In support of gay teens

Dear America, when you tell gay Americans that they can’t serve their country openly or marry the person that they love, you’re telling that to kids too. So don’t be shocked and wonder where all these bullies are coming from that are torturing young kids and driving them to kill themselves because they’re different. They learned it from watching you. 

Sarah Silverman

Inspiration: Linked Destinies

It can be quite striking when something mundane or technical is explained with a sense of the beautiful.

In the Fall issue of the Paris Review, Michel Houellebecq talks about the inspiration for his second novel, The Elementary Particles (or Atomised):

the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982. They demonstrated the EPR paradox: that when particles interact, their destinies became linked. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they are great distances apart.

I like that.

Hope

Yesterday I watched Cinema Paradiso and enjoyed seeing it again (well, ‘again’ is a bit overstated, as it was maybe 15 years ago that I saw it). But here’s a quick hint – if you’d like to see it, try to get the original edit: the director’s cut, while it provides a new, poignant perspective on the story, is pappy soap opera. But other than that it’s a gorgeous little film about child-like wonder and teenage longing and love and hope.

Take this one scene, where Salvatore has just returned from military service, and takes Alfredo to the seaside and recalls an old story. Standing among a tangle of intertwined anchors, Salvatore tells Alfredo: ‘Now I understand why the soldier left right at the end. One more night and the princess would have been his. But she might not have kept her promise. That would have been too cruel. It would have killed him. This way, at least, for 99 nights, he lived in hope that she’d be his.’

Image: Screenshot, Cinema Paradiso