Word: arounders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...That's not to say that Bad is just an older Dude. Certainly there are similarities - both men wander around with a lowball in hand, pot belly swaying in gentle tandem with the ice clinking against the side of the glass, and Crazy Heart even opens at a bowling alley. But whereas bowling was the Dude's favorite sport and main occupation, for Bad, finding himself performing at a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colo., is a misery. He's a legend in the country-and-western scene, but he's 57, broke and no longer even afforded the dignity...
...Moreover, Bad has a lot more menace in him than the Dude; he's so self-destructive that anyone around him is likely to get hit with some sort of whiskey-soaked shrapnel. Indeed, alarm bells go off the minute we hear that the love interest he meets on the road, an aspiring journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), has a 4-year-old. (And she's a single mother, movie shorthand for Vulnerable with Babysitting Issues...
...There is a terrifically naked moment when Jean catches him watching porn on the couch, with nothing but a towel tossed over his paunch. She's embarrassed, but more important, he's mortified, and for the first time, as he attempts to gather the shambles of his dignity around him, we see that Bad is not beyond caring. Cooper nicely juxtaposes this with a later scene of Bad's seducing Jean when she's on her way out a different door, and he's wonderfully courtly and engaged. (Unfortunately, I didn't know exactly what to make of Jean. There...
Back in the mid-1990s, when astronomers were just beginning to find new planets around distant stars, nearly every new discovery got front-page headlines. Today, with the extrasolar-planet count up to about 400, it takes something extraordinary to make news...
...nearby Earth. M-dwarfs are much more numerous than Sun-like stars; of the 300 stars closest to Earth, says Charbonneau, 220 or so are M-dwarfs. They're also much cooler than Sun-like stars, so their habitable zones are close-in. A planet in the Goldilocks position around an M-dwarf doesn't take a year to orbit, as Earth does; it takes only a few days (1.6 days, in the case of GJ 1214b). So astronomers need to wait only a few days to spot a planet passing by, and only a few weeks to confirm...