is covering its backyard well, with timelines, indexes, interactive infographics, and a one-stop shop for drugs and death news. The NY Times is also on the beat, keeping apace, but generally a bit behind. Except, of course, for today's scoop, about Mexico's record-setting madness, including both the largest cocaine bust and the world's largest meatball:

Apparently, Mexico is afire with Guiness attempts. Every couple days someone is trying to make the biggest cheesecake, or bring together the largest concentration of mariachis. And not to be outdone by a bunch of Filipino prisoners, Mexico also staged the largest Thriller dance-fest:

This particular impersonator is named Hector Jackson, we're told, and to me it looks like Hector is about to eat that giant meatball while dancing. Now that would be a record!

If he can't manage the whole thing himself, perhaps he could get help from the 12,000+ dancers he managed to assemble at the Monument of the Revolution.

More pictures of Mexico's record-setting mania here.

Everyone's Gotta Make A Living

Even Moscow strays:

Russian scientists say that Moscow stray dogs became much smarter. The four legged oldest human’s friends demonstrate real smartness such as riding the Moscow metro every morning to get from their suburban places of living to the fat regions of Moscow center.

There are many more  article is from Englishrussian, the self-described "easter entertainment channel" so take all this with however many grains of salt that requires, but it goes on to describe how the dogs arrive downtown after their commutes and go to work. They use the escalators, know the stations, and cross with traffic lights out on the street when they are on the prowl for food. And perhaps because there's so many dogs in on the game that the competition is forcing the canine work force to develop new, "previously unseen dog skills," such as the “the hunt for shawarma”:

Regular Moscow busy street with some small food kiosks. A middle-aged man buys himself a piece of hot fast food and walks aside chewing it without a rush. Then just in a second he jumps up frightened - some doggy has sneaked up on him and barked out loudly. His tasty snack falls out from his hands down to the ground and the dog gets it. Just ten minutes later, on the same place, the teen youngster loses his dinner in exactly the same manner. The modern Russian dogs are on their urban hunt.

Leave It To The Japanese To Come Up With New Advances In Genetically Modified Cute Technology

A Time Elapse Twist

If only Marco Polo could have stopped in at Best Buy!

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Animals that DO Exist

I like how one of these incredible animals that actually do exist is just a really huge cat:

Some other animals that DO exist? More cats! But the real payoff is the weird scrolling message at the end: WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE. Most collections of animal stills set to music may be teenage boredom, but not this one. Baby ground sloths + really huge cats = existentialism. To that, my cousin Poochie asks: are teenage boredom and existentialism the same thing? Think about it. A fine riposte. And the answer is clear, especially, if you have recently caught the Virgin Suicides on cable, like me. Twice!

I Imagine Two Magpies, Drunk, Sitting On A Fence

Singing, "I thought I'd seen everything, till I seen a rapping competitive eater."

From pal Brendan, aka Microkahn, who notes that Eric "Badlands" Booker, raps about "his gustatory dedication, as well as the perks of being a minor celebrity." If that's not worth cutting five albums (yes!), I don't know what is. A track is provided, for your listening pleasure; it tells the compelling story of "the stress and glamour of life on the eating circuit, where Booker continues to hold seemingly unassailable records in both the burrito sprint (15 burritos in 8 minutes) and the corned beef hash throwdown (4 pounds in 1 minute, 58 seconds)."

It's Even Funnier Because The Dog Is So Scrawny

And looks so happy as she nurses red panda cubs in China:

Has It Gotten This Bad on Frontier Airlines?

There I am, on the tarmac at Denver, picking at the loose upholstery on the seat in front of me when I knock the little plastic toggle and -- BAM -- the tray table flips down to reveal a full contour ad decal. It's bad enough that just to set down my watery ginger ale I have to also consider the 100% Natural Goodness of Natury Valley Nut Clusters, but it also gets me to thinking: what does it mean for this particular airline's cash flow if they had to resort to ghetto bus stop-style ads on the tray tables? And: what the plane have to go without if the sales team hadn't sold all the rows?

Who Doesn't Love a Little Mechanical Mystery?

I recently read "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a sort of hybrid graphic-young adult novel by Brian Selznik that tells a fictionalized story revolving around Georges Méliès, the frenchman who was the first filmmaker to employ cinematic tricks in narrative. Méliès pioneered many modern special effects and was instrumental in pushing the development of film as its own medium. He made more than 500 films, one of which was A Trip to the Moon, the first science fiction flick, produced in 1904 and still remembered by the enduring image of the moon with the terrestrial rocket stuck in its eye:

Méliès, like many early filmmakers, was also a stage magician, as it was magicians who first recognized the unique power of film to create new forms of illusion. Early on, Méliès worked with Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the hugely popular nineteenth century stage magician from whom Houdini took his name in homage. And Robert-Houdin, like many magicians, was also a watch-maker, as it was also magicians who, before film, saw the unique power of machinery to create their own forms of illusions. Stage magic was often created with intricate, complicated mechanisms — technology enabled by the industrial revolution, which was seen by many at the time to be a form of magic all its own. Among the most vivid examples of that mechanical wonder were Automata: figures built to approximate the appearance and doings of living things. Automata sang; they danced; they wrote poems. One automaton was a turban-wearing turkish figured played chess, and he was pretty good: the Turk beat Napoleon, Catherine The Great, and many others.

One of the most famous automata was Vaucanson's Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, which appeared to eat little duck kibbles and then crap them out. Such a feat was enough to amaze all of Europe: Vaucanson's Duck toured for years, making Kings smile, and prompting Voltaire to proclaim Vaucanson a "new Prometheus." There is a great book called Edison's Eve about how automata like Vaucanson's Duck and other "philosophical toys" were embodiments of the Enlightenment's uneasy embrace of the Cartesian question, as master engineers seemed to be animating mechanisms into life forms.

But Vaucanson's Canard was not alive; it was a ruse with a thousand parts. The thing was an incredible piece of machinery, but it did not metabolize duck food. (The food went in one way, and the hidden cache of pre-loaded duck poop came out the other.) And the Turk turned out to be concealing a man who was actually the one beating Napoeleon and others at chess. Both mechanisms were, in essence, magic tricks, which again explains why famous illusionists like Robert-Houdin were collectors and builders of automata. Robert-Houdin's own devices included a singing bird, a tightrope dancer, a cup and balls performer (snicker, snicker), an acrobat, and a full-sized man that would write and draw. When Robert-Houdin died, Méliès wound up with many of his automata. But then Méliès went bankrupt in 1913. Not only were most of his incredible films trashed or melted down to be reshaped into boot heels for the french army (a cruel irony, since Méliès's father was a cobbler and he escaped his familial trade by realizing his dreams in magic and film and now his dreams were being glued to the soles of shoes), but the automata were also lost, donated to a museum that eventually junked them. (One of Robert-Houdin's automata and famous stage tricks was later discovered and refurbished by master magic builder, John Gaughan, whom I recently profiled for the LA Weekly. Gaughan also discovered the mystery of the Turk and recreated it over several years.)

After his bankruptcy, Méliès fell into obscurity, finding work at the Gare Montparnasse as a toy builder. This is the story of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which imagines an aging Méliès being befriended by the reprobate timekeeper's nephew who lives in the train station and has discovered one of the lost automata in a state of disrepair. A natural engineer himself, the kid fixes it, and the machine comes to life, and reveals a secret. (Spoiler: the secret is glaringly obvious.)

This is a pretty nifty idea, but even niftier is the entirely real version of the same story, which begins in 1928 in Philadelphia, when the Franklin Institute, a museum named after founding father Ben and dedicated to the "mechanical arts," received a mysterious delivery. It was an anthropomorphic brass machine, totally ruined, but intriguing because of it's apparent complexity. The Brock family who donated the mechanism said it once wrote and drew pictures. It had clearly been damaged by fire. More than that, no one knew.

Painstakingly, the machine was restored by a machinist at the Institute. The pieces were cleaned, re-fitted and pieced back together. When it was ready, the staff put down some paper, gave the thing a pen, and turned it on. The motors fired, and the automaton came to life, lowering its head to get a good look as it produced four drawings and three poems. These were elaborate sketches for an automaton, and the staff wondered who had built such a thing. And then, in the border around its final work, the automaton itself explained where it came from by writing: "Ecrit par L'Automate de Maillardet," or "Written by the Automaton of Maillardet." The secret of the draughtsman's origin had been hidden in the memory of its clockworks!



Footnote: mechanical memory restored, the automaton was forced to live a new life as a transvestite, as the staff changed its soldier boy clothes to a dress. 

Copula Mori, Part II

Just getting around to reading the Financial Times' nice piece on David Li's formula for correlating risk, the fool-proof method of mathematical certainty that in fact allowed the financial sector to underestimate risk and melt itself down.

I've written about this before, mostly because I find it fascinating that this little string of mathematical terms that cause so much damage to the world originated with the actuarial science of broken heart: people often die sooner when their spouse dies; the relationship between such seemingly unrelated events can be quantified; and Li borrowed this idea for his formula to correlate vast, much more complicated relationships, like entire markets, which are not so easily correlated. Broken hearts indeed!

The Financial Times piece does of a nice job of really explaining this -- better than the Wired piece from a few months back. First off, this one starts with Johnny Cash and June Carter. First went June and Johnny died of a broken heart four months later. Just like in a country song. And kudos to sneaking a lede like that into a financial news daily.

The hefty story also explains the context: how Wall Street had been primed for such a colossal mistake since the mid-80s when the keys were turned over to quantitative whizzes who claimed intellectual superiority and infallibility as they converting the arcane world of finance into an even more arcane world of pure abstraction. No one else could understand what they were doing enough to say: sounds fishy. And yet it was fishy. Case in point: Long Term Capital Management, the massive hedge fund run by "quant" whiz kids from MIT and elsewhere that almost punched a $2 trillion hole in the economy and had to be -- you guessed it -- bailed out.

Then, along comes well-meaning David Li, and his thoughts on "life, death, and love." His formula, and the feeling of quantitative safety it seemed to wrap around risk, single-handedly created a huge, complex, unregulated, and (it turned out) highly unstable market. That would be the derivatives full of sliced and diced mortgage backed securities and the credit default swaps that bet -- er "insured" -- them.

But the knock out punch, the article points out, was when Li's formula was incorporated into the ratings agencies' formulas for grading those fancy financial instruments. Talk about fox in the hen house. Hmmm -- let's use the same methodology as the thing we're evaluating so as to ensure we'll all be on the same page. That sounds like a super solid approach to rating!

And the rest is...well, you know. To be fair to David Li, it wasn't his fault. Back in 2005, long before the end was nigh, Li told Wall Street Journal that his model was running amok. People were using it improperly. They didn't understand it. The assumed it meant more than it did. Li's heart is the one that's broken now. He left finance and moved back to China.

Why is Joan Jett Playing Gyruss?

I'll tell you why Joan Jett is playing Gyruss. Did you ever see a movie called Light of Day? It's about two down out rock and rollers, Patti and Joe, who are also siblings — and who are also Joan Jett and Michael J. Fox. It's true. Check it:

Brian McMullen wrote me out of the blue to note that Light of Day was written — trip on this — by Paul Schrader. And the theme song? Bruce Springsteen. Why, as one of Brian's commenters points out, is Light of Day not a box set Criterion release?

The reason Brian kept me informed about his video rental of Light of Day, by the way, because of its tangential relationship to my inquiry into the Metaphysics of Ms. Pac Man. As Brian notes: 

Joan Jett plays Patti Rasnick, a rock-n-rolling single mom from Cleveland. Although her life is a mess, she finds spiritual relief in coin-op video games — especially Gyruss.

PATTI: I've been trying to live my life by an idea. You see that machine? [Pointing to Centipede.] That's an idea. Rock 'n' roll — that's an idea. All those video-game monsters, bip-bip-bip. All those bipbips are separate. No moment is any more important than another. Nothing comes together — no heaven, no hell, just moments.... I go out there every night just to hear the beat: dvv-dvv-dvv-dvv, dvv-dvv-dvv-dvv, dvv-dvv-dvv-dvv. And that's all there is, man.

This is exactly what Robert Mruczek would say about his 48-hour Star Wars marathon, or what Dwayne Richards might say about his various Nibbler attempts, or what Walter Day believes is the state of mind achieved by communion of the player with the machine. And, according to Paul Schrader, it's the same existential statement made by shredding in front of a stadium of heshers. See? Billy really is a rock star

You Say Qaddafi; I Say Gadhafi...

Everyone's favorite half-cocked Libyan leader back in the news, offering a hero's welcome to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, aka the Lockerbie jackass, and helping drive the nail into Gordon Brown's political career by talking about how such close friends they are now after they got through this difficult political time together. Most people are rightly pissed off about the Lockerbie bomber, but the right wing is also looking to make some political hay out of it, since it reminds everyone about terrorism and supposedly puts Obama in a bind now that Gadhafi (I'll choose that spelling) is coming stateside for a UN visit. Never mind that just a few years ago, America's new-found friendship with our Libyan partners against nuclear proliferation was supposed to represent a big success for Bush, whose foreign policy so terrified Ghadafi that he volunteered to give up his goods. A dubious claim to begin with, but even if true, I'm not sure that screwing up the entire Middle East is worth securing part of the Barbary Coast. But let's get back to that stateside visit. Gadhafi freaked out the New Jersey town of Englewood when he announced that he wanted to pitch his customary traveling tent there. Gadhafi, you see, only rooms Bedouin-style. Even in New Jersey. (The plan was scrapped.) So, what kind of dude is so flamboyant no hotel could contain his stylistic requirements? This type:

Guess which one is the tin pot dictator! (Please click to enlarge photo for full flamboyance.) This came from a recent Vanity Fair collection of Gadhafi sartorial highlights. Some other favorites:

No martial cap is too big for my man. And don't say that Gadhafi's closet is a one trick pony, cuz:

When in Rome, right? Or make that: when in Nome! And here's my favorite, in Dracula (circa '77, Frank Langella version) mode:

Why I Wish Josh Brolin-as-Llewelyn Moss Had His Own Weekly Film Review

Sure beats At The Movies!

A Strange and Lovely Email

From a friend. With the subject line: FROM THE BARRICADES.

In front of the market I saw a man down on his hands and knees, crawling and barking like a dog. Someone gave him a bottle of water and he doused his head as though he were on fire.

Walking into the store I watched, not with the detached eyes of the city dweller, but knowing that he is me, only down on his paws, no longer able to stand and pretend.

When I came out the medics were strapping him to a stretcher but the howling never stopped.

The Last Organ Grinder

Re: awesomeness -- nuff said?

A Long-Lost Artifact of Unspeakable Power

My friend Todd Hughes has done estate sales for years, and in the process has combed through thousands of antiques, collectibles, ephemera, valuable artifacts, junk, and just plain weird shit. Sifting through a recent pile of holographic material unearthed this incredible find:

Todd: Thought you might be able to step in and help broker a deal on it.

Me: At last -- after all these years, you finally found it! What if that thing had special powers, and the Nazis were trying to use it to win the war but you got it back from them with your rugged pluck and bullwhip!

Todd: I know. I'm afraid if I drop it it'll release its power and dimensions will be torn asunder. I'll have to select my particle cannon and start blastin...

Don't Look if You're Scared of Charlie No-Face!

A friend sent me this with no explanation.

With The Fire Threat Waning, Let Us Reconsider The Legacy of the Mt. Wilson Observatory

Praise be to the slightly moist, changing winds — they helped spare Mt. Wilson. Or so it seems for now. Deep breath taken. And now please allow me to pull from the files a feature I wrote for the LA Weekly about the Mt. Wilson observatory. It is one of the first things I wrote, and it remains a favorite, partly out of a multi-layered nostalgia: for the old LA Weekly; for the early, exciting days of a newly found writing career; and for the sheer awe of visiting the Hooker dome, which, unless you're pretending to be a science journalist from, say, the LA Weekly, is difficult to do.

In case you haven't heard on the news yet, the Hooker dome was the biggest telescope in the world for 50 years, and it's where Edwin Hubble first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding. From that came the Big Bang theory, and modern cosmology. All from right there, above Altadena. Even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit. Intrigued? Then you will enjoy:

THE GREAT DOME

Before the early film impresarios set up shop here for the constant sunshine — a full decade, in fact, before Carl Laemmle’s 230-acre chicken ranch became Universal City — someone had already noticed the light in Los Angeles. That someone was George Ellery Hale, an astronomer from back East who had developed a way to photograph the sun. Hale studied the sun daily, so he needed good light. And in 1904 he built a big version of his spectroheliograph atop Mount Wilson, about 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to take advantage of the calm air and the 300 cloudless days the area gets each year. The site grew, with four more telescopes added over the next decade and a half, the last of which was the Hooker 100-inch — then the largest in the world, and the instrument with which Edwin Hubble discovered (or proved, depending on whom you talk to) that the universe was expanding.

I moved to Pasadena in 1981 when my father took a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Mount Wilson has been with me ever since. It’s the tallest summit in our little stretch of Sierra Madres, and you can see it from the entire city. Since I was 14, it’s been framed right in the center of my bedroom window (I’m looking at it right now). My father is a physicist — to the aging crack about smarts that went, “What are you, some kind of rocket scientist?” he always responded, “Yes indeed!” — and he gave my brother and me an early start with the sciences. Next to our charts of the solar system, we had mural-sized posters of eclipses, Io’s angry volcanoes and Europa’s mottled tundra, with its zigzagging furrows. I was up on quasars, brown dwarves, pulsars, the date of Voyager II’s expected Saturn flyby. And I knew that Hubble made one of the most important cosmological discoveries, one that fundamentally changed our idea of the universe — even Einstein’s idea of the universe — right up there on Mount Wilson. There’s a canyon below the mountain, and right at the edge, hidden by a barricade of oleander, is a little platform where I liked to take girls in high school, not only because it was secluded but also because we could talk about the string of lights up on the mountain and how they gave us the universe that we know. Those lights blinked slowly over my first kiss.

Despite all this, I had never been to Mount Wilson until recently. Like most people, I assumed that the observatory no longer operated — that light pollution had rendered the telescopes ineffective decades ago. I am admonished about this on my first visit by Don Nicholson, the associate director of the Mount Wilson Institute, who explains that the Hooker and the other telescopes have been in daily use since they were built (except for an eight-year stretch when the Hooker was offline for lack of funding). A full staff continues to use the daylight to watch the sun; and the night sky, which filters through some of the world’s calmest air, affords what astronomers call good “seeing” — down to half an arc-second on some nights, a resolution that, as the convivial octogenarian Nicholson says, “makes other astronomers drool.” And lately, Mount Wilson has been home to some pioneering technologies that make the observatory as relevant as ever. Despite the smog and the encroaching city, Los Angeles still gives us a great sky.

The Mount Wilson grounds occupy about 40 forested acres atop a 5,700-foot peak that overlooks much of Southern California, from Mount San Jacinto to the Malibu hills. Its spot on the ridge is tight, almost precarious. From some points the crest becomes so narrow you’ll look south and find Catalina floating in the mist and then turn around to see the Angeles National Forest stretching off toward the Mojave Desert. From these places, the view due east is divided equally between a solid urban grid and empty wilderness.

The solar observatories on Mount Wilson are imposing towers, although the giant structures we see from the city are the nearby broadcast facilities. Together, the various spires and domes feel sci-fi: They give the impression, especially at night, of some kind of far-off research colony. People do live there, and for them there is a cluster of buildings that provides housing, a galley for cooking, and a library.

Dwarfing them all is the dome of the Hooker 100-inch telescope, which is settled on a north-facing, downward-sloping promontory that puts it out of sight of city lights. It looks like what we imagine observatories to be because it set the standard: a massive white metal cap, raised on a pedestal, with a wide arc of a door that opens to reveal the cage and optics that make the heavens visible.

The Hooker was finished in 1917, after three years of construction, and it’s built like a dreadnought — solid steel top to bottom, a massive complex of structure, supports and bulkhead doors. “They didn’t have finite element analysis back then,” Nicholson says as we enter the open floor of the observatory. “So they overengineered. They just worked it out on the back of an envelope and doubled the numbers.” The telescope weighs 50 tons and the dome twice that, and both are moving parts: While the scope swivels, the full range of the sky is reached by turning the entire dome. The reflecting element at the bottom of the scope is 9,000 pounds of wine-bottle glass from the Saint Gobain bottle works in France. It remains the largest solid plate mirror ever cast. All of this was hauled up the tortuous Mount Wilson Toll Road by burro and a few specially designed Mack trucks, which, as you’d expect of trucks built in 1917, often got stuck and required assistance from the donkeys and their drivers.

To the dismay of many visitors (including me), the Hooker, like all professional observatories since, doesn’t have an eyepiece. You can’t bend over, squint, and see Jupiter. The whole apparatus is guided electronically and mostly records data. But photographic images taken by Edwin Hubble more than 70 years ago were the basis for Mount Wilson’s most important scientific discovery. Hubble, with the help of his historically neglected partner, Milton Humason, used a spectrograph mounted at the top of the telescope to expose spectral images onto photographic plates. Over eight years, Hubble took thousands of exposures, which together revealed something extraordinary.

Hubble was measuring the distances and velocities of galaxies outside our own, and he found that all of them, in every direction, were receding from us. And the farther away they were, the faster they were moving. This relationship could be quantified, and the resulting number became Hubble’s constant. Until then, many assumed the universe was fairly static; that the firmament was fixed; that it was, had been, and always would be the same general size and shape. But Hubble proved that the universe was, in fact, expanding, and he could say how fast. One of the conventional ways to visualize the phenomenon is to imagine a balloon with dots all over it. When the balloon fills with air, the space between all the dots expands. No two dots are getting closer together. From the perspective of any one dot — or galaxies, in the case of the universe — all the others are moving away. The expanding-universe idea quickly led to the Big Bang theory: If the universe is getting bigger all the time, it must have been smaller before. In the beginning, then, it all started in one place, as one point, a singularity.

Today, technology has made Hubble’s photographic plates obsolete, but it is also giving the observatory a new lease on life. From the catwalk outside Hooker’s dome, you can see a few small silver domes poking out over the trees below. These are the components of a nearly finished stellar interferometer, which is an instrument that receives the light from multiple observatories and combines it into an image with the resolution of a hypothetical telescope that would be far too big to build. Interferometry is not new; there are many such instruments already, including an older one on Mount Wilson. But this new one, which should be fully functional this spring, will be among the world’s most powerful.

The aging Hooker, too, has been upgraded. Five years ago, it was outfitted with an adaptive optics system, which uses a deformable mirror and computers to monitor and correct in real-time blurring caused by light in the atmosphere. It undoes the stars’ twinkle to get a much sharper image. When this system is in operation, the Hooker lens will be able to get the same quality images as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Anyone with a research project can rent the Hooker at $1,800 a night and make use of its improved capabilities. But when no one else is in, the telescope carries on the age-old task of mapping the night sky. That ongoing project, called “HK” for the spectrum in which the observations are made, is in its 21st year, and is less than half finished. One night, Jim Strogan is the telescope operator on hand, taking data on the calcium flux of about 60 stars. “Depending on the time of year, you can do more or less stars,” he says as he steps onto the telescope mounts to check something out. “You take data on each one for a few minutes, and then move on.”

Astronomers live differently from the rest of us. They are true night owls, sometimes sleeping through daylight entirely. Their world goes by sidereal time, with days that are 23 hours and 56 minutes and clocks that match ours only twice a year. They think about position in terms of declination and right ascension instead of longitude and latitude. They brave the elements and, in the case of Mount Wilson, the cougars that sometimes come out of the forest to forage.

And they don’t mind isolation. The act of astronomy is a lonely activity. The people who live on Mount Wilson call the dormitory building the Monastery. Nowhere does it feel more monastic than at the desk of the scope itself, where one or sometimes a few dedicated astronomers stay up through the night to study the sky. The place is cold, cavernous and — since the lights go out when the telescope is active — very, very dark. Only the scope operator’s desk is lit, the sole beacon in the enormity of the dome, except those dim lights coming in from the sky.

There is also no noise, or any sound at all, but for the Geiger counter-like crackle of a detector on the telescope that gives audio cues to the operator. (Each pop is one photon, so the more light, the louder the crackle; when you’re right on a star, the detector’s speaker really sputters.) When the operator is working, the place is an empty, dark metal cavity, alternately silent and filled with electronic hiss, and it can be downright spooky.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why people want to be there. Although astronomy is not very glamorous — there are few “Eureka!”s and even Hubble’s discovery was built on others’ ideas — the appeal is in just being there. Strogan, for example, is a former auto mechanic and astronomy hobbyist who made it to the controls of the field’s Holy Grail, and for him there’s nothing like sitting for a night at the desk. “It’s tough living up here,” he says. “But the hard part is the downtime, when we’re not working. The fun is when we’re in here.” If you like the night sky, what better place to be? After all, when the dome opens, it really is just you and the heavens.

Which is an unavoidably impressive feeling. When I first see the door slide out to reveal the stars and an invading sliver of moonlight, I can’t help wondering if the mere sense of place influenced Hubble’s discovery: Looking out into that expanse, how could you not find an expanding universe? From Mount Wilson, it’s easy to see why the early narratives and rituals of civilization were rooted in the stars — they tell us a lot, especially now that we can add scientific understanding to superstition. The night sky, as those of us who seldom see it forget, invites both awe and interpretation. The first marvel is that the stars are really there, drifting around a universe indescribably far beyond our scale. More startling is that we actually know a lot about these things and can derive scientific, if not metaphysical, meaning from them.

This, for me, has always been the essence of Hubble’s discovery — that science constantly navigates the edge of fathoming the unfathomable. From lines exposed onto glass plates, we can deduce the nature of a cosmos that will always be outside our experience. Like relativity, or other great discoveries, that kind of intuition is sort of the cosmological equivalent of Hitchcock’s zoom-dolly shot: It puts us, uneasily, at the center of a center-less universe. Human intellect keeps revealing, in very certain detail, a universe that is indifferent to it. And that’s the rub: We learn ever more about a physical world that can be described but not fully understood. Every time science answers How? at a place like Mount Wilson, the Why? question only looms larger. As a friend rejoined after I tried to explain Hubble’s discovery: “OK, so, the universe must be expanding, because the dots on the balloon are moving away from each other. But,” — he turned, leaned in, and added with a pointed finger — “then who’s blowing up the balloon?”

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