A popular (and quite enjoyable) New Year's tradition in Austria is that of Bleigiessen, meaning "lead spirits" in English. In the waning hours of the old year, each participant melts a lead figurine over a candle and then tosses (individual techniques and strategies vary, but I'm a fan of a violent flick of the wrist) the molten metal into a pot of cold water, where it solidifies into its final guise. This unique artifact supposedly grants good luck to its creator for the new year and some say that a legendary Bleigiessenmeister can even preform metallurgical prognostication based on the item's shape.

For a short time I wondered why Wachsengiessen (wax spirits) wasn't a viable alternative. I mean, wax can be shaped into figures, melts easily, and will certainly solidify when cooled, so why not? Throwing tradition and forethought to the wind I gave it a try and it turns out there is a very good reason no one does Wachsengiessen. Wax floats! A flat pancake is invariably created on the surface of the water by the ritual! I earnestly hope that I am not now haunted by enraged, Germanic spirits.

But before being concerned with what is yet to come, yet us linger on times already passed. Winter's grip on the land intensified in the last few days and so in the spirit of doing as little as possible during the holidays my brother, cousin and I bunkered up in the basement with our woodstove, some videogames and a bunch of terrible movies. We may be the first people to ever watch all three Santa Clause movies in a row (it's a diabolically mind-rending task). Our slack-a-thon also included Christmas favorites Jingle All the Way, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Believe it or not, these movies were actually a step up from Dungeonmaster/Ragewar and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra that my brother and I watched earlier this week. Between films we enjoyed the masterfully crafted and surprisingly challenging barrel-filled antics of Donkey Kong Country Returns.

I also managed to play through Link's Awakening in the past week. Although its system for assigning but two of the items in your arsenal at a time to buttons now seems barbaric, the game still is quite enjoyable. At first Link's quest in this game seems to be a pretty normal affair wherein he will tromp through a few dungeons and gather a set number of some item (mystical instruments in this case) by smashing a boss in each of these locales in order to achieve some final goal (waking the legendary Windfish). Yet as he goes about this task he receives the cryptic musings of a strange owl and warnings from the bosses (dubbed Nightmares) he slays about "waking from the dream" and the island being an illusion created by the slumber of the Windfish. It's quite poetic. The Windfish himself though looks a bit like a whale whose owners make him wear the most ridiculous clothing and ornamentation that they can find. Look at his eye. Does that look like a happy aquatic mammal to you?

Tal Tal Heights has some incredible music too.

Well, I've been promising him for a while now and he's really only a villain in vaguest sense, but without further ado I present Aresene Lupin III!

Lupin III is an infamous rogue, insatiable scoundrel, and the world's greatest thief. Hounded across the globe by Inspector Zenigata, Lupin seeks out adventure and challenge to his ability as much as wealth and treasure. I may have mentioned that some of my previous villains had some skill in impersonation, but Lupin is the unparalleled master of disguise. His guile is world-renowned and his only weakness is for the beautiful Fujiko, a sometimes-friend-sometimes-enemy who usually attempts to exploit Lupin's soft spot for her by grabbing the goods at the last minute. Lupin can't really be considered evil and his attitude and debonair make him the prince of gentleman thieves. And did I mention his fantastic theme song?

Merry Christmas! Well, almost.

Gamefaqs just recently completed its Game of the Decade contest, determining by popular vote that the greatest game to come out between the years 2000 and 2010 was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. I have no desire at all to disagree with this assertion, but picking a single game is far too difficult for me. On the other hand, if I had to name the best five games of the decade I would put forth Majora's Mask (2000), Paper Mario (2001), Metroid Prime (2002), Windwaker (2003), and Mother 3 (2006). 

There is a certain manga that I truly love, its title is Mudazumo Naki Kaikaku, and its awesomeness knows no bounds.

The man on the cover is the manga's protagonist, Junichiro Koizumi, actual former prime minister of Japan. You see, this manga proposes a world exactly like the our own, except that throughout history political disputes were handled not through diplomacy, but through mahjong (an oriental gambling game that can perhaps best be equated to bridge or poker). Ridiculous special attacks and famous world leaders appear (Bush Senior, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, and even The Iron Lady to name a few) and each is more badass than the last (except Sarkozy, who is often the butt of jokes). Even Pope Benedict gets in on the action. Prime Minister Koizumi's ultimate technique is the Rising Sun (it has been animated as well), and combined with his many cheats and bluffs he fights valiantly for the Japanese people.

Who better to be the villain of this series (and consequently of this post) than one of history's most evil leaders: Adolf Hitler.

I will not speak of Hitler's historical atrocities, but only of his additional actions within the manga. Instead of committing suicide, Hitler escapes Germany by way of submarine to fight again another day. Cardinal Ratzinger accidently aids the tyrant's flight and vows to defeat him after he ascends to the position of Pope Benedict. Hitler bides his time, and ends up establishing the Fourth Reich on the Moon! To stop him from destroying the entire Earth, the Group of 8 sends its elite mahjong players to defeat him and his Nazi cohorts. Of course, being one of the most evil despots of all time, Hitler's mahjong prowess is unprecedented; the Fuhrer's ability is such that he need not even play a hand to win it, he can see the very fabric of reality and know what events will unfold. Worse yet, when taxed he can take the form of the legendary Super Aryan, capable of untold mahjong feats. Koizumi and his political companions are currently locked in furious battle against the menace of Hitler with the fate of the free world in the balance!

Anyone who saw the lunar eclipse yesterday (the first during the winter solstice in about 500 years) may have noticed that as the Moon disappeared it seemed to take on a reddish hue. So why did this happen? For the same reason that the sky is blue during the day and red during sunset/sunrise: Rayleigh Scattering. Please refer to my handy diagram.

Handy Diagram

Ignoring the terrible proportions, due to the position of the Sun the man in the top hat is experiencing day and the couple on the "top" of the Earth are watching the Sun set or rise. The white light from the sun travels straight and contains all the colors (wavelengths) in the visible spectrum, but upon striking the particles in our atmosphere it scatters by a process called Rayleigh Scattering. As indicated, the shorter the wavelength of the light, the more it will scatter, and since blue has a shorter wavelength than other colors in the visible spectrum it will scatter the most, making the sky appear blue for our top-hatted gentleman. This also means that the unscattered light that passes straight to our couple will be weighted towards the orange/red end of the spectrum, producing a brilliantly colored sky. But what about the the eclipse? Examine now the dandy diagram.

Dandy Diagram

Although the diagram isn't exactly what one would call "to scale," it gets the job done. Arranging our celestial bodies for a lunar eclipse, we see that the light that does get to the Moon (before totality) has to pass barely around the Earth and hence through its atmosphere. This sunlight will have had much of its blue/green light scattered away, explaining the reddish appearance of the Moon during an eclipse.

My brother and I have been on a movie-watching rampage the last few days. We started with Steven Chow's hilarious and extreme Kung Fu Hustle, and continued our marathon with Home Alone 2 (featuring Donald Trump and Tim Curry, more on him later) and Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro (I'll do Lupin eventually, I swear!). Our most unique selection was surely the mystifyingly ponderous "Valhalla Rising". I am sad to report that the movie's title is, incredibly enough, less self-important than the film itself. The Scandinavian epic combines about 30 seconds of the most brutal violence you will ever see depicted, perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue, 45 minutes of men staring at clouds and 30 minutes of those very same men lost in clouds. Yet despite all this I can't bring myself to call the movie bad. It actually did manage to entertain and confuse me during its excruciating runtime.

Of course these all pale in comparison to the incomparable Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, that my entire family watched the last night. If I had to pick just one part of the brilliance we just witnessed to share, it would have to be the King Caesar summoning song. Magical, truly magical.

I promised more about Tim Curry, and I shall deliver. Today's villain is Hexxus.

Super-polluting fiend of Fern Gully fame, Hexxus is a pretty unique villain in that he doesn't want to steal, conquer or benefit any nefarious scheme in any way. His only goal is destruction, and lots of it. Maybe this diabolical musical number will help clear up his motivations. Seriously though, this guy is nasty. He appears to be composed only of the most noxious smogs, gunkiest goos, and slimiest sludges, each infused with more evil than the last. Sadly after a horrifying transformation into a blazing obsidian skeleton cloaked in corrupting ooze, he is defeated by the movie's strongest (and the world's lamest) forces: flowers and love. 

The last few days have been spent enjoying all the usual luxuries of being home during the holidays: roaring fireplaces, delicious spaghettis, and slapdash lamp repair.  Somehow a magazine article about Chromatic Polynomiels also found its way into my hands. And while my attempts to sate a certain canine's ravenous appetite for retrieval have been futile, my thorough search of all the house's dusty bookcases has yielded an enviable bounty. I'll returning to Davis with quite a few additional books in tow.

Good news struck today when the trailer for the new Ace Attorney game was revealed: check it out here if you are interested. It seems that logic and evidence will fly amongst another cast of new and interesting characters. Yet, if you watch the end of the trailer very closely you might notice the subtle and titanic return of a notorious assassin known only as Shelly De Killer.

Today's villain is as dangerous as he is devious and his past is shrouded in as much blood as mystery. The peerless assassin of the Phoenix Wright world, Shelly De Killer has been at the bottom of innumerable murders and has evaded capture on countless occasions. A noble hit man, De Killer leaves his famous calling card at the scene of his crimes and is perfectly faithful to his employers...unless they foolishly attempt to betray him. As you ponder the grave implications of his return to the series, listen to his haunting theme, fittingly entitled "The Whim of a Murderous Gentleman."

Christmas has an ambience like no other holiday; every year just after Thanksgiving, when we are weak and lazy from food and revelry, it comes thundering down from the North Pole like a jolly blitzkrieg on our senses. People erect trees in their houses, surround any static object with colorful lights, and bake wonderfully hearty dinners and tasty sweets. The delicate smells of pine, mint and ginger hang in the air for weeks on end. The sounds of Christmas are also unique; in fact, Christmas music is inescapable this time of year, like it or not. Sadly all that jingles is not gold, and some artists attempt to hide nightmarishly bad songs behind a holiday label. So should be forgive these terrible songs their trespasses given the time of year? Absolutely not! Christmas does not preclude criticism, and with this in mind, I now present the two worst Christmas songs that I have ever heard.

The Christmas Shoes- An unbelievably cloying and nauseatingly sappy dirge about a boy trying to buy his dying mother a pair of shoes. If by some Herculean feat of mental fortitude you make it to the three and a half minute mark in this pathetic festival of corniness called a song, your remaining strength, along with any doubt that the track deserves more criticism than the English language is capable of leveling at it, will immediately be evaporated by the most heinous of saccharine inclusions: a children's choir. My investigation unearthed that soul-chilling fact that the song was adapted first into a book and later that a movie had even been made based solely on this woefully terrible song.

Wonderful Christmas Time- Just as bad as the last, but for completely different reasons. This song attempts to sound "happening" and "fun", but comes off as obnoxious, disoriented and despondent. Techno beats and meandering synthesizers punctuate each mislaid bar of music as the vocalist provides all the mournful enthusiasm of drugged patient about to have his spleen removed. I'm also pretty sure that when Paul McCartney realized that this abomination sounded like an amalgam of half-baked Garageband themes and nothing at all like a Christmas song, his brilliant solution was to shove sleigh bells into the background of the whole freaking song. Worst of all, it's almost impossible to shop in December without being assaulted by the concentrated tripe that is Wonderful Christmas Time.

During my visit to Lexington these past few days the area was stuck (not in the aluminum bat sense, more like with a pillow half-filled with down) by a snow storm. We got about 4 inches of very powdery flakes. By the way, it just occurred to me to see if Eskimos really do have lots of words for snow: they don't! It kinda smelled like one of those popular things people just hear and repeat with no one fact-checking along the way. I'm glad my senses did not deceive me.

Today's villain will be a bit of a non-sequitur, so throw your train of thought to the winds and examine with me the fascinating personage of Don Paolo!

He sports handlebar hair as well as a handlebar mustache (so evil!), and as Professor Moriarty is to Sherlock Holmes, Don Paolo is to Professor Layton. Paolo's genius is second only to Layton's, and he possesses the engineering prowess of Da Vinci (emulating his designs) and his mastery of disguise surpasses even that of Lupin III (in that one is only safe if he assumes at all times that everyone around him is Don Paolo in disguise). Lupin will certainly be the subject of a later post. Strangely, beyond his appearance and obvious desire for the label, it's unclear precisely why Don Paolo is considered evil.

Well, following a delicious round of sayonara sushi (the official title was something along the lines of Salaciously Succulent and Stupendously Sacrosanct Sayonara Sushi, but much of it has been lost to history), I have departed Davis and returned to Virginia. The trip was largely uneventful except that I went from lows of 55 to lows of 15 (with 25 mph winds, naturally), and spent my time in the air reading this. My verdict so far? Mediocre. Things picked up a bit around Iowa, but if my mode of travel hadn't mandated that I not move at all for 8 hours, well, I would have done something else with my time.

I'll be in Lexington on Wednesday through Friday to meet up with some friends and hang out with my brother. If you happen to be one of the aforementioned, prepare to be met!

At once debuting a new feature on the blog and in keeping with our holiday theme, I am now proud to present (in no particular order, barring the last)
THE BLOG OF MANY THINGS BIG 'OLE LIST #1: 
GREATEST CHRISTMAS MOVIES EVER

Dr. Suess's How the Grinch Stole Christmas

I think I've already said all that needs to be said here, but note that the Grinch's heroic moment is now on youtube for those of you left wanting more from my earlier post. 

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Peanuts always strikes close to home, and this holiday rendition is no exception. The animated feature chronicles the misadventures of a depressed and distraught Charlie Brown, trapped in a sort of middle-aged Christmas crisis. The overall atmosphere is unforgettable. 

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Unconventional to say the least, Tim Burton's masterpiece tells the tale of a band of Halloween misfits who seek to transcend their own holiday and take over Christmas as well! The animation is iconic, and the yuletide antics of Jack Skellington are not to be missed.

The Santa Clause

A Tim Allen movie based entirely off of a half-cooked pun that involves a divorced father in a custody battle for his son when he accidently becomes Santa and everyone around him thinks he going crazy!? Yup, looks like we've entered the dubiously good Christmas Comedy section of the list! Just look at the HILARIOUS way that E dangles on the end of the title! Comedic gold. Seriously though, the corny/absurd plot is what makes this movie a classic!

Jingle All the Way

Can you go wrong when Arnold and Sinbad team up for a Christmas-based comedic slapstick extravaganza? Of course not. The ultimate Christmas confrontation features the two duking it out to see who will win a coveted Turbo-man action figure for his son. Love is on the line! (aside: How in the sweet Virgin Mary is that guy my governor!?)

Home Alone

The comedies keep on rolling with the well-known and imaginative Home Alone. It's filled to the brim with memorable scenes like this. And who doesn't remember fondly the terrible tortures that the two bumbling bandits endure at the hands of the surprisingly competent and frankly sadistic Macaulay Culkin? Seriously though, those guys should be dead. 

A Christmas Story

Don't shoot your eye out while watching this all-time classic. Its another christmas-quest film, and this time the ultimate treasure hanging in the balance is a Red Ryder BB-gun.

The Awesome Rankin/Bass Christmas Movies

Probably best known for their famous Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer animation, the super-prolific Rankin/Bass also produced The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, Jack Frost, Frosty the Snowman, and my personal favorite The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, in which St. Nick gets an origin story complete with magic and demons! Their songs tend to be great too.

Miracle on 34th Street

A nearly (due to the last entry on the list) unsurpassed Christmas classic. Touching and magical, it all comes down to a thrilling courtroom climax, where a lawyer ends up in the precarious position of proving that his client is in fact the real Santa Claus!

It's a Wonderful Life

Now and forever the king of all Christmas movies, It's a Wonderful Life tells the tale of the down and out George Bailey who dares make that bold statement that he wishes he had never been born. To change his mind, the angel-in-training Clarence takes George on a now legendary journey into a nightmare world in which he had never existed. Heartwarming and unforgettable, this movie reminds us all why it's so great to be alive. 

And since we need a villain, why not use the evil Henry Potter?

Antagonist of It's a Wonderful Life, Potter is a heartless real estate tycoon whose only response to a jovial, "Merry Christmas" would be to raise your rent. Intent on driving George Bailey's Building and Loan out of business, Potter takes advantage of the absent minded Uncle Billy, steals most of the company's assets and accuses the innocent George of bank fraud. Worse yet, in the scenario where George was never born, Potter does what any unchecked evil genius would do...he names the whole town after himself!

I managed to snag food at local burger place Murderburger earlier this week. The city of Davis, known for its incessant fastidiousness and generally sticking its nose where it isn't wanted, mandated that the restaurant change its name years ago, so the owners simply reversed the first six letters forming Redrumburger. Of course, no one calls Murderburger by the artificially imposed name that is bares on its signs and legal documents; after eating there but once, I too now bear Murder in my heart.

A appreciate everyone who has helped keep me appraised of the Orioles acquisitions lately, as I've been a bit confined for time. They will certainly be a fun team to watch this coming year.

A quick list of pun-derived fantastical creatures (hopefully to be augmented later):
-Dungeoness Crab: An evil shellfish that lives beneath the darkest of castles
-Veracious Tiger: Huge, predatory cat that cannot tell a lie
-Argyledillo: An ugly, ugly beast that is hunted for its rare hide

I'm finally done with my work for the semester, and will soon be heading home to Virginia for Christmas. These last few days were incredibly busy, but really show that like any language, you can learn a TON about Physics if you immerse yourself in it and do virtually nothing else for an entire week. My Mechanics and Math Methods finals were pretty easy after gorging myself on information, and I also ran a review session for my Intro Physics students that basically involved me solving problems on a blackboard nonstop for two and a half hours. After this session my officemate said that I came into the office, "with a cloud of chalkdust billowing behind me." But what would a Physics marathon be without a climactic end? A finale for the ages? A test to end all tests? Today's villain provided this apt conclusion, and his name is Hsin-Hia Cheng:

Don't let that smile fool you. In the above picture, Professor Cheng is no doubt plotting the demise of the photographer who dared to capture him on film while at the same time calculating the spin precession of a graviton in a relativistic, time varying magnetic field in the frame of the simultaneous angular momentum and energy eigenstates of a n-dimensional quantum mechanical oscillator. You see, this man is brilliant and as such his lectures are fantastic, but his genius comes at a cost. They say that baseball great Ted Williams was a terrible hitting coach; he just couldn't understand why other players couldn't simply hit the ball. Similarly, Cheng has trouble understanding why his students can't immediately leap joyfully from answer to answer, shrugging off immense complexities and penetrating the very ineffable shrouds that baffled even the greatest minds in history. Anyway, Professor Cheng is my Quantum Mechanics professor (I shudder with a certain masochistic glee to report that he fill the same role next semester) and the reason he is today's villain is because he dropped a bomb of a final exam on us yesterday. The exam was handed out at 3:30 in the afternoon and he claimed that we would "easily" finish within 2 hours. I understood what was on the test, and yet I worked on it (without pause) until 2:00 in the morning. Most people gave up earlier, but some forged on through the night. One problem in particular was especially unbelievable. Let me put it this way; take another look at the blackboard behind the maniacal smirk of Cheng: just the answer (less the pages upon pages of derivation) to the first part of this problem would not fit on TWO such blackboards.

Yesterday, a review session for our classical mechanics course was held in preparation for the final. At one point our conversation about angular momentum and angular velocity was derailed by a heated disagreement about the orientation of these two vectors for an airborne football. What you might not realize is that, for such simple scenarios, discussions can get quite aggressive among people who take an enormous amount of pride in their physical understanding. Eventually the two camps were able to glean enough of the "enemy's" arguments over the shouting to realize the origin of the problem was a disagreement about the inertia tensor (basically a matrix that contains the information about where mass is located in an object). This stopped us short and immediately led to the query: what kind of football was in question? It turns out that roughly half of Physics graduate students are either international, and thus thought we were discussing what Americans call a soccer ball, or are from America but are so detached from the world of sports that they actually don't know the shape of an American football. Despite these embarrassments, this resolution meant that all of our physics was correct. The final peace accords were lain down over chinese food. I had some deliciously fiery Mapo Tofu.

We'll I'm off to check out amazon for a Christmas present for my brother. I have ideas, but he probably wouldn't be happy to open a box full of plans.

And since we're in the Christmas spirit, you should expect several holiday villains during this merry month. I'll start with one of the all-time greats, the Grinch!

The eponymous villain of Dr. Seuss's famous How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch's name immediately evokes his grouchy, joy-sucking, fun-destroying personage. What really sets Seuss's green fiend apart from other holiday haters is his devotion; not content to simply grumble to himself about the cheer of others, the Grinch actually attempts to annihilate the holiday that is the cause of his woes! In blatant mockery of the entire gaudy affair, the Grinch garbs himself as Santa and ironically enters through chimneys and extracts presents, employing an excellent song during this process. Of course in the end the story is one of redemption and, the Grinch perched precariously at the very peak of Mt. Crumpet, he has a moment of revelation documented by what literary scholars agree is one of the most legendary couplets in the English language:

 "And then the true meaning of Christmas came through,

and the Grinch found the strength of ten Grinches, plus two!"

We all know that the next World Cup will be located in Brazil and in the next 24 hours we will learn the locations of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. It seems as though Europe will be hosting the games in 2018 as the only remaining contenders for that year are England and Russia with joint bids from Spain/Portugal and Netherlands/Belgium. The competition for 2022 will prove more interesting as the US and Australia probably have the most legitimate shot at becoming the hosts, with South Korea, Japan and even lowly Qatar also in the mix. Current scuttlebutt holds that Russia has 2018 locked up, as Putin has confidently declined an invitation to further sway the Cup committee in person. Hopefully the strong showing by the Americans combined with the rather pathetic performance by the Australians in this year's tournament will shift the selection in our favor for the more distant World Cup.

I mentioned yesterday that I had more to say about the music from the Legend of Zelda series and I typed truthfully when I did so. I have anecdotes aplenty on the subejct; why, just the other day I heard a girl playing Epona's Song on her phone in the Physics building. I could go on about all the recognizable songs in the series, like Saria's Song, Zelda's Lullaby, or the Main Theme, but I'm personally more partial to the more eerie tracks like the Song of Storms, The Dark World Theme, and much of the music from my favorite game in the series, Majora's Mask. In my opinion, The Song of Healing is the greatest of all the Zelda songs. If you have played Majora's Mask, then you know that the emotional impact of its simple, haunting tune is unparalleled. Of course, these are by no means the only good Zelda songs, but if I was only allowed to post one more Zelda-music oriented link, it would have to be this one.

Expect more information about video game soundtracks at a later date.

Homework is done for the week, so now the studying for my finals will begin. Given the amount of time I have to prepare I don't find myself too worried; the mysteries of Clebsch-Gordon coefficients will be resolved soon enough. My main problem right now is running through all the gouda cheese in the fridge; so far I've topped pasta with some and made grilled gouda sandwiches.

A villain, you say? Well, I suppose I can scrounge one up. No pictures exist anywhere in the world of this man, so I had to create a likeness. Behold my rendition of Fernando Sanchez!

The image that I quickly crafted, while crude, captures Fernando's main features: his armor, his diabolical facial hair and his four eyes that just so happen to be gemstones. Fernando's tale begins with that of Kolmox, the four-eyed god and forgotten deity of the Isle of Talon. Legend tells that after the creation of the world, Kolmox saw that it was lacking, forged the island with fire and magma and then watched over his land and its peoples for eons. Slowly though, Kolmox's followers abandoned him in favor of new ways, and with the last of his waning consciousness he selflessly scattered his eyes (and the power they contained) across the island to preserve it for eternity. The evil cleric Fernando heard these tales and set out for the island intent on stealing the eyes for his own machinations. To achieve his goal Fernando wrecked a ship upon the isle, killing most of its passengers and crew, and then proceeded to con his way around the continent and wade his way through the blood of those who opposed him, gathering the four eyes of Kolmox as he went. His acquisitions complete, the mustachioed menace slammed the gems into his eyes and forehead achieving an incomplete form of godhood and immense power. Before his vile transformation could be completed though, he was vanquished through the might of adventurer monk Hikaru Sakamoto and the dwarf Stannis Grumblebeard Copperbottom VII, saving the Isle of Talon and its inhabitants from certain doom.